Eat Your Way to a Healthy Brain

July 25, 2002 -- Once again, mom was right -- carrots, broccoli, and fish really are good for your brain, especially if you want to protect it from Alzheimer's disease.

The opposite is also true, so avoid foods that are bad for your brain's health, says Robert P. Friedland, MD, a professor of medicine at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. High fat and high salt are two components of a brain-unhealthy diet, but the main problem is "eating too much meat," he says.

Filling up on meat usually means there is no room left for "at least five servings daily of fruits and vegetables, which are high in antioxidants" -- a fundamental component of a brain-healthy diet, says Friedland's research partner, nutritionist Grace Petot.

But both Petot and Friedland also warn against extremely low-fat diets. Trying to eliminate all fat from the diet is a mistake, says Petot, because both mind and body need a diet that gets 25-30% of its calories from fat. "What we don't need to do is add fat to the diet," says Petot.

Our rural ancestors living in the late 19th and early 20th century had the right idea, she says. "If they wanted butter, they skimmed the [cream] off the milk and drank the milk. They didn't add fat when cooking meat." Our ancestors also "didn't add salt," says Petot.

Friedland and Petot are conducting ongoing studies of people genetically at risk for Alzheimer's disease because they carry one or two copies of the ApoE gene, the so-called Alzheimer's gene. About one in four people have one copy of this gene, which is associated with late-onset Alzheimer's disease, meaning the disease is diagnosed at age 70 or older.

Only about half of the people with the Alzheimer's gene actually develop the disease -- a fact that sent researchers like Friedland and Petot looking for other Alzheimer's risk factors. They've been conducting dietary studies of both Alzheimer's patients and carriers of the gene who haven't developed the disease.

Friedland and Petot are presenting their latest findings this week at the 8th International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders, in Stockholm.

And those findings form the basis for their dietary recommendations, says Friedland.

They found that people who have the Alzheimer's gene and eat a high-fat diet during their 40s are seven times more likely to develop Alzheimer's than people who don't have the gene. When these same genetically predisposed people ate a low-fat diet in midlife, their risk of developing Alzheimer's dropped to four and a half times that of people without the ApoE gene.

In other research, Alzheimer's experts discovered that antioxidants are especially effective at fighting Alzheimer's disease, perhaps by helping to prevent the development of the protein plaques that block signals between brain cells. Some researchers suggest taking vitamin E to boost antioxidant protection. Friedland also recommends taking vitamin B supplements.