I write about dementia a lot, and I reckon the biggest change the stories I cover have made to my life is through exercise.
There’s evidence to suggest that maintaining muscle throughout your life may be helpful in preventing dementia, as well as the precursors to it (both frailty and falling are associated with higher dementia risk).
Additionally, what is good for the heart has long been considered by experts to be great for our brains too.
But if I’m honest, I’m a little more lax on my diet, which has also been linked to brain health.
A study recently published in JAMA Network Open has offered further proof that I should start to focus on what I’m eating, as it found what we eat between two ages seems to affect our dementia risk.
When could diet matter most for lowering dementia risk?
This study found that interventions to improve diet and manage central obesity “might be best targeted in middle to older age”.
More specifically, a healthy hip-to-waist ratio seemed to matter most between the ages of 48 and 70 years old.
The study assessed the diets of 512 people over 12 years, and also looked at the waist-to-hip ratio of 664 people over 21 years.
Participants also took cognitive tests and MRI scans at the end of the study (when they were aged 70 on average).
They found that people who maintained a healthy hip-to-waist ratio and ate healthier diets had a more functional hippocampus (a part of the brain associated with memory) and more connected white matter at the end of the study.
Meanwhile, a higher waist-to-hip ratio in midlife “was associated with poorer working memory and executive function, through a pathway partially mediated by alterations in white matter connectivity”.
As a result, the researchers wrote: “The findings suggest that interventions to improve diet and manage central obesity might be most effective between ages 48 and 70 years.”
Doesn’t diet matter throughout our lives?
Yes, absolutely. This study didn’t prove that those are the only ages that matter for our diet, and didn’t definitively link the diet changes to increased dementia risk.
That would be quite hard to do as you’d have to deliberately feed people different diets over decades, ensure they actually stick to it, and also face the ethical conundrum of knowing one diet plan is likely worse for them. Those are only a few reasons why diet studies can be so difficult to run.
The American Heart Association said that eating well throughout our lives is key ― not only is dementia not the only risk associated with poor diet, but it’s seen to help children and adolescents focus in school too.
In other words, don’t wait until your late 40s to eat well. There is no data to suggest this will help you, and plenty to show it may harm you.
This study only shows that you might want to pay particular attention to your meals in midlife and older age.
#Healthy #Diet #Important #Ages
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