New
MIND diet may significantly protect against Alzheimer's disease
Rush University Medical Center, Science Daily
A new diet, appropriately known by the acronym MIND, could
significantly lower a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, even if
the diet is not meticulously followed, according to a paper published online
for subscribers in March in the journal Alzheimer's
& Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association.
Rush nutritional epidemiologist Martha Clare Morris, PhD, and
colleagues developed the "Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for
Neurodegenerative Delay" (MIND) diet. The study shows that the MIND diet
lowered the risk of AD by as much as 53 percent in participants who adhered to
the diet rigorously, and by about 35 percent in those who followed it
moderately well.
"One of the more exciting things about this is that people who
adhered even moderately to the MIND diet had a reduction in their risk for
AD," said Morris, a Rush professor, assistant provost for Community
Research, and director of Nutrition and Nutritional Epidemiology. "I think
that will motivate people."
"I was so very pleased to see the outcome we got from the
new diet," she said.
The MIND diet is a hybrid of the Mediterranean and DASH (Dietary
Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diets, both of which have been found to reduce
the risk of cardiovascular conditions, like hypertension, heart attack and
stroke. Some researchers have found that the two older diets provide protection
against dementia as well.
In the latest study, the MIND diet was compared with the two
other diets. People with high adherence to the DASH and Mediterranean diets
also had reductions in AD -- 39 percent with the DASH diet and 54 percent with
the Mediterranean diet -- but got negligible benefits from moderate adherence
to either of the two other diets.
The MIND diet is also easier to follow than, say, the
Mediterranean diet, which calls for daily consumption of fish and 3-4 daily
servings of each of fruits and vegetables, Morris said.
The MIND diet has 15 dietary components, including 10
"brain-healthy food groups" -- green leafy vegetables, other
vegetables, nuts, berries, beans, whole grains, fish, poultry, olive oil and
wine -- and five unhealthy groups that comprise red meats, butter and stick
margarine, cheese, pastries and sweets, and fried or fast food.
With the MIND diet, a person who eats at least three servings of
whole grains, a salad and one other vegetable every day -- along with a glass
of wine -- snacks most days on nuts, has beans every other day or so, eats
poultry and berries at least twice a week and fish at least once a week and
benefits.
However, he or she must limits intake of the designated unhealthy
foods, especially butter (less than 1 tablespoon a day), cheese, and fried or
fast food (less than a serving a week for any of the three), to have a real
shot at avoiding the devastating effects of AD, according to the study.
Berries are the only fruit specifically to make the MIND diet.
"Blueberries are one of the more potent foods in terms of protecting the
brain," Morris said, and strawberries have also performed well in past
studies of the effect of food on cognitive function.
The MIND diet was not an intervention in this study, however;
researchers looked at what people were already eating. Participants earned
points if they ate brain-healthy foods frequently and avoided unhealthy foods.
The one exception was that participants got one point if they said olive oil
was the primary oil used in their homes.
The study enlisted volunteers already participating in the
ongoing Rush Memory and Aging Project (MAP), which began in 1997 among
residents of Chicago-area retirement communities and senior public housing
complexes. An optional "food frequency questionnaire" was added from
2004 to February 2013, and the MIND diet study looked at results for 923
volunteers. A total of 144 cases of AD developed in this cohort.
AD, which takes a devastating toll on cognitive function, is not
unlike heart disease in that there appear to be "many factors that play
into who gets the disease," including behavioral, environmental and
genetic components, Dr. Morris said.
"With late-onset AD, with that older group of people,
genetic risk factors are a small piece of the picture," she said. Past
studies have yielded evidence that suggests that what we eat may play a significant
role in determining who gets AD and who doesn't, Morris said.
When the researchers in the new study left out of the analyses
those participants who changed their diets somewhere along the line -- say, on
a doctor's orders after a stroke -- they found that "the association
became stronger between the MIND diet and [favorable] outcomes" in terms
of AD, Morris said. "That probably means that people who eat this diet
consistently over the years get the best protection."
In other words, it looks like the longer a person eats the MIND
diet, the less risk that person will have of developing AD, Morris said. As is
the case with many health-related habits, including physical exercise, she
said, "You'll be healthier if you've been doing the right thing for a long
time."
Morris said, "We devised a diet and it worked in this
Chicago study. The results need to be confirmed by other investigators in
different populations and also through randomized trials." That is the
best way to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the MIND diet and
reductions in the incidence of Alzheimer's disease, she said.
The study was funded by the National Institute on Aging. All the
researchers on this study were from Rush except for Frank M. Sacks MD,
professor of Cardiovascular Disease Prevention, Department of Nutrition, at the
Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Sacks chaired the committee that developed
the DASH diet.
Story
Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Rush University Medical Center.Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal
Reference:
Martha Clare Morris, Christy C. Tangney, Yamin Wang, Frank M.
Sacks, David A. Bennett, Neelum T. Aggarwal. MIND
diet associated with reduced incidence of Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's & Dementia,
2015; DOI:10.1016/j.jalz.2014.11.009
Cite
This Page:
Rush University Medical Center. "New MIND diet may
significantly protect against Alzheimer's disease." Science Daily,
19 March 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150319104218.htm>.
