MIND diet

Uh, shout out to my sister-in-law for being co-, uh, producers of the whole event.

And this week in BMJ Journals, Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, is an article, Adherence to the MIND Diet, that's M-I-N-D, and Brain Structure Changes Over a Decade: Framingham Study.

So this was 1,647 individuals.

They filled out food questionnaires, what they ate.

You can figure that out, 10 years apart.

They were followed overall for about a dozen years.

And there is a famous diet called the MIND diet, developed in Chicago at a university, for optimal brain health, very much like the Mediterranean diet with a few differences in terms of green tea, salmon, and blueberries being even higher on the list.

And what they were able to judge is how much did the people in this study adhere to the MIND diet and what happened to the brain.

Ron: Unfiltered, Uncensored.

The MIND diet, ultra-processed foods, and what the headlines are not telling you.

But I wanna tell you that I'm having fun doing these podcasts, and that this podcast is for educational purposes only and not medical advice.

And always consult your physician before making health decisions.

So let me start with a question.

What if some of what we're doing to our brains every day isn't happening in the doctor's office? What if it's happening at the breakfast table? What if it's happening in the grace- grocery cart? What if, if it's happening every time we reach for something because it's convenient, it's packaged, it tastes good, and somebody told us it was healthy? There are, there are headlines making the rounds right now about something called the MIND diet.

One headline says that people who follow the MIND diet more closely appear to have brains that are about two and a half years younger based on measures of brain structure.

And almost at the same time, we're seeing more research connecting higher consumption r- consumption of ultra-processed foods with cognitive impairment.

If you actually think about the fact your body is built out of what you eat, that we are updating and remodeling all the time, not just as kids, but as adults, it makes sense that what we're eating on a daily basis is literally building our brain, building our nervous system, and building how we are gonna respond to what's out there, and there's phenomenal research on this.

And one of the big projects we've seen recently is one called the Mind Diet, and that's reading it, really looking into whole dietary patterns as well as individual nutrients, and they're seeing huge benefits around mental health when people adopt this way of eating.

So [clears throat] when it comes, I suppose, how you feel, is it that when we go through periods of stress in our life that we tend to pick the wrong foods, pick quick foods, comfort foods, convenience foods, or is it that the eating of those foods at certain points in our lives, or perhaps in an ongoing way, is causing the stress?

It's actually both.

... studio for the shop that I intend to do in about an hour and a half.

There's nothing wrong with supplements if somebody wants to use them, and I am a big fan of fish oil supplements or a general multivitamin if you're going to do that, but you don't need to go out and buy 16 separate boxes.

But if you can look at your food, your, you know, what we see with the Mind Diet is it's very food-based because you're looking at whole grains, bringing in, like, if you're going for the brown bread and your nice bowl of porridge in the morning, that you're getting your fruit and veg in.

People talk about vitamin C and immune system a lot.

We released a video very recently about diet and dementia, like Alzheimer's, and in that video, we talked about a number of dietary patterns.

We talked about Mediterranean diets, DASH diet, the MIND diet, ketogenic diets, et cetera.

Here we are, only two weeks later, and a brand-new trial just came out looking at the MIND diet that shook this entire field.

It's a randomized control trial with 600 people, very respectable scale, followed over three years.

So they were split randomly.

Half were put on the MIND diet, which if you don't know, is a blend of Mediterranean and DASH with some changes to emphasize foods that are thought to be particularly protective for brain function, like berries and leafy greens, for example.

And the other half were told to just keep eating their regular diet, which wasn't great.

The participants were typical Westerners living in the US, overweight, many with high blood pressure and other risk factors.

And obviously we talk diet.

Barbie walks us through the mind diet, the foods that she wants us eating more of.

We talk about coffee, alcohol, creatine, and which supplements are actually worth considering.

Plus we get into menopause and brain health and fact check the very comforting claims circulating online that during menopause, your brain starts to eat itself.

Yeah.

I love it.

I want to talk about the MIND diet.

What is that, first of all? And then also, you know, are we implementing this for patients? How do we even begin to implement it? Give us kind of the details around this dietary approach.

Today's episode, episode 260, is the fourth episode in a mini series I've been doing about diets.

So the last few episodes, I've talked about what the word diet actually means, what makes an eating pattern reasonable or supportive of health, and some of the dietary patterns that consistently show up when we're looking at eating patterns with a strong research base, including DASH, MIND, Mediterranean-style eating, and flexitarian approaches.

So those were the last three episodes.

Today's episode is going to look at a different angle here, because one of the things that I find fascinating in nutrition is that some of the diets and eating patterns that are extremely popular today do not actually start out as weight loss diets.

Some very clever researchers asked an interesting question.

What if we took the parts of the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet that seemed most protective for the brain and combined them into one eating pattern? The result was the MIND diet.

That's the Mediterranean Dash Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay.

And they studied rates of development of dementia, and the results were, quite frankly, astonishing.

This episode is personal, and I plan to take everything we learn together to heart, and I hope you will too.

What exactly is dementia? I think most people have a general idea of what dementia is.

But before we dive into what the MIND diet is and what the research shows, let's spend just a couple of minutes talking about dementia itself.

Dementia isn't actually one specific disease.

Welcome to the latest episode of the Real World Nutrition Podcast.

This is episode 259, the best diets, DASH, MIND, Flexitarian, Mediterranean, and why they consistently rank well.

Hi everyone, welcome to Real World Nutrition.

I'm Shelley Rael, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, and this is episode 259 of the podcast.

You don't have to wait until you have hypertension to do this.

Everybody can benefit from this with or without high blood pressure, with or without blood pressure concerns.

Okay, next up is the MIND diet.

So the MIND diet is another acronym, and this one's a long one.