You’ve no doubt heard of the Mediterranean diet, you might even have come across its cooler cousin the Atlantic diet, but what about the MIND diet? It’s touted for its brain benefits, and now a new study has provided evidence to suggest it could help reduce the risk of cognitive problems during aging.

The Mediterranean-DASH Diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND) diet combines the Mediterranean and DASH diets to target the aging brain. It’s packed full of foods rich in certain vitamins, carotenoids, and flavonoids, which are thought to protect the brain by reducing oxidative stress and inflammation.

Vegetables such as spinach, kale, and collard greens, as well as whole grains, olive oil, poultry, fish, beans, and nuts all take center stage in the MIND diet. Berries are favored over other fruits, and it’s recommended you eat one or more servings of fish and two or more servings of poultry per week.

Meanwhile, red meat and sweet treats should be limited to four and five times a week, respectively, and cheese, fried foods, and butter should also be kept to a minimum.

"With the number of people with dementia increasing with the aging population, it's critical to find changes that we can make to delay or slow down the development of cognitive problems," study author Dr Russell P. Sawyer, of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and member of the American Academy of Neurology, said in a statement. 

"We were especially interested to see whether diet affects the risk of cognitive impairment in both Black and white study participants."

To find out, Sawyer and co-authors recruited 14,145 people with an average age of 64 – 70 percent of them were white and 30 percent were Black – and followed them for 10 years on average. Participants were required to complete the Food Frequency Questionnaire in the REasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study, which the researchers used to assess how closely their diets matched the MIND diet.

They also measured thinking and memory skills at the beginning and end of the study and compared MIND diet adherence with incident cognitive impairment and cognitive trajectory, adjusting for various factors such as age, sex, race, underlying health conditions, and lifestyle factors. 

Eating a diet that closely resembled the MIND diet, the team found, was associated with a decreased risk of cognitive impairment for female participants, but not male participants; there was no difference between Black and white participants. 

Turning their attention to cognitive decline, the researchers found that in people who more closely followed the MIND diet, cognition worsened more slowly than in those who did not, and that MIND diet adherence was a better predictor of cognitive decline in Black participants than white participants.

Of course, the team have only demonstrated an association – this work has far from proven that following the MIND diet bolsters the brain against cognitive impairment and decline. It is also limited by only including older Black and white people, and not other populations. Nonetheless, it’s an exciting avenue of research.

"These findings warrant further study, especially to examine these varying impacts among men and women and Black and white people,” said Sawyer, “but it's exciting to consider that people could make some simple changes to their diet and potentially reduce or delay their risk of cognitive issues.”

The study is published in the journal Neurology.