United States: Eating healthy is essential for keeping your brain sharp as you get aged. New exploration shows that eating healthy earlier can make a big difference.
In this specific study, experimenters followed the diets and eating habits of over 3,000 people for seventy years and they set up that people who ate the healthiest diets had better brain power over time compared to those who ate less nutritional foods.
Importance of Early Dietary Choices
“Cognitive decline can begin at age 65. But, there’s this long latency period, maybe 10 to 15 years prior to symptoms showing up, that those brain changes can already be happening. So our thinking was that diet much earlier than age 65 might be an essential factor in what’s happening in our later life cognition.
And our preliminary findings suggest that may be the case,” Kelly Cara, PhD, a recent graduate of the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and author of the research, told Healthline
Cara presented her findings this week at NUTRITION 2024, the annual meeting of the American Society of Nutrition. These findings have not yet been published in a scientific journal and are considered preliminary.
Nonetheless, they are compelling and have practical implications for anyone concerned about maintaining brain health through diet. These experts say eating a rich diet in fruits and vegetables, fish, and whole grains, such as the Mediterranean diet, is really a good place to start.
Expert Opinions on the Findings
“The findings are constant with similar studies and truly exemplify the importance that diet plays early in life to impact health (in this case, cognitive health) later in life,” said Kristin Kirkpatrick, MS RD a nutritionist at the Cleveland Clinic, and co-author of Regenerative Health. She was not affiliated with the study.
Seven decades of research suggests healthy diet boost the brain health.
Cara’s work is based on the data from the Medical Research Council’s National Survey of Health and Development, which has collected the health and medical information from the British citizens for nearly 100 years.
The research looked at one specific cohort of 3,059 individuals born in 1946 and evenly split between men and women those who were alive today are nearly 78 years old and are still involved in the study.