Diet for the Mind

In Beating the Dementia Monster, we discussed the MIND diet.  Research had found reduced incidence of AD among people who followed the Mediterranean and DASH diets, and the MIND diet was said to be an improvement on these.  In fact, in my post of March 6, 2019, I cited research that found no cognitive improvement with the Mediterranean and DASH diets, but improvement with the MIND diet.  But I have never gone back to the source when speaking to the MIND diet.  (I have, however, been following the MIND diet myself for about two years.)

This weekend, I finally read Dr. Martha Clare Morris's book, Diet for the Mind.  It was Morris who created the MIND diet to explicitly include nutrients known to support brain function.  In her book she describes the thought processes that went into its development and discusses the research that led to her formulation.  The second half of the book was devoted to recipes developed by her daughter.  The book answered a lot of my questions about the diet and the logic behind its composition.

One thing I wondered about was her exclusion of red meat, since I understood from the Wikipedia and Dr. Mark Hyman's book, Food: What the heck should I eat, that saturated fat, especially saturated fat from red meat, had been effectively ruled out as a nutrition issue.  Hyman had cited several studies that discounted cardiovascular risk due to intake of saturated fat.  But Morris cited research that claimed the opposite. She called one of the most important studies "seriously flawed."  So the MIND diet rules out red meat and keeps saturated fat to a bare minimum.  Hyman, nevertheless, discourages meat consumption in general.

Morris points out that her diet is the subject of a large study intended to definitively establish the place of the MIND diet as an effective weapon in the battle against neuro-degenerative diseases.  Is it a game-changer?  Results are due out in April 2021.