Older men and women who eat a healthy diet tend to have larger brains, which may help to protect against dementia. Those are the findings of a new study from the Netherlands that found that, using a very large cohort of individuals, a diet rich in vegetables, fruit, whole grains, nuts, dairy and fish and low in sugary beverages were associated with larger brain volumes.
“People with greater brain volume have been shown in other studies to have better cognitive abilities,” said study author Dr. Meike Vernooij of the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam. “Initiatives that help improve diet quality may be a good strategy to maintain thinking skills in older adults.”
The researchers found that a high quality diet was tied to larger overall brain volume, including a larger hippocampus, a part of the brain critical for learning and memory. The hippocampus is one of the first areas of the brain to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease.
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