While diet is a powerful preventative tool against brain disease and cognitive decline, it is not enough on its own. In fact, neither thing alone is enough. Synergy and holistic perspective are important to continue to be healthy. The time has come to learn to think of our bodies as a whole and our lives as a combination of different sources of nourishment, where nourishment includes but is not limited to the food we eat.
In addition to eating well, other forms of nourishment include how often we move our bodies or exercise, how connected we feel to our friends and family, how often we challenge ourselves intellectually, how excited we are about our careers and even how soundly we sleep. Each of these elements supports brain health, but when we go about our lives together, they become more important than the sum of their parts. The extent to which we are able to incorporate all these healthy habits into our daily lives determines just how healthy and durable our bodies become.
Many still find it hard to believe that living a healthy lifestyle can increase our brain power throughout our lives and even protect us from diseases like Alzheimer’s. It has been proven that such a lifestyle actually lowers the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. The diet that has been studied the most for Alzheimer’s disease prevention is the Mediterranean diet because it has positive effects on preventing cognitive decline in the elderly.
Although several diets are said to promote brain and heart health, no diet is as strongly supported by clinical research as the Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean diet gained popularity after it was noticed that people in the Mediterranean regions of the world seemed to have a lower incidence of heart disease. Not only were people from the Mediterranean Sea healthier, they also lived longer. Thus, researchers began to study their lifestyle.
As more research became available, scientists began to realize that cardiovascular health has a huge impact on the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. They came up with a saying, “What’s good for the heart is good for the brain.” Thus, the Mediterranean diet began to be studied in terms of brain health.
A groundbreaking clinical trial published in 2015 demonstrated that relatively easy-to-incorporate lifestyle strategies to fight dementia – such as diet, exercise, intellectual stimulation and vascular risk management – were indeed successful in improving performance cognitive impairment in older adults. Over the course of no more than two years, participants showed a 25% improvement in cognitive performance. The program proved effective especially in terms of developing the ability to carry out complex tasks, such as remembering phone numbers and efficiently performing several tasks at the same time, skills that improved by 83%. Moreover, the speed at which they were able to perform these different tasks improved by no less than 150%.
With the exception of sleep, this study was able to incorporate all the known ingredients of a brain-healthy lifestyle, providing important evidence of a causal relationship between lifestyle and good cognitive health. Research is finally starting to show that people who live full, healthy lives paying attention to these crucially important interactive elements greatly improve their brain health and decrease their risk of dementia. These findings provide us with the much-desired alternative we have been looking for. No longer out of reach, even the most skeptical among us regain hope, as well as the motivation to do what is necessary to protect ourselves and thrive.
Psychologist Mihai Moisoiu
Tel. 0753937223
www.mihaimoisoiu.ro
E-mail: mmmoisoiu@gmail.com
2023-11-30 01:13:17
#Move #love #laugh #feel #good
