A specific eating plan that aims to lower blood pressure and incorporate key principles of the Mediterranean diet may slow structural changes due to brain aging — and the effect could be worth up to 2.5 extra years of brain health.
That’s the finding of recent research published in a journal of the British Medical Association. All adults experience some normal brain shrinkage due to aging. But those who follow the MIND diet more closely experience slower rates of shrinkage, according to the results.
In the study, researchers tracked 1,647 middle-aged and older adults for an average of 12 years. Participants had regular health checkups every four to eight years and MRI brain scans every two to six years. They also completed at least one questionnaire to assess dietary intake.
The MIND diet — short for Mediterranean–DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) Diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay — isn’t new. But this study is one of the more detailed looks into how the MIND diet affects brain structure rather than just cognitive test scores.
The diet calls for eating more of these foods regularly:
- Green leafy vegetables and other vegetables
- Berries
- Nuts
- Whole grains
- Fish
- Beans
- Olive oil
- Poultry
It also recommends cutting back on fried or fast foods, pastries and sweets, butter and margarine, cheese and red meat.
The researchers note in a summary of the findings:
“MIND-recommended foods rich in antioxidants, such as berries, and high-quality protein sources like poultry may reduce oxidative stress and mitigate neuronal damage. Conversely, fried fast foods, often high in unhealthy fats, trans fats … may contribute to inflammation and vascular damage.”
The researchers scored adherence to the MIND diet on a scale of 0 to 15, with 15 being the highest level of adherence. The average participant scored just under 7. Here’s what each 3-point improvement in diet score was associated with:
- 20% less gray matter loss: Gray matter is the brain’s information processing hub, with a key role in memory, learning, and decision-making. Slower loss was equivalent to 2.5 years of delayed brain aging.
- 8% less ventricular enlargement: The ventricles are fluid-filled spaces that expand as brain tissue is lost. Slower expansion was equivalent to one year of delayed brain aging.
Berries and poultry stood out as the biggest contributors to those benefits. Sweets were linked to faster ventricular expansion and degeneration of the hippocampus (a region critical to memory). Fried fast foods were also linked to greater hippocampus decline.
Not every finding lined up with expectations, however.
Higher whole grain intake was linked to faster decline of gray matter and the hippocampus and faster ventricular expansion. And higher cheese intake — a food the MIND diet recommends limiting — was associated with slower gray matter and hippocampal loss and less ventricular enlargement.
The benefits were stronger in older participants and in those who were physically active and not overweight — suggesting that diet alone isn’t the whole picture, and that pairing it with other healthy habits may matter.
Still, the researchers concluded that the MIND diet holds promise “as a brain-healthy dietary pattern” and could play a role in slowing neurodegeneration as people age.
For more on how your diet can improve your cognitive health, read “Researchers Find 3 Diets That May Ward Off Dementia — and 1 That Hastens It.”
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