Mediterranean Diet for Brain Health
Mediterranean Diet for Brain Health.. Great if you are a fan of the diet. According to a recent British research on diet and brain health, a diet rich in veggies, fruits, fish, olive oil, nuts and wine reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s disease later on in life as it stimulates the brain capacity.
Alzheimer’s disease affects millions of people in the world. The aging of the population and also the environmental factors are the cause of this epidemic. Recently, new dietary guidelines have been issued to prevent the risk of Alzheimer’s. Emphasizing the consumption of fruits, vegetables and foods rich in omega -3 fish oils and they suggest that a Mediterranean diet is very well designed to prevent this disease.
Compared to traditional Western diet, a Mediterranean diet seems to provide higher levels of omega -3 (fish, nuts, plant based foods), omega-9 (olive oil), polyphenols and antioxidants, terpenes (spices), vitamins and minerals (fresh and dried vegetables, fresh and dried fruits, spices, red wine), saponins and alkaloids (tomatoes , eggplant). It includes moderate consumption of meat and dairy products (especially cheese from small ruminant animals). Not to mention the sun and vitamin D!
Mediterranean Diet may partly owe its success to being rich in Omega 3 fatty acids, probably because of Omega 3’s natural anti-inflammatory effect helps slow the decline of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Omega 3 is found mainly in fatty fish but also in rapeseed oil or nuts, widely consumed in Mediterranean countries.
The thesis published in the Epidemiology journal includes twelve studies, nine of them indicates a link between the lower risk of suffering from Alzheimer’s and Mediterranean diet, a lower rate of cognitive decline. It confirms the positive impact of the Mediterranean scheme on cognitive function.
The Mediterranean Diet is both beneficial for health and tasty. This research shows that it can help protect against a risk of dementia in the aging brain, in which researchers attempted to analyze by all the evidence available to them, as much as they could.
However, the researchers did not find any links between these meals and the mild decline in cognitive functioning, more severe than that which comes from the natural aging but still relatively far from the generalized dementia decline anyway.
Still, the Mediterranean diet appears to come with many other health benefits from reducing the risk of cardiovascular diseases and different types of cancers, protecting from diabetes and contributing to living longer and healthier.
On the other hand, another recent study conducted in New York by American researchers have shown that following the Mediterranean way of eating as much as possible was found to be beneficial in preventing the onset of memory loss and mild forgetfulness as well. And above all, the more people religiously followed the diet, the better were the results- reaching 28% improvement. But also for people with “mild cognitive impairment”, this way of eating allowed a 48% decreased risk of progression to Alzheimer’s disease.
In this study, a group of 2,258 people were observed for four years. During this period, 262 cases have emerged of Alzheimer’s disease in the group. The results of the study in the Journal of Neurology shows that followers of the Mediterranean diet are less likely to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease than others. The more food habits of people are closer to the Mediterranean diet, the lower the risk of developing Alzheimer’s is. This study also confirms that poor nutrition is therefore a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
Moreover, other studies on Mediterranean diet for brain health have already shown that the diet is possible to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, a recent study published in the Journal of Neurology has shown that the same diet allowed to extend the lives of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, an average of 4 years!
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