Health
You are what you eat, or at least your brain is.
Medical researchers are discovering how everyday foods can contribute to the risk of deteriorating brain health and dementia.
However, at the same time, they are also discovering that some foods and drinks can help maintain healthy cognitive functioning well into old age.
“There may be some powerful nutritional tools in your home to help combat inflammation that may contribute to brain aging,” Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas, a member of the American Academy of Neurology, said in a news release.
“Diet is a lifestyle factor that can be modified and could play a role in fighting inflammation, one of the biological pathways that contributes to the risk of dementia and cognitive decline later in life,” Scarmeas added.
Eat These Foods to Prevent Dementia
In a groundbreaking 2021 study published in the journal Neurology, Scarmeas and a research team from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens looked at 1,059 people in Greece with an average age of 73 years who did not have dementia.
Study participants were surveyed about their diets and rated according to how anti-inflammatory their eating and drinking habits were.
People with dementia ate fewer whole foods
After three years, 62 of the people developed dementia, and those who developed the disease consumed about half as many of the following four items as those who showed no symptoms of cognitive decline:
“Our results bring us closer to characterizing and measuring the inflammatory potential of people’s diets,” Scarmeas said. “That, in turn, could help inform more personalized and precise dietary recommendations and other strategies to maintain cognitive health.”
Find the flavanols
Other studies have found similar results. A recent report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that people whose diets were low in flavanols (a substance found in certain foods) had better memory after three years of taking flavanol supplements.
Foods rich in flavanol include:
Foods to avoid that cause dementia
Meanwhile, a large and growing body of evidence finds that many foods, especially fast and highly processed foods, can contribute to dementia.
A study published last year in Neurology also found that for every 10% increase in daily intake of highly processed foods, the risk of dementia increased by 25%.
Participants in the study included more than 72,000 men and women who lived in the United Kingdom, were aged 55 or older and had no symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.
The researchers followed them for an average of 10 years, during which time 518 were diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Those who ate the most processed foods had a higher risk of developing dementia.
Examples of highly processed foods:
Meanwhile, those who ate the least amount of highly processed foods (less than 10% of their daily food intake) had the lowest risk of dementia.
“Ultra-processed foods are meant to be convenient and tasty, but they decrease the quality of a person’s diet,” study author Huiping Li, of Tianjin Medical University in China, said in a news release.
“These foods may also contain food additives or molecules from packaging or produced during heating, all of which have been shown in other studies to have negative effects on thinking and memory skills,” Li added.
Highly processed foods contain:
Apparently eating an apple a day to keep the doctor away isn’t just an old nursery rhyme.
“Our results also show that increasing unprocessed or minimally processed foods by just 50 grams a day, which is equivalent to half an apple… and at the same time decreasing ultra-processed foods by 50 grams a day. ..is associated with a 3% lower risk of dementia.”
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