Your Brain On... the MIND Diet

Ayesha Sherzai (0:00)

Almost every week, someone sits across from us in clinic and asks us some version of the same question. Doctor, just tell me what to eat. And they're exhausted before they even ask it, because they've been told to go keto or carnivore or vegan or paleo. They've been told eggs are poison and eggs are superfood in the same day. Sometimes it feels like a war.

Every camp is certain. Every camp has a documentary, a best-selling book, a charismatic guy or a girl with a microphone in a podcast and they all contradict each other. But here's what almost no one in that war tells you. When you set aside the shouting and look only at the research on food and the brain, the noise mostly disappears. There's no magic food. What there is, is a single pattern that keeps showing up across decades and across the world. Plant predominant. Leafy greens, vegetables, berries, beans, nuts, olive oil, sources of omega-3 fatty acids and whole grains.

Not much red meat, not much sugar, or fried foods. And you've heard pieces of it under different names. The Mediterranean diet, the DASH diet. These aren't rivals. They rhyme. And the eating plan with the most evidence aimed specifically at the aging brain is one that is built directly out of these two. It's called the MIND diet. And it's what we're going to talk about today. I'm Dr. Ayesha Sherzai.

Dean Sherzai (1:21)

And I'm Dr. Dean Sherzai.

Ayesha Sherzai (1:23)

And this is Your Brain On The MIND diet.

Okay, Dean, I'm so glad we're talking about this. So let's go ahead and define what the MIND diet is. So the MIND diet stands for Mediterranean Dash Delay, which is a mouthful, but I'm glad that acronym exists.

Dean Sherzai (1:44)

If you have to say the whole thing and you made it contingent that people have to say this before they ate, a lot of people would be eating a lot less food. So it is incredibly important diet that has come to us. In the last decade or so.

Ayesha Sherzai (1:57)

So it was actually built at Rush University by an amazing scientist who is not among us anymore, unfortunately, Dr. Martha Clare Morris. She basically took two patterns with the best track records and kept only the parts that pointed towards brain health.

Dean Sherzai (2:15)

She looked at the data and saw out of all the data, the elements, the subparts of the food types, which ones stood out. And what stood out was pretty remarkable.

Ayesha Sherzai (2:26)

Absolutely. And I wanted to point out something really important here. The word delay, neurodegenerative delay, is used in this acronym. Not reversal, not cure, and that's because it is based on evidence.

Dean Sherzai (2:40)

Correct.

Ayesha Sherzai (2:41)

And the evidence shows that you can prevent Alzheimer's disease and you can delay it, but there is no reversal or treatment with diet. And I think the audience who listens to us, we've heard this quite often and we keep on repeating it over and over again for a reason. And it's because there's just a lot of misinformation out there. Food is important, but it can prevent Alzheimer's disease and some dementias, not cure or reverse it.

Dean Sherzai (3:07)

Correct. And that distinction is not a minimal parsing of language. It's really fundamental because it's with hope that charlatans pull people who are at their worst, at their most vulnerable and drain them of their funds, drain them of their hope, drain them of their time. This is what we're fighting. The patients that you and I deal with, the ones that are developing the beginnings of Alzheimer's, already are in the grip of this terrible disease. They're desperate and their families are desperate. So when a person with some accolades or with some confidence comes to them and says they can reverse their disease and don't listen to anybody else, we've seen it repeatedly.

Wallets open up, people's funds are drained, and we've seen this so many times that it just breaks our heart.

Ayesha Sherzai (3:54)

It really does. We can't talk about the positive side of nutrition without showing people that it's being abused. There are protocols that are being sold for people who are hopeless and they're desperate. And that hopelessness and desperation is not very visible on social media posts or when someone is actually talking about specific types of foods that people should eat to quote-unquote reverse their dementia. But that aside, we have evidence that it can be prevented. Dementia and Alzheimer's disease can be prevented.

Dean Sherzai (4:26)

And not 100%.

Yes. Again, even there, we have to really be careful not to overstate things. The data so far shows about 60% of it can be prevented. And we, the two of us, have extrapolated saying that at its optimal, if people start very early and do all of the elements together, which not many people have, we think that as much as 90%. But again, that's an extrapolation. So we come back to the 60%. 60% is pretty good.