Eating healthier can protect aging brain

It’s never too late to start eating right as a means of protecting your brain health, a new study says.

People who improved their healthy eating in middle-age had a 25% lower risk of dementia, compared to those whose diets got worse, according to findings reported today at a meeting of the American Society for Nutrition (ASN).

“Our study findings confirm that healthy dietary patterns in mid to late life and their improvement over time may prevent Alzheimer’s and related dementias,” researcher Song-Yi Park, an associate professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said in a news release.

“This suggests that it is never too late to adopt a healthy diet to prevent dementia,” she added.

For the study, researchers analyzed data from nearly 93,000 adults taking part in a long-term health study. Participants were between 45 and 75 when the study started in the 1990s, and more than 21,000 developed Alzheimer’s disease or dementia in the years that followed.

Study participants filled out diet questionnaires, and researchers assessed their responses to gauge their adherence to the MIND (Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay) diet.

The MIND diet combines the Mediterranean diet with the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, two eating patterns that have been shown to improve people’s health.

It emphasizes whole grains, vegetables, nuts, beans, berries, poultry and fish, while recommending that people limit pastries, sweets, red meat, cheese, fried foods and butter/margarine, according to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Overall, people whose diets aligned with the MIND eating pattern from the start had a 9% lower risk of dementia.

An even greater reduction of 13% was seen among Black, Hispanic or white people, results show.

“We found that the protective relationship between a healthy diet and dementia was more pronounced among African Americans, Latinos and Whites, while it was not as apparent among Asian Americans and showed a weaker trend in Native Hawaiians,” Park said. “A tailored approach may be needed when evaluating different subpopulations’ diet quality.”

However, people whose diets grew closer to the MIND diet over a 10-year period had a 25% lower risk of dementia—even if they didn’t follow that eating pattern closely at first, researchers found.

Park presented the study this morning at the ASN meeting in Orlando, Fl.

Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

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