Thu, Jan-05-17, 01:31
|
 |
|
|
Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
|
|
Mediterranean diet helps to slow shrinking of the brain
Quote:
From The Times
London, UK
5 January, 2017
Mediterranean diet helps to slow shrinking of the brain
Sticking to a Mediterranean diet rich in fruit, vegetables and olive oil could help to slow the shrinking of the brain in old age, academics have found.
While numerous studies have shown that cardiovascular health is closely linked to the fate of the brain, there has been relatively little good quality evidence on the role that particular eating habits might play over time.
Researchers led by a team at the University of Edinburgh signed up 562 Scots aged 70 and asked them how often they ate 168 types of food.
Scientists have long been interested in the way that people who eat like southern Europeans — consuming plenty of plant-based foods while cutting down on meat and refined sugar — seem to have significantly better circulation and lower risks of heart disease and stroke.
MRI scans taken of the participants when they were 73 and again when they were 76 showed that those who followed this pattern recorded a smaller fall in the total volume of their brains than those who did not.
The brain naturally gets smaller as people age, but this process accelerates with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Overall the effect of the Mediterranean diet on brain size was about half as big as the normal impact of ageing.
Writing in the journal Neurology, the researchers said that the amount of meat and fish people ate did not seem to make much difference. “It’s possible that other components of the Mediterranean diet are responsible for this relationship, or that it’s due to all of the components in combination,” Michelle Luciano, one of the authors, said.
What is less certain is what these findings mean for people’s mental health. One study in 2009 carried out in New York suggests that the diet may be beneficial against dementia: people with mild cognitive difficulties had a 48 per cent lower chance of going on to develop Alzheimer’s disease if they followed the Mediterranean diet.
The Edinburgh study echoes the results of a similar analysis, also carried out in New York, that was published in 2015 and found that Americans who adhered to the diet had brain volumes typical of people five years their junior.
Peter Passmore, professor of ageing and geriatric medicine at Queen’s University Belfast, said that the Edinburgh study had been well designed but more research was needed to confirm the link.
“While it would seem that the loss of brain volume over time is not what anyone would want to see and therefore that preservation of volume should be a good thing in terms of cognitive ability, it is still not fully clear exactly what this means in terms of memory and dementia,” he said.
|
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/n...brain-090spr5fz |
Threaded Mode