How You Can Save Your Mind With The MIND Diet

Proven to boost brain health and slow cognitive decline.

This is it; you have made up your mind; after reading about the Mediterranean and DASH diets and their mental and physical health benefits for longevity, you’ve shopped for the right foods, subscribed to healthyhealingeats.com for weekly insight, and picked up Bryant Terry’s cookbook Vegetable Kingdom: The Abundant World of Vegan Recipes. Now your determination to age well throughout your lifespan is solidly in place; it’s go time, and you’re ready!

Hold on. Like anything worth doing, it is also worth improving. Promising research shows that the Mediterranean and DASH diets combined result in an even better way of maintaining your health, especially your aging brain. This blending is known as the MIND diet. It was specifically designed to reduce brain decline as you age and prevent dementia.

Since Aristotle advised, “Let food be thy medicine,” there has been an unrelenting interest in figuring out how and why food can make us healthier. Food research often reveals foods’ potential, but it takes decades to verify whether it is nutritionally beneficial, and sometimes it’s not.

Case in point; Erythritol, a naturally occurring sugar alcohol found in fruits, was deemed a safe alternative to processed sugar as a natural sweetener. However, recent research determined that commercially produced erythritol is linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks. The study showed that while our bodies also produce erythritol, eating more through outside sources, such as packaged foods, adversely affects the heart and digestive system. Through your gut-brain connection, additional erythritol impacts brain health, too.

Back to the MIND diet, which results from continuing research that shows elements of the Mediterranean diet that focus on cardiovascular health with its promotion of fiber, antioxidants, and olive oil — in combination with the DASH diet created to combat hypertension by severely limiting salt — resulted in the Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay diet (MIND). All three diets emphasize primarily plant-based eating, noting that the Mediterranean and DASH diets also have brain health benefits. However…