“I probably felt my oldest at around 50,” says Liz Earle, radiating good health down a Zoom from a ski chalet in Austria. “I think when you go into your 40s, you're thinking, midlife, middle age. But when you get to 50, you start thinking, 'Ooh, older age is really creeping up on me.' And that, for me, didn't feel particularly good.”
They think in terms of birthdays, knowing that the more candles on the cake, the more we should anticipate things like joint pain, lines on the face and even foggy thinking. Yet the most recent research shows us that we have the story all wrong around brain health. The brain changes we associate with aging (for example, memory loss) are far more dynamic and modifiable through the choices we make each day than people realize.
"In a study of more than 50,000 brain scans, researchers found that features such as the thickness of the cerebral cortex can predict how quickly a person's ability to think and remember will decline with age."
