Aging, Cognition, and Politics - and Even More on Quercetin and Its Strength as an MAO Enzyme Inhibitor
Have an innovative idea or project that needs funding? Generally, your best bet is to pitch it to someone who hasn’t reached their 50s yet. Ditto for choosing a candidate for public office.
A Structural and Functional Problem
I’ve been recently wallowing in some of the (quite muddy) general literature produced by academics working in the very young (1990s) science of evolutionary psychology. From what I’ve read so far, not much coherent scientific progress has been made in that field yet, so most of the connections between natural selection and human thought are still pretty much black box.
However, while doing this, I ran into the following graph in Gilinsky and Judd, 1994. Ninety-one percent of the 278 subjects described by this data array were college graduates, while the remainder had at least two years of college education. Women made up 56% of this large sample, men 44%.
As you can see, working memory – the key limiting factor of accurate decision-making in the face of novelty – begins slowly declining during the average person’s 20s. Nevertheless, the ability to reason accurately using system 2 thinking, signified by the evaluation and construction measures on the graph, is usually sustained near optimal young adult levels until people first enter their 50s.
Keeping the above graph in your own working memory, now examine the next two graphs showing the median age of US residents and the US Congress through time.
Taken together, these three graphs explain a whole lot, I think, about the current condition and nature of US national culture. All other things being equal, this set of graphs is clearly something to keep in mind during the current US election year. From the middle-of-the-road political viewpoint of the writer (that’s the same as ‘right wing extremism’ for all of you on the Left) and from a consideration of the first graph in this post, 46 year-old De Santis and 38 year-old Ramaswamy both look like much better cognitive bets than any of the other 2024 presidential candidates. From my perspective, 52 year-old Nikki Haley looks like a probalistically-poor presidential candidate not only because of her age but also, more concretely, because of her (possibly age-related) recent jaw-dropping utterances regarding the Israeli-Palestinian mess.
Back to Quercetin
In a directly related matter, it has been fairly conclusively determined (2022) that increased dietary consumption of plant polyphenols is associated with a slower rate of decline in “…global cognition and multiple cognitive domains.”
But much more specifically, some close careful research has recently been carried out on aging humans and the effects of the dietary polyphenol, quercetin, on their ability to ‘use their heads’. Not incidentally, this same research measured the effects of regular supplementation with quercetin on the MAO-A and MAO-B enzymes believed to help drive the development of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases (and other neurodegenerative diseases) in old age.
In a randomized, double-blind clinical study, Wattanathorn et al., 2022, showed that 8 weeks of quercetin supplementation significantly increased the working memories of perimenopausal and menopausal women aged 45 to 60, and materially inhibited the harmful chemical activity of the MAO-A and MAO-B enzymes in those aging women.
The net amounts of quercetin given to the two test subpopulations were 11.4 mg/day and 342.7 mg/day. Greatest improvements in working memory and MAO enzyme inhibition were obtained at the higher 342.7 mg quercetin dose/day. Using the graph provided in Figure 14 of this earlier Substack post, these daily doses of quercetin likely boosted serum quercetin levels in the study participants up into the neighborhood of 0.1 to 0.9 µM/L quercetin, respectively.
Besides helping to maintain general cognitive abilities through old age, the high degree of apparent reversible inhibition of both of the MAO enzymes known to increase with age by daily ingestion of only 342.7 mg/day quercetin appears quite promising as far as minimizing the chances for personally developing neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.
Interpretive caution: the culinary herb mixture used in the Wattanathorn et al., 2022, study contained several other common plant compounds besides quercetin. These include gallic acid, ferulic acid, and cyanidin. See Wattanathorn et al., 2018, for more detail.
Rodrigo-Gonzalo et al., 2022, in their “Effect of Polyphenolic Complements on Cognitive Function in the Elderly: A Systematic Review”, put the Wattanathorn research group’s recent positive results into the context of earlier clinical studies on people older than 50 years of age. Unlike all of the previously completed studies reviewed by Rodrigo-Gonzalo et al., 2022, the Wattanathorn research work results clearly demonstrated significant improvements in working memory in older persons after dietary supplementation with quercetin.
As things stand, and as discussed above and in earlier posts on this Substack, a quercetin-enriched diet gives much promise of not only extending individual healthspan, lifespan, and cognitive abilities, but also — over the long run — helping to rectify currently chaotic and confused human cultural operations.
In the meantime, play the odds by not only choosing political candidates who promote group policies that match your own preferences and goals — but who are also younger than 50.