FOOD FOR THOUGHT:

In her new book, Dr Joanna McMillan shows how feeding your grey matter with healthy foods will maximise your brain power and lower your chances of memory loss.

brain-boosting recipes and dietary advice

We pretty much all accept what we choose to eat and drink affects our health. Much attention has been given to the factors that influence heart, gut and liver health. Yet we really don’t talk about how food and lifestyle choices affect brain health.

We’re aware the brain doesn’t always work so well as we get older. In fact, for the over 50s, concerns about dementia and “losing one’s marbles” have now overtaken those of cancer or heart disease. The good news is that while you can’t change the genes inherited from your parents, nor many aspects of the environment around you, you can change your diet and your lifestyle.

The march of time is unstoppable and ageing is inevitable. Yet some people age more slowly than others. If we understand why, we can implement the strategies that will help us put the brakes on the ageing process, and that includes the ageing of the brain.

Scientific studies have illuminated many factors that count when it comes to looking after your brain. Your brain needs the right nutrients and hydration to work at its best. Keeping good eating and lifestyle habits over the years will help slow the ageing process of the brain, helping it work better as you age.

There are factors we know to be important for human health, but what wasn’t appreciated and understood until relatively recently was the impact these things had on the brain. For example, we used to think dementia was just the luck of the draw, but we now know the risk can be substantially reduced through following a healthy eating pattern, such as a Mediterranean-style diet.

Pay attention to these things and you’ll reap the benefits. Each impacts on the others, so by giving credence to each you improve them all – when you exercise you feel more like eating healthy food; when you’re sleeping well you are more inclined to exercise. When your stress is at a manageable level you’ll find you sleep better and so on.

The ageing brain

Age affects every cell in the body. Visibly, we see the effects on skin, hair and body composition (muscle and fat levels), but ageing is also responsible for changes in the brain.

Generally with age, most of us find we’re less able to quickly retrieve information, such as remembering names, and we’re not as adept at learning new things. Others will succumb to more serious and debilitating forms of dementia. However, the news isn’t all bad.

Many people in the later decades of their lives can score just as well as younger people on cognitive tests, even those who are later shown to have the same degenerative changes to their brain that those with dementia exhibit. Such discoveries led to the concept of cognitive reserve. Cognitive reserve is your brain’s ability to adapt and form new ways of working when certain connections or parts of the brain become damaged.

Think of this scenario. If you had to drive from A to B and discovered that your usual route was closed due to roadworks, you would try to find an alternative route. This is essentially what your brain has the power to do. With the right stimulus and

“You can’t change genes inherited from parents, but you can change diet and lifestyle.”