A simple diet for a healthier brain!
The Mediterranean Diet is one of the top-ranked diets in the country. Not only is it a balanced diet—one that involves all the food groups, with plenty of healthy fats, proteins, and minimal carbs—but it’s also one highly nutrient-rich. It doesn’t deprive your body of any important vitamins, minerals, or antioxidants. Instead, it focuses on adding more high quality foods to your menu, rather than taking the typical approach of eliminating foods from the diet.
The diet has been proven highly effective at promoting weight loss, thanks to all the healthy fats, proteins, and complex carbs included in the eating plan. It’s also a heart-smart diet, one that eliminates most artificial and processed foods.
But according to a new study, it’s as good for your brain as it is for your heart and waistline!
The journal Neurology published a study in January 2017, detailing how following the Mediterranean Diet helped to improve brain volume retention over a three-year period. Nearly 1,000 people participated in the study, none of whom suffered from dementia. The researchers took MRI scans of the participants’ brains before and after the three-year test. They discovered that those who adhered most strongly to the Mediterranean Diet had the highest brain volume, while those who didn’t stick with the diet lost more brain volume.
How is this so important? Well, it all comes down to the one thing we all dread: age. As we age, our brain cells die off, and the volume of our brain decreases. Brain shrinkage is a problem that sets in the older we get. The more the brain shrinks, the more our memory and learning abilities are impacted. Severe shrinkage can lead to Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
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Interestingly enough, eating more or less fish didn’t affect the brain volume of the participants. While it’s a well-known fact that the Omega-3 fatty acids in fish play a role in brain health and improving brain function, the researchers discovered that it had no effect on brain volume. Eating more or less meat also did nothing to affect the size of the brain after the study.
If you needed an excuse to try a new diet, you’ve just got one! Not only is the Mediterranean Diet going to be excellent for your health and weight loss, but it can improve brain function and potentially stem off the neurodegenerative effects of aging.
What is the Mediterranean Diet? It’s actually a fairly simple diet, one that involves a lot of fruits, veggies, olive oil, legumes, nuts, herbs, spices, whole grains, dairy, red wine, fish, and limited quantities of poultry and red meat. It’s a fairly non-restrictive diet, but with the focus placed on eating high quality foods. Of course, it goes without saying that you are supposed to eliminate artificial and processed foods from your diet in order to make it work.
The beauty of the Mediterranean Diet is that you can eat a lot of food (monitoring calories, of course), and you have a wide variety of ingredients to choose from. The food is all flavorful and rich, making it a much more enjoyable diet than many of the restrictive eating plans around. Yet as we’ve seen above, it can do wonders for your brain. Add to that improved insulin sensitivity, better appetite control, decreased risk of heart disease, and a greater potential for weight loss, and you can see why this diet may be the best thing you can do for your body!
