This Diet Prevents Alzheimer’s (But Don’t Cheat)

There is one type of diet that has repeatedly been proven to prevent or even reverse Alzheimer’s disease.

But it may not always be the easiest diet to follow.

Scientists from the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago decided to research how much could you cheat on this diet before it became ineffective in fighting Alzheimer’s.

The researchers used data obtained by the Chicago Health and Aging Project, an assessment of the cognitive health of elderly Chicago residents, from 1993 and 2012.

For this study, they included data from 5,001 people older than 65 who had completed a cognitive assessment questionnaire that tested their basic information processing skills and memory every three years.

In addition, the participants completed a questionnaire that recorded how often they consumed 144 different types of food.

From these food lists, the researchers assigned each participant a Mediterranean diet and a Western diet score. They then used the Western diet score to subtract points from the Mediterranean diet score to calculate the participants’ final Mediterranean diet score.

In other words, since there were 55 points up for grabs, a score of 55 meant the participant consumed a perfect Mediterranean diet. A score of 37 meant that two-thirds of their consumption was Mediterranean, 27 meant that they consumed half Mediterranean and half Western, and so forth.

By the end of all these calculations, the scientists discovered that those with the highest Mediterranean diet score were the equivalent of 5.8 years younger in cognitive functioning than those with the lowest scores.

Those who mixed the most Western foods with Mediterranean foods did not benefit from the Mediterranean diet at all.

This means that refraining from mixing Western foods with Mediterranean foods can extend your cognitively productive life by almost six years.

The researchers classified fruit, vegetables, legumes, olive oil, nuts, fish, potatoes, whole grains, and moderate wine consumption as Mediterranean. They classified fried foods, sweets, red meat, processed meat, full-cream dairy, refined grains, pies, and pizzas as Western.

For an even simpler way to boost your brain health and fight off Alzheimer’s, load up on this one free ingredient, explained here…