Eat Spinach, Prevent Alzheimer's?

What do spinach, sunflower seeds, and a mango-blueberry smoothie have in common? All may help protect you from dementia and Alzheimer's disease because they're great sources of different types of vitamin E.

You may have stopped taking E a few years ago when once-enthusiastic vitamin E researchers announced disappointing results: Taking alpha-tocopherol (the best-studied form of E and the type in most supplements) did little to stop these aging-brain problems. But wait! Two recent studies show that when people eat E-rich foods, risk for Alzheimer's drops by 45 percent and for dementia by 25%. Food rocks, the researchers suspect, because it contains all eight (yes, eight) types of natural E.

Researchers are still sorting out how much of which forms of E do what for your brain. Meanwhile, 9 out of 10 of us don't get enough E to hit the government's current target of 22.4 international units (IU) of vitamin E a day, let alone the 100 IU we YOU Docs now suggest. (Yes, somewhat less than we recommended in our books.) Translation: We all need to be eating more E-rich foods, including spinach, swiss chard, collard greens, red bell peppers, tomatoes, papayas, mangoes, almonds, avocados, and whole grains. Popeye trumps Bugs Bunny again. Scroll to the bottom of this page for recipes containing vitamin E.

But E is just not that easy to get from food, so we still recommend taking a 100 IU supplement of E (alpha-tocopherol) daily. Whether or not it helps your brain, it almost certainly helps defend you against heart disease, eye problems, and maybe even cancer.

Here are two other lifestyle tips to try that can help keep dementia and memory problems away.