WHAT TO EAT DEMENTIA TO BEAT

By the nutritionist who is a world authority on how diet can keep YOUR mind sharper . . . for longer by Dr Michael Greger

ALL this week, we are highlighting the power of food to stop major preventable killers. Dr Michael Greger is the leading voice for the healing power of diet and lifestyle, and when in 2016 we serialised his book How Not To Die, it became a UK bestseller. Now he’s released a recipe book packed with tasty meals to make it easier to eat a wholefood, plant-based diet. In yesterday’s paper, we showed how you can prevent heart disease with his Daily Dozen — the blueprint for a disease-busting diet. Today, he reveals how a plant-based diet can protect you and your family against what is now the UK’s biggest killer: dementia.

My maternal grandmother died of alzheimer’s. the strongest memories I have of her are from my childhood, when she was the perfect, doting grandmother. But later in life she started to lose her mind.

By then, I was in medical school, but my new knowledge was useless. She had turned. my previously sweet and stately grandmother now threw things at people. She cursed. Her carer showed me the teeth marks on her arm where my grandma had bitten her.

alzheimer’s disease is one of the most physically and emotionally burdensome diseases, both for the sufferers and for the people who care for them.

In my clinical practice, it was the diagnosis I dreaded giving more than any other. not only because of the psychological toll to come for the patient, but also because of the emotional toll for loved ones.

It is a horrendous disease that destroys our memories and sense of self, and can neither be cured nor treated effectively. But there is much you can do to reduce your risk of getting it in the first place.

Unlike strokes, which can kill instantly and without any warning, alzheimer’s involves a slower, more subtle decline over months or years. It isn’t caused by the cholesterol-filled arterial plaques that trigger heart attacks and strokes, but plaques of a different sort, made from a substance called amyloid, which develop in the brain tissue.

most alzheimer’s sufferers aren’t diagnosed until they are in their 70s, but we now know that their brains begin deteriorating long before that.

Using thousands of postmortem examinations, pathologists have been able to detect the first silent stages of alzheimer’s disease appearing as ‘tangles’ in the brain in half of all 50-year-olds, and even 10 per cent of people in their 20s.

But the good news is that the clinical manifestation of alzheimer’s disease — as in heart disease, lung disease and stroke — may be preventable, and there is mounting evidence that a healthy diet offers protection. In fact, numerous studies have shown alzheimer’s is more a disease of lifestyle than genetics, and there is an emerging consensus that the same foods that clog our arteries can also clog our brains.

the world’s lowest validated rate of alzheimer’s disease is in rural northern India, where people traditionally eat a plantbased diet of grains and vegetables. levels are low in countries such as Japan, too.

But the prevalence of alzheimer’s has shot up over the past few decades, which is

thought to be in part due to the shift from a traditional rice-and-vegetablebased diet to one featuring triple the dairy intake and six times the amount of meat.

So, just as I explained in yesterday’s paper in the discussion of heart disease, the problem may be the typical Western diet, which can choke the arteries — this time in the brain.

In the U.S., those who don’t eat meat (including poultry and fish) appear to cut their risk of developing dementia in half. And the longer meat is avoided, the lower the risk may fall.

For example, compared with those who eat meat more than four times a week, the dementia risk of people who have consumed vegetarian diets for 30 years or more is three times lower.

In fact, the link with meat is so strong that the dietary centrepiece of the 2014 Dietary and Lifestyle Guidelines for the Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease was: ‘Vegetables, legumes [beans, peas and lentils], fruits and whole grains should replace meats and dairy products as primary staples of the diet.’

Plant-based diets are recommended in Alzheimer’s prevention guidelines due to the foods they tend to accentuate and those they reduce.

The Mediterranean diet, for example, which encourages a higher intake of vegetables, beans, fruits and nuts and a lower consumption of meats and dairy products, has been associated with slower cognitive decline and a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

When researchers tried to tease out the protective components, the critical ingredients appeared to be the diet’s high vegetable content and its lower ratio of saturated to unsaturated fats.

Whole plant foods contain thousands of compounds with antioxidant properties, some of which can traverse the blood-brain barrier and may provide neuroprotective effects by defending against the ‘rusting’ of the brain.

Meet the requirements of my Daily Dozen (see the box below) and you will be doing the best you can to protect your memories and your brain power well into old age.