Do You Have to Stick Closely to the MIND Diet to Benefit Your Brain?

So we have some studies in Chicago where we evaluated people's diets. And we followed them over a period of time to see who developed Alzheimer's disease, and also measured their cognitive abilities every year to be able to look at how fast their cognitive abilities declined with age.

So in this study, we scored people according to their adherence to the MIND diet. And those who had a high score had a 53% reduction in the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. This was about the same amount as people who scored high in the Mediterranean diet.

But what was very interesting is that people who scored just moderately well on the MIND diet still had a 35% reduction in the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, whereas people who scored moderately on the Mediterranean diet, they didn't have a reduction in the risk of Alzheimer's.