How Eating Olive Oil Can Boost Your Memory

You now have one more excellent reason to shelve the store-bought dressing in favor of the homemade stuff: Eating a diet rich in extra-virgin olive oil may protect your brain as you age, researchers from Temple University suggest.

In the study, researchers genetically modified mice to express three key characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease: memory impairment, the buildup of sticky proteins called amyloid plaques, and tangles of tau proteins. Then, when the mice reached six months of age, they had some mice eat chow supplemented with extra-virgin olive for six months, while the others ate their regular food. This food change occurred before the mice began to exhibit signs of Alzheimer’s.