It is known: the MIND diet is beneficial for brain health. However, a new study comes not only to provide more evidence in this regard, but to add another piece of information: implementing changes in eating following the patterns of this diet has a positive impact in the short term.
This is a work carried out by researchers from Rush University Medical Center whose results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
After comparing the effects in a group that adopted a healthy diet and in another that followed the MIND diet, they concluded that the latter helped in the prevention of cognitive diseases and provided improvements in older people during the first two years.
The study indicates that while within a three-year period there was no statistically significant difference in the change in cognition of participants in the MIND diet group compared to the usual diet control group; there was an improvement during the first two years of the investigation.
This is the first randomized clinical trial designed to test the effects of a diet thought to protect brain health among a large group of people 65 and older who did not have cognitive impairment, the authors noted.
“Randomized trials are the gold standard for establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between diet and the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Lisa Barnes, associate director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at RUSH.
Specifically, this study was designed to test the effects of a 3-year MIND diet intervention on cognitive decline and brain neurodegeneration in 600 overweight people who were eating diets considered unhealthy.
“There is established research showing that a person’s diet affects health,” Barnes said.
“Participants in this study had to have suboptimal diets as determined by a score of 8 or less on a diet assessment instrument before the study began. It is reasonable to think that they were going to maintain their cognition or slow the rate of cognitive decline in the future,” she explained.
Participants in both groups had individualized dietary guidelines developed by dietitians. The trial compared two different dietary interventions, which included counseling, and a mild caloric restriction of 250 calories per day to lose weight.
The MIND diet is a hybrid of the Mediterranean and DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diets but with modifications geared toward evidence of the relationship between diet and dementia.
Both diets were taken, as they are proven to reduce the risk of cardiovascular conditions, such as high blood pressure, heart attack, and stroke.
In fact, in two studies published in 2015, it was found that the MIND diet could slow cognitive decline and reduce a person’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease significantly, even if the diet was not followed meticulously.
Regarding its composition, the MIND diet has the same basic components of the DASH and Mediterranean diets, such as the emphasis on natural foods of plant origin and the limitation of foods of animal origin with a high content of saturated fats, but makes special emphasis on green leafy vegetables and red fruits such as blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and strawberries.
For those interested in this diet, you should know that it has 14 dietary components, including nine “brain-healthy food groups” such as chicken and fish, leafy green vegetables and berries, nuts, and five unhealthy groups: red meat. , butter and stick margarine, full-fat cheese, bills and sweets, and chips.
“What we saw was an improvement in cognition in both groups, but the MIND diet intervention group had a slightly greater improvement in cognition, although not significantly better,” Barnes assumes. “Both groups lost approximately 5 kilograms over three years, suggesting that it may have been the weight loss that benefited cognition in this trial,” she acknowledged.
He added: “It was exciting to see that there was an improvement in cognition over the first year or so, but it could be due to the effects of practice on cognitive tests, and we also saw that on the control diet, which focused only on on caloric restriction.
“After three years the score for the MIND group was 11.0 and 8.3 for the control group, which puts both groups in a therapeutic range for delaying cognitive decline and reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. ”, the researchers specified.
In turn, they conceded that the significant weight loss and improved MIND scores indicate that the control group also improved their diet and may suggest that following the MIND diet with a score of at least 8.3, along with a reduction in al less than 250 calories to produce weight loss, can improve cognition. “More research is needed to confirm this,” they concluded.
“These people were healthy at the start of the trial and had no cognitive impairment, and their cognition improved slightly over time,” Barnes enthused.
“Why there was no difference between the two diet groups at the end of the trial could be due to many factors, including that the control group had a relatively healthy diet,” he acknowledges.
And he suggested that in the future, specific food groups “and their associations with biomarkers that were measured in the blood could be looked at to see if certain nutrients and food groups are more important than others, since both groups were quite healthy from the start.” dietary point of view at first.
In the study they allude to previous research that showed a slower rate of decline among those who ate specific foods. In particular, they refer to nutritional epidemiologist at RUSH and original principal investigator of the MIND diet study Martha Clare Morris, who showed that there was a slower rate of decline among those who ate specific foods.
In 2015, Morris and colleagues at RUSH and Harvard University developed the MIND diet, which is short for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, in preparation for the trial.
