Sept. 19, 2024 – Older and middle-aged people who followed the MIND diet for at least 1 year had less and slower cognitive decline, compared to people with significantly different diets. The benefits were especially pronounced in women and in Black people, according to results of a new study.
Older people who have cognitive decline have a harder time with thinking, memory, concentration, and other brain functions than what is expected due to aging.
The formal name for the MIND diet is the Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay diet, and its goal is to support healthy brain aging. The MIND diet encourages eating nine food types: whole grains, vegetables, green leafy vegetables specifically, nuts, beans, berries, poultry, fish, and olive oil. The diet also calls for limiting the intake of pastries, sweets, red meat, cheese, fried foods, and butter or margarine.
“With the number of people with dementia increasing with the aging population, it’s critical to find changes that we can make to delay or slow down the development of cognitive problems,” study author Russell P. Sawyer, MD, of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, said in a statement.
For this latest study, researchers used questionnaire responses from people who detailed what they ate for the past year. The data from the study came from a separate project that sought to understand geographic and racial differences in stroke risk. People in the study were ages 45 and older, with an average age of 64. They each took standard cognitive tests, including being asked to repeat three words back to an interviewer and to name the year, month, and day of the week.
The findings were published in the latest issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The analysis showed that, overall, people who most closely followed the MIND diet had a reduced risk of cognitive decline. The researchers also found that women who most closely followed the diet had up to a 6% reduced risk of cognitive problems, but there was no corresponding decrease among men.
The team also evaluated whether the diet may impact how quickly cognitive function changed, and found that people who closely followed the MIND diet showed slower decline. The impact was the greatest among Black people who closely followed the diet.
“These findings warrant further study, especially to examine these varying impacts among men and women and Black and White people, but it’s exciting to consider that people could make some simple changes to their diet and potentially reduce or delay their risk of cognitive issues,” Sawyer said.
