The MIND diet — which is intended to guard against dementia, and is rich in fruits and veggies and low in saturated fats — has no short-term brain benefits beyond those seen in people who follow a standard, “suboptimal” diet, a three-year trial suggests.
The trial’s results, published Tuesday (July 18) in The New England Journal of Medicine, showed that participants who followed the MIND diet for three years showed slight improvements in their overall cognition, as measured with a dozen tests. However, those mental improvements were not statistically different from those seen in people who followed their usual diets.
A subset of people from both the MIND and standard diet groups also underwent brain scans, which revealed that their brains changed in the same ways over the three-year period, regardless of the diet they followed.
Dispatches From The Front 