These Foods Cause Dementia

Since we don’t have any medical cure for dementia, our first option should be to try to prevent it from happening in the first place.

And a new study published in the journal Neurology gives us a clear road map for what to eat and what to avoid.

That’s because researchers found that one type of food increases our risk of dementia by a horrifying 343%

Cut out this one type of food and you’ll probably never have to worry about dementia again.

As humans age, the immune system becomes more pro-inflammatory, in order to launch a stronger response when it senses a threat.

But inflammation damages as much as it repairs, and inflammation has been associated with cognitive decline and dementia.

First, inflammation reduces the amount of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in your nervous system. This protein is responsible for the growth and health of neurons, so allowing inflammation to reduce it is a bad idea.

Second, inflammation kills cells. After all, that is how it kills harmful invaders. But it kills healthy cells in the nervous system too.

Since diet can modify the course of chronic systemic inflammation, a team of Greek scientists wondered whether an anti-inflammatory diet could make enough of a difference to prevent dementia in people whose immune systems would otherwise put them at risk of it.

They chose 1,059 subjects from the Hellenic Longitudinal Investigation of Aging and Diet, a study that tracked the causes of dementia and other neuropsychiatric conditions in Greek seniors.

They assessed their participants every three years and have evaluated each subject twice up to now. At the beginning, none of the participants had dementia.

They assessed their diets via a questionnaire and used the Dietary Inflammatory Index to rank foods according to their pro- and anti-inflammatory properties.

They split their participants into least, moderate, and most inflammatory dietary groups.

A comparison between the most and least inflammatory groups on anti-inflammatory foods is interesting:

1. Nine versus 20 servings of fruit per week.
2. Ten versus 19 vegetable servings per week.
3. Two versus four legume servings per week.
4. Nine versus 11 coffee and tea servings per week.

Can you guess what they found?

1. Every one-point increase on the Dietary Inflammatory Index was associated with a 21% higher dementia risk.

2. Subjects consuming the most inflammatory diets were 3.43 times more likely to develop dementia than those who consumed the least inflammatory diets.

It is great to know that dementia can be prevented so easily by doing something that is completely under our control.

Anti-inflammatory foods include fruit (especially berries), vegetables (especially dark leafy ones), legumes, whole grains, coffee, tea, olive oil, fish, nuts, and seeds.

Pro-inflammatory foods include sugar, refined grains, red meat, processed meat, and large quantities of vegetable oils.

The MIND and Mediterranean diets are the perfect anti-inflammatory diets to prevent dementia.

But if you have already begun to experience those senior moments, then an anti-inflammatory diet is not going to be enough. In fact, you need to load up on this one free ingredient, explained here…