Food For Thought: Eat Right to Save Your Brain

Richmondchironeu • December 16, 2019

Hello Everyone:

Here is more great info on how food impacts our brain health and our ability to avoid dementia.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2293082

Conclusions and Relevance: In an older population, a Mediterranean diet supplemented with olive oil or nuts was associated with improved composite measures of cognitive function.

While this study looked at our older population, the same holds true for any age. But what is the real traditional Mediterranean Diet?

Mediterranean Diet?

• The more traditional Mediterranean diet (MedDiet) associated with health improvements is characterized by:

– Limited intake of animal-derived and processed foods

– Consumption of a variety of plant-based foods (fruit, vegetables, some breads, and other whole-    grain cereals, pulses, nuts, and seeds), wine, and olive oil (as the main source of lipids).

– Am J Clin Nutr 2013;97:369–76.

– Red meat only a few times per month

– Fish once or twice per week

– The Mediterranean dietary pattern is not as strict in guidelines relative to autoimmune diets and those with other nutritional considerations, such as those requiring low oxalate or low sulfur or specific food allergies…and these will require individualized tweaks, but for most of us, the Med Diet is the place to start.

  - Ageing Research Reviews 31 (2016) 80–92

Bottom Line: Invest in reading about how to consume a food pattern associated with the best health benefits overall. Right now, looking at the available science, it appears that the MedDiet is optimal for most of us. The book by Valter Longo, PhD, is the best one out there right now for two reasons: He gets the food part right, plus he adds periods of intermittent fasting to really supercharge this food plan. His book is “The Longevity Diet” and I highly recommend it.

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Health News Update: Happy New Year 2026! 1.5.26 Hey there everyone: Here is some news you can use to help you age optimally. I have written before about circadian rhythms and meal timing where it has been shown that eTRF (early time restricted feeding) has many benefits. But what happens as we age and shift our mealtimes away from our natural circadian clocks? Here are some snippets from this paper: “Chrononutrition, the study of the timing of eating, has emerged as a modifiable risk factor for adverse health outcomes The role of eating schedules is biologically relevant as dietary intake acts as an environmental cue influencing the circadian clocks of peripheral metabolic tissues and therefore can contribute to circadian misalignment and internal desynchrony 2 , 10 . The emerging evidence largely suggests that later mealtimes, particularly eating during the biological evening, is detrimental to health, Physical and psychological illnesses, including fatigue, oral health problems, depression, anxiety, and multimorbidity, are primarily associated with later breakfast. Later breakfast timing is also associated with increased mortality Importantly, eating breakfast later with aging was linked to a higher risk of death” https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-025-01035-x meal timing important for health Bottom Line: While this paper focuses on the elderly, it is certainly applicable to all of us. I have seen significant health benefits when people adopt eTRF patters…from better digestion to weight loss, to better sleep, to more energy! Here are two links to my earlier blogs for the info on when to eat for optimal health: https://www.richmondchironeuro.com/health-news-update-when-you-eat-is-critical-to-long-term-health https://www.richmondchironeuro.com/health-news-update-when-we-eat-is-as-critical-as-what-we-eat
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