A new study that was conducted over the course of six years has found that seniors who regularly eat mushrooms with their meals have a significantly lower chance of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

MCI is the stage that comes after the cognitive decline of normal aging and before the more serious decline of dementia. Senior citizens who have MCI typically show memory loss as a main symptom as well as problems in cognitive functions like language, attention and visuospatial abilities.

Researchers from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore (NUS) concluded that seniors who eat more than two standard portions of mushrooms every week could reduce their odds of experiencing mental decline by as much as 50%. A standard portion is defined as three quarters of a cup of cooked mushrooms with an average weight of around 150 grams, with two portions effectively being half a plate.

The researchers found that even having one small portion of mushrooms a week can reduce someone’s chances of developing MCI.

“This correlation is surprising and encouraging. It seems that a commonly available single ingredient could have a dramatic effect on cognitive decline,” explained Assistant Professor Lei Feng, who is from the NUS Department of Psychological Medicine, and the lead author of this work.

Conducted between 2011 and 2017, the study looked at data from 600 Chinese seniors over the age of 60 living in Singapore

“People with MCI are still able to carry out their normal daily activities. So, what we had to determine in this study is whether these seniors had poorer performance on standard neuropsychologist tests than other people of the same age and education background,” Feng added. “Neuropsychological tests are specifically designed tasks that can measure various aspects of a person’s cognitive abilities. In fact, some of the tests we used in this study are adopted from the commonly used IQ test battery, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS).”

Researchers believe that mushrooms are beneficial to helping people avoid MCI because of one specific compound that is found in them.

“We’re very interested in a compound called ergothioneine (ET),” explained Dr Irwin Cheah, senior research fellow at NUS’s biochemistry department. “ET is a unique antioxidant and anti-inflammatory which humans are unable to synthesize on their own. But it can be obtained from dietary sources, one of the main ones being mushrooms.”

If you’re a senior citizen, you might just want to start incorporating mushrooms into your diet. Doing this can pay off big time for you down the road!