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The older we get, the more and more important it becomes to take care of our brains. The number one way you can keep your brain healthy is by eating foods that help improve your brain health. There are many diets out there that claim they boost brain health, but what diets legitimately boost your brain’s health?
It is completely natural for your body and your brain to go through changes as you get older. Think of it like a car, if you take care of it, you can expect it to perform at a high level for a much longer time. There are things you can do to help slow any decline in memory and lower your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias. Here are some things you can do to keep your brain healthy:
Research has found that those who exercise frequently are far less likely to experience a decline in their mental function and have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. You should try to exercise several times per week for 30-60 minutes. Exercises don’t have to be rigorous weight training. Walking, swimming, jogging, playing tennis, stretching, and any other moderate aerobic activity that increases your heart rate works just fine.
Sleep plays a massive role in both our physical wellbeing and our mental wellbeing. Some experts even believe that sleep can help clear abnormal proteins in your brain and consolidate memories, which boosts your memory and brain health. You should try to get seven to eight consecutive hours of sleep per night. Consecutive sleep gives your brain the time to consolidate and store your memories.
Much like your muscles, your brain needs to be ‘worked out’ in order to keep it healthy. Things such as crossword puzzles, reading, playing cards, or putting together a puzzle can help stimulate the brain. You should also avoid watching too much television as it is a passive activity and does little to stimulate the brain.
Keeping up with social activity can help ward off depression and stress, both can play a huge role in memory loss. Connecting with loved ones, friends, and others, especially if you live alone, can help you keep your brain socially involved.
Of course, one of the best ways to take care of your brain is to eat a diet full of brain-healthy foods. These foods will not only take care of your brain’s wellbeing, but your entire body’s as a whole. Here are some foods that improve memory and concentration that also increase your longevity:
By pairing a healthy diet with plenty of physical and mental exercise, you can take proper care of your brain. Both your brain and your body will thank you.
If you’re looking for the best brain-food snacks or the best brain-food for studying, look no further than fruit, more specifically berries. Flavonoids, the natural plant pigments that give berries their colorful hues, can also improve your memory. A 2012 Harvard study found that women who consumed two or more servings of strawberries and blueberries each week can delay memory decline by up to two-and-a-half years.
To be more specific, blueberries are the one berry experts recommend the most, even being coined as ‘brainberries’. Studies have found that diets rich in blueberries significantly improve both the learning capacity and motor skills of aging rats. You should aim to add at least 1 cup of blueberries a day in any form to your diet.
Earlier, we compared your brain to a car in the sense that it needs regular maintenance to ensure it runs smoothly. The affect nutrients have on our brain provides us with another opportunity to compare your brain to a car. Your car functions best when it gets premium fuel, and the same can be said for your brain.
Eating high-quality foods that contain vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants nourish the brain and protect it from oxidative stress. For example, foods high in spermidine can help induce bodily functions such as autophagy. This is the body’s process of replacing old and damaged cells with newer healthier ones. Autophagy can help reduce the negative effects of oxidative stress on the brain.
In recent years, there’s been a push in the research community to discover just how big of a role our diet plays on our brain health. In those studies, we’ve discovered that a healthy diet can greatly decrease the risk of developing Alzheimer’s. During the studies, researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago developed a diet plan called the MIND diet.
Early studies have found that the diet may reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by as much as 53%. The study, published in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia, looked at more than 900 people between the ages of 58 and 98 who filled out food questionnaires and underwent repeated neurological testing. It found participants whose diets most closely followed the MIND recommendations had a level of cognitive function the equivalent of a person 7.5 years younger.
The foods that you will find on the MIND diet are incredibly similar to the foods we mentioned earlier as being healthy for you. This is because these foods have been time and time again found to help the brain’s healing process. Here are some of the foods you can expect to eat on the MIND diet:
This diet combines many elements from two other popular diets, the Mediterranean diet and the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet. In fact, the MIND diet stands for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay.
Just as important as it is that you eat food that is healthy for your brain, it’s important that you avoid food that is bad for your brain and memory. Experts suggest that nearly 65 million people will be suffering from dementia by 2030. You can reduce your risk of the disease by avoiding some of these foods:
Your diet has a massive impact on your brain health. Inflammatory diet patterns can contribute to impaired memory and learning. This doesn’t mean that you can never eat these foods. However, you should eat these foods in moderation, maybe once a week or even once a month.
Junk food uses sensory contrasts to make our eating experience more pleasurable. However, these sensory contrasts trick our brain into thinking it’s not heavy food. Bad diets full of junk food can cause dementia due to high blood pressure and cholesterol disrupting the blood supply to the brain.
Research also shows that junk food can prevent brain cells from responding properly to insulin. On top of that, too much junk food can also make us feel dull and disinterested, which can lead to a more sedentary lifestyle. We have already discussed how important it is to be active, a junk food diet may prevent that.
So we have established that a poor diet can cause a major decline in cognitive functions. By simply altering your diet, you greatly reduce the risk of developing diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. But what are the main foods you should avoid? Here are five foods that cause memory loss:
As we mentioned earlier, it’s not like you need to stop eating these foods for the rest of your life. However, cutting these foods out of your regular diet can help tremendously. It’s okay to splurge every once in a while but you should not be eating these foods regularly.
Nutrients help keep our brain healthy and can reduce depression and dementia risk, which can help improve our longevity. Luckily, the nutrients that researchers recommend can be found in most healthy diets. If you focus on eating brain-healthy foods, you should have no issue getting the nutrients you need. Here are some essential nutrients:
There are plenty of other nutrients that doctors and research recommend but these are some of the main nutrients.
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