There’s a familiar story in nutrition: Scientists identify a food or diet that appears to be good for the brain, the headlines follow, and suddenly we’re all wondering whether we should be eating blueberries by the handful. Does this sound familiar?
The MIND diet has had a similar journey. Developed to explore whether diet could help protect cognitive health, the MIND diet combines elements of the Mediterranean and DASH Diet eating patterns. It puts extra emphasis on foods such as leafy greens, berries, nuts, beans, whole grains, fish and olive oil. Early studies about the MIND diet were encouraging. People who followed the MIND pattern more closely appeared to have slower cognitive decline and lower rates of dementia.
But newer research has made the picture more complicated. So the question was raised: Does the MIND diet really work? The honest answer is: we don’t know yet — not in the simple way a headline might suggest.
Let’s look at the data. A three-year randomized clinical trial published in 2023 compared older adults following the MIND diet with a control group. Both groups received dietary counseling and made meaningful changes to their diets. After three years, both groups showed some improvement in cognitive measures, but researchers did not find a significant difference between the groups in cognitive function or brain MRI measures. That doesn’t necessarily mean the MIND diet is useless. For one thing, the control group wasn’t eating a terrible diet. Their diets improved, too. Participants in both groups also lost weight.
Perhaps the most important issue worth remembering is that three years may be a very short window when we’re talking about a disease process that can develop over decades. This is just one reason why nutrition is incredibly difficult to study.
A more recent analysis of the trial offers another piece of the puzzle. Researchers found that people whose MIND diet scores improved substantially over the course of the study also showed improvements in global cognitive scores. They also had higher blood levels of certain carotenoids: plant compounds found in foods such as leafy greens and colorful fruits and vegetables.
This still doesn’t prove that eating more of these foods will prevent dementia. But it does support a broader idea that is more useful. Your overall eating pattern may matter more than whether you perfectly follow a particular diet. It’s also likely that the duration and consistency of following this eating pattern impact the likelihood of developing cognitive decline or not.
The brain is influenced by the same systems that affect the rest of our bodies: blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, inflammation, circulation, physical activity, sleep and overall diet quality. And then there’s the gut. One of the most fascinating areas of nutrition research right now is the relationship between the gut microbiome and the brain. This is a nascent, but rapidly accelerating area of study.
We don’t know much yet, but we do know: Feed your gut microbes a variety of plants. This includes vegetables, fruits, beans, lentils, whole grains, nuts and seeds. Variety matters because different plants provide different types of fiber and other compounds.
Feed the gut, feed the brain!
If you want to borrow the best ideas from the MIND diet, you can start here:
Put plants on many plates as possible.
Leafy greens are great. So are broccoli, peppers, tomatoes, carrots, berries, apples, and plenty of other fruits and vegetables.
Make beans a regular.
Lentils, chickpeas and other legumes are inexpensive, versatile sources of fiber and plant protein.
Keep nuts and seeds around.
They’re an easy way to add unsaturated fats, fiber and other nutrients.
Choose whole grains more often.
Oats, quinoa, whole-grain breads and other minimally processed grains can contribute valuable fiber and nutrients.
Include fish as often as you can.
Fatty fish provide omega-3 fats, but you don’t need to eat salmon every day to have a healthy diet. Omega-3 supplements play an important role in brain health.
Use unsaturated fats more often.
Olive oil and avocado oil are my cooking kitchen staples, but the bigger idea is to emphasize unsaturated fats in place of some foods higher in saturated fat.
And perhaps most importantly, don’t forget the rest of the picture: good sleep; regular physical activity; not smoking; limiting alcohol; and managing blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar are all part of protecting brain health.
My biggest takeaways as a dietitian:
What it gives us is something more useful: another reminder that healthy eating is a pattern, not a magic ingredient. The longer one eats this way, the better for preventing chronic disease, including dementia.
