Diet and Brain Fitness

When you’re looking to do everything you can to maintain and improve your brain’s fitness, you should think about how you eat. Why? Because in a number of studies, diet has been shown to influence things like high blood pressure, cholesterol, and even your risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease.

While you may already have heard about keeping your salt intake low to keep your blood pressure low, too, many people don’t know about the DASH or Mediterranean diets and what they may be able to do for you.

DASH stands for “Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension.” An article published just this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that women who were the most adherent to the DASH diet guidelines had a significantly reduced risk of coronary heart disease and stroke. Women who ate 4-5 servings of fruits and vegetables, lots of whole grains, and avoided red and processed meats and sugary beverages had a lower chance of developing heart disease or having a stroke. Since the evidence is increasing that heart disease is linked to poorer memory and developing Alzheimer’s disease, anyone interested in keeping their brain fitness level high should consider changing their diet.

Other studies have shown that the Mediterranean diet may reduce the chances of having Alzheimer’s disease. An article in 2006 in the journal Neurology showed that people who follow the Mediterranean diet have reduced chances of having Alzheimer’s disease (Scarmeas et al. Neurology, 2006, 63, 1709-1717; you need a subscription to see this paper). This same group of researchers followed a group of people with Alzheimer’s disease over several years. They found out that the patients with Alzheimer’s who followed the Mediterranean diet were less likely to die over an average follow-up time of 4.5 years (reported as an abstract at the 2007 meeting of the American Academy of Neurology).

You can find out more about the DASH diet in a publication from the NIH. You can download it here: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/public/heart/hbp/dash/new_dash.pdf.

This booklet is 979 Kb, and may take a long time to download if you don’t have a high-speed Internet connection. You’ll need the free Adobe Acrobat reader to read the booklet. You can get it by clicking here: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.

You can read the article about the DASH diet, for free, here: http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/168/7/713.

You can find out more about the Mediterranean diet at the Mayo Clinic website: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/mediterranean-diet/CL00011.