Eating lots of fruits, veggies, beans and other foods with inflammation-cooling properties may lower your odds of developing dementia as you age.
But, if your diet is loaded with pro-inflammatory foods, you may be up to three times more likely to experience memory loss and issues with language, problem-solving and other thinking skills as you age, new research suggests.
“A less in inflammatory diet relates to less risk for developing dementia,” study author Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas, an associate professor of neurology at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece says.
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How does your diet affect your risk of developing dementia?
Exactly how, or even if, diet can help stave off dementia and preserve brain health isn’t fully understood yet. “Diet may affect brain health via many mechanisms, and according to our findings, inflammation may be one of them,” Scarmeas adds.
It’s not the whole food per se, but all the nutrients it contains that contribute to its inflammatory potential, Scarmeas explains. Each food has both pro-and anti-inflammatory ingredients.
The study does not prove that eating an anti-inflammatory diet prevents brain aging and dementia, only that there’s a link between them.
Longer follow-up is needed to draw any firm conclusions on how inflammatory diet score affects brain health, Scarmeas cautions.
“This study is lending further weight to the mechanism inflammation — specifically neuro-inflammation — that much of us understand as being one of the main players in causing cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s dementia,” Dr. Thomas Holland, a physician-scientist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago says.
What the study shows
For the study, more than 1,000 people in Greece (average age: 73) completed a questionnaire to determine the inflammatory potential or score of their diet. No one had dementia when the study began. Six percent developed dementia during a follow-up of just over three years.
Dietary inflammation scores range from -8.87 to 7.98, with higher scores pointing to a more inflammatory diet. Folks with the lowest scores were less likely to develop dementia than folks with higher ones, the study shows.
Each 1-point increase in dietary inflammatory score was associated with