MIND Diet and Boredom

There are two separate topics for this post -- boredom and the MIND diet.  I'm not bored with the MIND diet.

Boredom is good

In Beating the Dementia Monster, I described how I would sometimes sit on the sofa, completely uninterested in speaking with anyone or engaging in most any activity.  Different thoughts may have been running trough my head, but I wasn't interested in engaging with anyone or any thing.  You would think that this might indicate boredom, but I was definitely not bored.  I was too dulled by the disease to be bored.

That was then, this is now.

Retiring from my engineering and teaching careers has left me with quite a bit of time on my hands.  And so I have been keeping this blog, preparing a new edition of Beating the Dementia Monster, taking pictures, working at the food bank, getting to the gym, reading classics, meeting with friends, maintaining a couple of web sites, and other activities.  But these don't fill all of my time.  So I occasionally become bored, quite bored. At least, nowadays.

It occurred to me the other day that the return of my ability to experience boredom is a relatively recent phenomenon.  It occurred to me that boredom, at least for me, arises out a sort of frustration with a lack of engaging activities.  But if I'm ambivalent about life, I'm not frustrated, and I'm not bored.

It seems to me that the ambivalence I was experiencing before was a product of AD.  Therefore, the more recent tendency to boredom indicates a retreat by the disease.

I don't like being bored, but it looks like the ability to be bored is a very good thing!

More on the MIND diet

In Beating the Dementia Monster I minimized the importance of diet in dealing with AD after reading that some researchers believed that the link between brain health and cognition may simply indicate that people who eat healthy diets also get exercise.  The idea was that research was inadequately controlled for exercise, and exercise is responsible for the better brain health of people with good diets.  I still said that diet was important, but it wasn't anything like the powerful solution that exercise was. 

In my December 17, 2018 post on the FINGR study, I noted the disappointment that a correlation could not be established between either the Mediterranean diet or the DASH diet and improved cognition.  The study acknowledged that there was such a thing as the MIND diet, but it did not evaluate it.  The study is important and seems to be forming a baseline for research on diet and brain health.  It seemed to me that this was helping confirm my minimization of diet as an important solution to AD. 

On March 6 of this year I reported on an Australian study that actually compared cognitive improvement outcomes with the Mediterranean diet and the MIND diet.  The study found no correlation between the Mediterranean diet and brain health, but it did find a surprisingly strong correlation with the MIND diet.  I was surprised, but didn't think much of it initially.

Over the past month I've been thinking about this more and more.  Maybe skipping the butter, cheese, and red meat, then adding all of the blueberries, strawberries, and almonds actually is making a significant difference. 

The University of Washington Alzheimer's Disease Research Center publishes a quarterly magazine, Dimensions.  I will review the current issue in another post, but I want to note a specific article there on diet.  The article discusses the MIND diet, and notes that there is a large study of the MIND diet in progress right now that may more clearly define its true worth in brain health.  It should be completed in April 2021.  Yes, that's a long way off, but maybe this will be the definitive study that answers most of our questions on the relationship between diet and Alzheimer's disease.