Q & A Library

Maybe so. A study from Columbia University suggests that the closer your eating habits are to the Mediterranean diet, the lower your risk of Alzheimer’s. Researchers at Columbia analyzed the diets of 1,984 people averaging 76.3 years of age and scored them from one to nine – the higher the score, the closer the diet was to the Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean diet emphasizes high quality fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, legumes, unrefined cereals, olive oil, fermented dairy products such as yogurt and natural cheese, and fresh fish as daily staples. Red meat is limited to about one meal a month; poultry, eggs and sweets are not daily fare – they’re eaten about once a week. Moderate amounts of wine are part of the diet.

The Columbia study found that the risk of Alzheimer’s was lowest among those people whose diet was most like the Mediterranean diet. For each point on the diet scorecard, the risk of Alzheimer’s dropped by 19 to 24 percent – so, for example, if you scored a six, your risk would be 19 to 24 percent lower than someone who scored a five. Those who scored in the top one-third had a 68 percent lower risk of Alzheimer’s than those in the lower one-third. The study was published in the October 2006 online issue of the Archives of Neurology.

I believe the Mediterranean diet protects against Alzheimer’s, because it is anti-inflammatory. As I wrote in Healthy Aging, inflammation in the brain precedes the tangles of filaments within nerve cells and accumulation of protein plaques outside them that identifies Alzheimer’s disease. Anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, and turmeric, a powerful anti-inflammatory agent is also protective.

In any case, it makes sense to eat this way, because the Mediterranean diet also reduces risks of heart disease, heart attack, high blood pressure, obesity, and a number of types of cancer.

In the same issue of the Archives of Neurology, researchers from Sweden published findings that taking omega-3 fatty acids appears to slow cognitive decline among patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. No such benefit was found among people with more advanced disease.

Andrew Weil, M.D.