Well, hello there. I am Monica Rinegal, and today on the Nutrition Tiva Podcast, we're

talking about nutrition for cognitive health. So let's jump right in.

Cheryl writes, I've been reading a lot about the mind diet lately. A 50% reduction in Alzheimer's

cases seems pretty significant, even if it's not a controlled study. And I'm willing

to eat a few more blueberries just to hedge my bets. But I'm not ready to give up cheese

quite so easily. So how strong is the evidence that cheese increases your risk of Alzheimer's

disease? This is such a great question, but in case you're not familiar with it, let

me just back up and tell you what the mind diet is. This is a set of dietary guidelines

proposed by researchers from Rush University. And this diet combines elements from both the

Mediterranean and the dash diets, two dietary patterns that have a long track record for

promoting health and longevity. But this has a particular emphasis on foods and nutrients

that have been associated either with cognitive health or cognitive decline. So the researchers

hypothesized that following this diet could keep your brain healthy, preserve your cognitive

abilities as you age, and perhaps even ward off dementia and Alzheimer's disease. And

to test their theory, they reviewed dietary and medical records for almost 1,000 people

to see how closely their diets adhered to these proposed mind guidelines and then how

they fared in terms of their brain health. And their initial findings did make quite a splash.

In a study published in 2015 in the Journal of the American Alzheimer's Association, they

reported that those whose diets conformed most closely to the mind diet principles that

they had developed were only half as likely to develop Alzheimer's as those whose diets

conformed the least well to this pattern. And the risk for those whose diets conformed

only moderately well was still reduced by a third. And as Cheryl says, that certainly

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