foreign [Music] healthier diets are associated with a significantly lower risk of hearing loss and for all three diet quality scoring systems these researchers used avoidance of meat was most strongly associated with lower risk the bond from my last video who preserved their hearing into old age eight little meat but also weren't eating sugary junk explaining their almost total absence of dental cavities a high glycemic diet of refined carbs is also associated with developing age-related hearing loss if it's the blood sugar spikes that would explain why diabetics and pre-diabetics are also at higher risk even among
whole grains sorghum which is the center of the bond diet has a particularly low glycemic index due to its resistant starch content costing about a 25 lower rise in blood sugar compared to whole wheat impaired blood circulation may also explain how noise damages the inner ear as loud noises cause constriction of the accompanying blood vessels this may also help clarify the link between obesity and hearing loss excess weight it may just be a proxy for unhealthier diets but the pro-inflammatory state of obesity can itself lead to vascular dysfunction measures of systemic inflammation seem to directly
correlate with age-related hearing loss as do measures of oxidative stress in my video on brain inflammation I introduced the antioxidant defense activator Nerf 2 called guardian of Health span and gatekeeper of species longevity those born with a genetic variant Nerf 2 that doesn't encode as well or significantly more likely to develop impaired hearing implicating the role of free radicals in the process of hearing loss you can look in the back of people's eyes and measure the amount of macular pigment to the lutein and zeaxanthine antioxidants concentrated in Greens and correlate that with Superior hearing the
population data on antioxidant intake and hearing loss is mixed though take vitamin C for example some studies show that higher vitamin C intake is associated with better hearing but others failed to find any significant connection the only way to tell if antioxidants help or not you know the drill is to put them to the test adding antioxidants to the diet of rats seems to help prevent age-related rat hearing loss but doing the same thing in mice doesn't appear to help the most exciting pre-clinical data may be a study in which aged rats randomized to added
blueberries look like they had a reversal in hearing deficits in fact ending up better than the young rat oh wait I thought hair cells don't regenerate our ability to hear doesn't just have to do with our ears but our brain as we age our auditory cortex in the temporal lobe of our brain loses some of its ability to discriminate and understand speech even in a quiet environment we don't just need to sense sounds but make sense out of them that's where blueberries seem to come in reversing the age-related cognitive deficits in auditory processing but what
about in people their studies lacking control groups that documented improvements in hearing loss giving people antioxidant supplements like vitamins aec and alpha lipoic acid but when properly put to the test in a randomized deadline Placebo control trial of a whole list of antioxidants the supplements flopped no effect on any of the measured hearing aspects is there any supplement that's been shown to help with hearing in older adults yes folic acid the supplement form of folate from concentrated in beans and greens some observational studies had found that higher levels of folate in the blood seem to
correlate with better hearing but maybe that's just a marker of eating a healthier diet in general so Dutch researchers set out on an ambitious three-year double-blind placebo-controlled trial randomizing more than 700 older men and women to take 800 micrograms of folic acid a day or an indistinguishable Placebo excitingly those who have been taking the folic acid suffered significantly less decline in hearing its speech frequencies the effect size was rather small so I said one might expect a proportion of men for example who would be hearing aid candidates at age 75 might drop from 33 percent
to 22 with folic acid supplementation also note the study was done in the Netherlands where at the time the food supply was not fortified with folic acid in the U.S with folic acid fortification has been mandated in refined grain products for decades it's unclear how much additional benefits supplements might add regardless the healthiest sources are dark green leafy vegetables and legumes a cup of cooked lentil says 90 of adult daily needs [Music] foreign
