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Transcript:
Aging, Innovation & The Mind - A New Series from Baycrest
Dr. Carol Greenwood, Senior Scientist, Baycrest:
My main interest is really trying to look at the relationship between diet, nutrition and brain health. So we are really interested in trying to understand what is it about our diet that may increase our risk of cognitive loss as we age, or more optimistically, what it is we can do at a proactive level in terms of helping to retain our brain health with diet as one of the main interventions.
We were really the first to show that the average North American diet, if consumed in middle age, can contribute to cognitive decline.
When we first started doing this work, people were arguing that the brain was insensitive to diet after development, so that we didn't have to worry about brain function after we were about seven or eight years of age. At that age, we had all our brain tissue there and after that the brain was protected.
So, not only was our data showing that no, this is not true, not only does our brain continue to be sensitive to diet, but it was also saying that the types of eating patterns that were traditional in North America, particularly high fat, high meat, low in fruits and vegetables, were contributing to cognitive decline.
I think what's really interesting when you start to look at the issues around nutrition and brain health is to recognize that those issues change dramatically as we move throughout a life-span.
So, for instance, when we are in our fifties and sixties, that's when we can be most proactive in terms of changing our lifestyle. We need to do what we can so that we are setting ourselves up for healthy brain aging.
So the focus at that point really needs to be on maintaining our body weight, doing what we can to prevent heart-disease and diabetes because those are adverse for brain function. That needs to be our focus.
As we get into our senior years, we need to start shifting the way we think about nutrition. The main thing is that we shouldn't be trying to lose weight.
I think a lot of it is that as we get older is that we are more likely to lose muscle than to lose fat and that can contribute to frailty.
So what we need to do in our fifties and sixties is to get ourselves into a healthy body-weight range.
Once we get into our seventies and beyond, we need to focus on retaining that body weight rather than trying to move it upwards or downwards.
One of the problems that we often have when offering nutritional advice is that people are looking for easy answers
Brain nutrition is about diet patterns, not about specific foods.
They want to know whether a nutritional supplement is good, whether a particular food is good.
I think the answer to that is more complex.
What we know in terms of looking at some longitudinal studies of seniors and seniors that are aging well in terms of retaining their cognitive function is that we can describe their diet.
Their diet is high in fruits and vegetables. They are not eating a lot of animal fat, so that even if they are eating meat, they are taking lean cuts. We know that this diet pattern is very healthy.
So it is true that you will read in the newspaper that blueberries are healthy, and yes, blueberries are healthy. But so are raspberries and strawberries and all sorts of other kinds of fruits and vegetables.
I would argue that the important thing is to take advantage of the cornucopia of food available in North America and eat as wide a variety as you possibly can, rather than trying to focus on individual foods.
Baycrest
Baycrest is a magnificent place to work. I am coming from a discipline where there are not a lot of people in nutrition that are working in cognitive health.
I am in an environment where everybody around me is bringing different forms of expertise as it relates to trying to sustain and maintain brain function as we age.
It is that interdisciplinary, collaborative nature of the environment here that makes it so fruitful in terms of the research.
So I can work with cognitive psychologists so that I know that my work, while I can describe nutrition interventions, is grounded in cognitive psychology, because I work with that expertise on a daily basis. So I think it is the breadth, the collaborative nature.
Then, there is the expertise of the people here. We have some of the best people in the world doing cognitive psychology at Baycrest.
It is such a privilege to come in now as someone from a different discipline and be able to play with those people and work with them on a daily basis.
To raise good cholesterol, the American Heart Association recommends exercising regularly, eliminating trans fats, reducing all fats, especially saturated fats, and consuming monounsaturated fats, such as olive, canola and peanut oils.
Add just 7 to 9 walnuts a day to an otherwise healthy diet. It should help older people improve the cognitive, motor and behavioral skills effected by dementias such as Alzheimer's.
