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The plan eliminates processed foods containing sugar, excess salt and refined vegetable oils (including canola, safflower and corn) that our ancestors didn’t eat. These types of foods contribute to weight gain and are linked to heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure.
New findings from a long-term diet trial show a positive effect on brain health.
Switching to a Green Mediterranean Diet positively affects brain health, according to new research from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Weight loss attenuated brain aging in a sub-study of the DIRECT-PLUS trial.
DIRECT PLUS was a large-scale, long-term clinical trial over 18 months among 300 participants.
The sub-study was conducted by Prof. Galia Avidan of the Department of Psychology and Dr. Gidon Levakov, a former graduate student at the Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences.
Their findings were published recently in the scientific journal eLife.
The larger study was led by Prof. Iris Shai of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, an adjunct Professor from the Harvard School of Public Health and an honorary professor at the University of Leipzig, Germany, along with her former graduate student Dr. Alon Kaplan, and colleagues from Harvard and Leipzig Universities.
Obesity is linked with the brain aging faster than would normally be expected. Researchers can capture this process by calculating a person’s ‘brain age’ – how old their brain appears on detailed scans, regardless of chronological age. This approach also helps to check how certain factors, such as lifestyle, can influence brain aging over relatively short time scales.
Levakov, Kaplan, Shai, and Avidan studied 102 individuals who met the criteria for obesity. The participants received a brain scan at the beginning and the end of the program; more tests and measurements were also conducted at these times to capture other biological processes affected by obesity, such as liver health.
They used the brain scans taken at the start and end of the study to examine the impact of the lifestyle intervention on the aging trajectory. The results revealed that a reduction in body weight of 1% led to the participants’ brain age being almost 9 months younger than the expected brain age after 18 months. This attenuated aging was associated with changes in other biological measures, such as decreased liver fat and liver enzymes. Increases in liver fat and production of specific liver enzymes were previously shown to negatively affect brain health in
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