MIND Diet And Its Significance: Should You Try It?

Food is the most important part of our lives. We will take care of everything. But when it comes to food, we often ignore its importance. We don’t focus on eating the right food. Right food is very important for us to have good health. The more you will focus on eating the right food, the more healthy you will be. But have you ever thought that your food can have an impact on your mind? It is true, and in fact, the food you eat impacts largely the health of your mind. The following article will discuss the perfect diet for your mind, commonly known as the mind diet. 

MIND diet refers to the diet used for improving the health of your brain. It helps to keep your mind healthy and sharp. The MIND diet is not a single diet. It is in fact a combination of two diets. One is the Mediterranean diet. The second diet is the DASH diet.

The DASH diet is made for the improved function of the heart. DASH means dietary approaches to stop hypertension. Mediterranean diet refers to the diet that is used by the Mediterranean countries. This is their traditional diet.

• Research has shown for years that what we eat can impact brain function. The mind diet is a hybrid diet. It is a combination of both the Mediterranean diet and the heart-healthy DASH diet. The research has shown time and time again that those two diets are not only healthy for us overall but also for our brain health.

• So, the researchers took the portions of that diet that had been found to be most helpful for brain function, put them together, and then studied them, which ultimately became the MIND diet. The MIND diet largely consists of large leafy green vegetables like kale and spinach but also includes berries, nuts, and fish. People who eat this diet have been found to have a significant reduction in conversion to Alzheimer's disease.

• So, one of the earlier studies showed that people who ate the MIND diet had a 53 percent reduced risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Equally impressive is that people who followed it even modestly had a 35 percent reduced conversion to Alzheimer's disease. So, the research shows the significance of the MIND diet. The good thing about the mind diet is that it is easy to follow.

• You don't have to spend a lot of money on supplements and powders and buy things that you see. These are basic things that you can get at the grocery store, and they are proven to work. The key is just to get people to incorporate them into their lives. So, the more people know about these brain-healthy diets, the better they will do to add them to their diets.

• MIND diet does not have any proper set of rules and guidelines. The diet just recommends a total of eight foods that people should add to their diets. It also lists a total of five foods that people should avoid in their diet.

• The MIND diet, the Mediterranean diet, and the DASH diet all suggest that people should eat a lot of food. But currently, the re is no research that supports the idea that fruits can improve your brain health and can save you from cognitive diseases. However, there is research on only one fruit currently that can support the health of our brain. That fruit is berries. So it means that all these diets, particularly the MIND diet, recommend that people they should eat a lot of berries to have their improve brain health and save them from cognitive diseases.

• Following is the list of the total of eight foods that are often suggested and recommended in the MIND diet. These eight foods contribute a lot to improving the health of your mind. Make sure you add all these foods to your diet as soon as possible to save and protect yourself from cognitive diseases.

MIND diet puts a special focus on leafy and green vegetables. For these vegetables, it is recommended to have a lot of green and leafy vegetables every day. But the minimum servings of these leafy and green vegetables that you should eat is six servings for one week. Every day you should eat these green and leafy vegetables one time at least.

Regarding all other vegetables besides green and leafy vegetables, it is recommended that you should eat those one time a day. You can have leafy and green vegetables every day as many as you want, but at least one time, have another vegetable with them daily.

In fruit categories, berries are the only fruit that the MIND diet recommends. Try to eat berries daily. The more you eat these berries, the more they will be beneficial for your mental health because there are many researches that support the significance of these berries for your mental health. The minimum criteria for eating these berries for following the MIND diet is that you should have them at least two times per week or once every three days.

Nuts, although more expensive than other MIND diet ingredients. You should take nuts at least five times a week. Nuts provide many health benefits other than brain for you. You will not only get your brain health improved, but also you will feel many improvements in your body. They are the sources of proteins that are necessary for many functions of your body.

When you see olive oil, you will realize that the market is full of cheap and unhygienic oils which pose many health risks for you. To minimize all this, you have to use olive oil for cooking all sorts of food.

Whole grains are easily available, and also they are not expensive like nuts. The MIND diet recommends that you should take whole grains daily at least three times. Whole grains include various things like red rice, corn, buckwheat, amaranth, etc. 

Fish contains various types of nutrients in large amounts that are beneficial for various functions of your body. With MIND diet, you have to eat fish at least one time in a week.

Beans, also known as legumes, are also recommended in the MIND diet. You should take the beans at least four times in a meal in one week.

For following the MIND diet, you have to eat chicken two times minimum in a week. You can also go for turkey if you like that above chicken.

The MIND diet is so powerful that even if you don’t fully follow it, you will still have its benefits on your mental health. You will feel safe from cognitive diseases.

Besides recommending foods to take in the MIND diet plan, there are some foods that you should avoid at all costs. These are the foods that worsen your mental health. Some foods that you should avoid at all mean that you can never eat if you have to follow the MIND diet plan. There are other foods that you should restrict for keeping your mental health balanced.

Although butter has some beneficial effects on your health, but you can’t eat an excess of it. You have to keep it to a minimum. The maximum amount of butter that you can eat daily is about 14 grams, which will be equal to one tablespoon. 

Avoid margarine as it negatively affects your mental health.

Like many things, excess red meat is also bad. You cannot eat red meat more than three times a week. This should not mean that you don’t take red meat at all. You just have to restrict and avoid overeating red meat for a week.

Fried food has a lot of negative effects on your mental health. This not only damages your mental health but also damages your whole body. Many functions of your body are affected by it. So you should not take fried food of any sort at all. But if you are too willing to eat fried food, then you should try to eat fried food of any one kind only once a week. Don’t go beyond that if you want to stick to the MIND diet to improve your mental health.

Sweets, desserts, and pastries have no good effect on your mental health. Try to take these as little as possible, and don’t take these more than four times in one week.

• The MIND diet has been associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease. But the latest randomized control trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed otherwise. In this randomized control trial, the scientists wanted to test the cognitive effect of the Mind diet with mild caloric restriction compared to a control diet with mild caloric restriction. Six hundred four people were enrolled. Three hundred one were assigned to the Mind diet group, and 303 were assigned to the control group. The mean age of the population was 70, and all of the participants were cognitively healthy.

• They all received counseling regarding adherence to their assigned diet and support to promote weight loss. The primary endpoint was any change in their baseline cognition score and the secondary outcome was the change in their brain MRI findings. The MIND diet group received a monthly supply of blueberries, two and a half cups per week mixed nuts, 5 ounces per week, and extra virgin olive oil, about 14 tablespoons per week. The participants in the control diet group received 30-dollar gift cards at the same frequency.

• They also did blood tests in a subgroup of the population to make sure that the participants were eating the things that they were supposed to. The results show both groups had improvement in their cognitive scores, but they were tiny and it was almost the same for both groups. Their MRI scans were the same as well. They both lost the same amount of weight, and the conclusion was that in cognitively healthy people, the MIND diet with calorie restriction was not any better in preventing cognitive decline than a sub-optimal diet with the same calorie restriction.

• First of all, we have to stop saying that the MIND diet didn't work. It worked, but the difference between the MIND diet group and the sub-optimal group was not significant. Second, even though they did a power analysis, the sample size of 300 healthy people most likely may not have been large enough to detect any signal, further skewing the significance towards the null, and the tools that they used were not sensitive enough to detect this change.

• The third three years may not have been long enough to detect neurodegenerative changes in a healthy population. Fourth, both groups were invited to social events, and they interacted with each other. They both participated in lifestyle talks, raising the possibility that the sub-optimal diet group may have also made some improvements to their diet.

• The study started in 2017 and ended in 2021 the peak was during the pandemic, and this may have introduced a lot of confounding factors, and this may explain the dip in the cognitive scores right around 2019. There is still plenty of evidence that a plant-predominant dietary pattern with healthy fats, whether that's the MIND diet, Mediterranean diet, or DASH diet, is associated with lowering the risk of Alzheimer's disease. We believe the study could have benefited from a more robust design and the methodology might have been influenced by the pandemic phenomenon.

If you don’t have any food routine, then you are doing a lot of harm to your health. You can see there are lots of diet plans available online. You can go to any nutritionist. All diet plans are for a particular purpose. Like many other functions and organs of your body, your mind also needs a diet. The MIND diet, the Mediterranean diet, and the DASH diet all can be very beneficial for your health. Your mind controls your whole body. Your mind needs food that improves and maintains its good health. If your mind is not working well enough, then you can’t imagine yourself doing the right things in your life. The health of your mind affects everything in your life. Your life decisions all depend on your mental health. So, mental health is even more important than the health of your body. So try to follow your MIND diet for improved health and proper functioning of your mind.