Mediterranean Diet better than Low-Fat Diet in keeping aging brains sharp

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Mediterranean Diet better than Low-Fat Diet in keeping aging brains sharp

– Reported, May 25 2013

Thank the olive oil or the nuts, but something about the Mediterranean diet could help older brains act young again. There’s plenty of evidence that the Mediterranean diet can contribute to a lower risk of heart attacks, stroke, childhood asthma and even cancer. In fact, in a recent study, researchers assessed about 200 traditional Greek Mediterranean foods and reported that taken together, the foods could make 1,024 relevant health claims.

The cognitive-function tests showed that on average, those consuming either version of the Mediterranean diet scored significantly higher than the low-fat dieters. Because the participants were Spanish men and women, it’s possible that other lifestyle or cultural factors played a role in the results. But even after adjusting for factors such as age, family history of cognitive problems and dementia, education and even depression, which can affect cognitive function, the beneficial effect of the Mediterranean diet remained.

Many studies have linked the diet to health improvements, and researchers are starting to pin down some of the factors that could be driving these effects. In this study, the researchers noted that the Mediterranean diet groups might have exploited the high levels of antioxidants and anti-in?ammatory agents in the foods.

“Oxidative stress has been associated with neurodegeneration. The main components of the Mediterranean-diet intervention in the … trial, extra-virgin olive oil and nuts, have antioxidant properties and, together with other polyphenol-rich foods in the [Mediterranean diet], are suggested to relate to improved cognitive function,” the authors wrote in the study. They also suggested that the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet come from improvements in underlying risk factors that otherwise could contribute to strokes or other related health problems.

Previous studies have linked Mediterranean diets to fewer heart attacks and deaths from heart disease, but most of those have correlated people’s recall of their diet with heart-disease outcomes rather than randomly assigning participants to eat specific diets and then following them for heart-disease risk

Children who consume a diet rich in fish, fruit and vegetables tend to have a lower risk for asthma and wheezing, while kids who eat several hamburgers a week may have a higher risk, according to new research published this week in the international respiratory journal Thorax.

Children who consumed a Mediterranean diet — or one rich in fruits, vegetables and fish — were significantly less likely to suffer from asthma or wheezing. Among children from wealthier countries, this was particularly pronounced when the diet was high in fish; among those in poorer countries, the correlation was strongest when children ate higher concentrations of cooked greens. Yet, while, across the board researchers found no correlation between meat-heavy diets and asthma risk, among children from wealthier countries there was a marked association between routine consumption of hamburgers — more than three times per week — and elevated risk for asthma.

CREDITS.

http://healthland.time.com/2010/06/03/mediterranean-diet-linked-to-lower-child-asthma-risk/
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/25/its-the-olive-oil-mediterranean-diet-lowers-risk-of-heart-attack-and-stroke/
http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/21/mediterranean-diet-better-than-low-fat-diet-in-keeping-aging-brains-sharp/    

 

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