New research from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev shows that switching to a Green Mediterranean Diet can improve brain health.
Losing weight can also slow down brain aging. This was discovered in a sub-study of the DIRECT-PLUS trial.
The DIRECT-PLUS Study
The DIRECT-PLUS trial was a long study over 18 months with 300 participants.
Prof. Galia Avidan from the Department of Psychology and Dr. Gidon Levakov, who studied at the Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, did a smaller study within this big study. Their findings were recently published in a journal called eLife.
The main study was led by Prof. Iris Shai from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, along with her former student Dr. Alon Kaplan, and other researchers from Harvard and Leipzig Universities.
Link between Obesity and Brain Aging
Obesity, or being very overweight, is connected with our brain getting older faster than it should.
Researchers can calculate a person’s ‘brain age’—how old their brain looks on detailed scans, no matter their real age. This method also helps to see how things like lifestyle can affect brain aging.
Levakov, Kaplan, Shai and Avidan studied 102 people who were obese.
The participants had a brain scan at the start and end of the program; other tests and measurements were also done at these times to study other biological processes affected by obesity, like liver health.
Results: Losing Weight Can Make Your Brain Younger
The researchers used the brain scans taken at the start and end of the study to see how the lifestyle changes affected brain aging.
The results showed that when body weight went down by 1%, the participants’ brain age was almost 9 months younger than what was expected after 18 months.
This slower aging was connected with changes in other biological measures, like less liver fat and liver enzymes.
More liver fat and certain liver enzymes were previously shown to harm brain health in Alzheimer’s disease.
“Our study shows how important a healthy lifestyle is for brain health,” says Dr. Levakov. “We were excited to find that even a weight loss of 1% was enough to make the brain 9 months younger,” says Prof. Avidan.
What’s Next?
The findings show that lifestyle changes that help people lose weight can slow down the brain aging that happens with obesity.
The next steps include figuring out if slowing down this brain aging leads to better health outcomes for patients. The study also shows a potential way to check if lifestyle changes are improving brain health.
As more people worldwide are becoming obese, finding ways that improve brain health could have big impact.
What is a Green Mediterranean Diet?
The researchers from the DIRECT-PLUS trial were the first to introduce the idea of a green-Mediterranean, high polyphenols diet.
This diet is different from the regular Mediterranean diet because it has more dietary polyphenols (plant chemicals that are good for our health) and less red/processed meat.
People following the green-Mediterranean diet ate 28 grams of walnuts every day. They also drank 3-4 cups of green tea and 1 cup of Wolffia-globosa (Mankai) plant green shake of duckweed each day over 18 months.
The aquatic green plant Mankai is rich in iron, B12, 200 kinds of polyphenols and protein, making it a good substitute for meat.
If you care about brain health, please read studies about how the Mediterranean diet could protect your brain health, and Vitamin B supplements could help reduce dementia risk.
For more information about brain health, please see recent studies that cranberries could help boost memory, and many older people have this non-Alzheimer’s dementia.
The study was published in eLife.
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