By Sandee LaMotte, CNN
(CNN) — Eating a combination of two award-winning diets slowed aging in key structures inside the brain by over two years, according to a new study.
The brain-focused eating plan is called the Mediterranean-DASH Diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, or MIND, diet. It combines the most brain-healthy parts of the award-winning Mediterranean diet and the acclaimed heart-healthy Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, or DASH, which restricts salt.
While all three diets are plant-based and quite similar, the MIND method emphasizes eating specific foods thought to reduce the risk of dementia: berries, beans, leafy green vegetables, fish, poultry, whole grains, olive oil and nuts. Foods with saturated fats, such as cheese, butter, red meat and fried foods, are extremely limited.
“People who adhered more closely to the MIND diet seemed to show slower structural brain ageing over about 12 years of follow-up,” said senior author Changzheng Yuan, a research professor at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, China, in an email.
“In particular, they had slower loss of grey matter, which is the part of the brain that contains many of the nerve cells involved in memory, thinking, and decision-making,” Yuan said.
Each three-point increase in adherence to the MIND diet was associated with 20% less shrinkage in gray matter, corresponding to a 2.5-year delay in brain aging, according to the study.
Both the Mediterranean and the MIND diets are linked in studies to improvements in cognitive decline and a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The new study’s conclusions fall in line with those past findings and add “further support for consuming a Mediterranean-type dietary pattern,” said leading nutrition researcher Dr. Walter Willett in an email.
Willett, who is a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, was not involved in the study.
Another key part of the brain was impacted
The study, published Tuesday in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, analyzed the diet of over 1,600 adults participating in an offshoot of the Framingham Heart Study — a decades-long study designed to identify factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease. This portion of the Framingham study, which began in 1999, enrolled people with an average age of 60 who had no evidence of stroke or dementia.
At several points over an average of 12 years, participants answered dietary questionnaires, underwent regular health checkups and had at least two MRI brain scans.
In addition to less shrinkage in gray matter, those participants who more closely followed the MIND Diet “had slower enlargement of the ventricles, the fluid-filled spaces that tend to expand as brain tissue shrinks with age,” Yuan said.
For every three points of closer adherence to the diet, the development of ventricles declined by 8%, reducing brain age by one year, the study found. The development of larger ventricles, which accelerates after age 60, is a sign of increased brain atrophy linked to Alzheimer’s disease and Read more