In recent years, evidence has been mounting that lifestyle factors, including nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress, greatly affect dementia risk. When it comes to nutrition, experts claim that ultra-processed foods—think hot dogs, French fries, chips, sodas, cakes, and ice cream—can set you up for cognitive decline. And now, a new study shows us a way of eating that actually decreases dementia risk. 

Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association1, this study evaluated data from over 8,000 middle-aged and older men and women from 11 cohort studies. All of the participants began the study period without dementia. Researchers used surveys to collect nutritional data from the participants, who were each given a score from 0 to 15 based on how closely they followed a way of eating defined as the Mediterranean-DASH Diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay2, or MIND diet. The higher the score, the more closely their diet aligned with the MIND diet. The average score among participants was 8.3 out of 15. 

At the end of the study, the participants were screened for dementia. Out of more than 8,000 participants, about 775 developed dementia. The results showed that the more closely a participant followed the MIND diet, the less likely they were to develop dementia during the study period. In fact, participants with the highest scores were 17% less likely to develop dementia compared with participants with the lowest scores.