Eating less doesn’t just boost physical health. In elderly people, it seems to improve memory too.

Restricting calorie intake has been shown to increase lifespan in mice, reduce the risk of heart disease in people and boost cognitive ability in elderly animals.

To see if the cognitive benefit held for people, Agnes Flöel and colleagues, at the University of Münster in Germany tested the short term memory of 50 people with an average age of 60, who were overweight, but not obese, and then got one-third to eat 30% fewer calories than normal each day.

After three months, the dieters scored 20% higher on the test than they had before the diet, recalling on average 12.5 words compared to 10.5.


“Two words may not seem like much, but it’s more than the difference between people under 30 and above 50,” says Flöel. Those who did not go on the diet showed no change.

The dieters had lower levels of glucose and insulin in their blood which previous studies have linked to greater neural function.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0808587106, in press