Give up the Mediterranean diet! An eating plan from another region of the world is generating a lot of excitement for its health benefits.
According to a new study, the Japanese diet, rich in fish, tea and soy, may protect the brain against shrinkage and may therefore reduce the risk of dementia.
Researchers at Japan’s National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology performed brain scans on two groups of Japanese people who ate different diets.
One group followed a traditional Japanese diet while the other followed a Western diet, full of high-fat foods such as red meat, alcohol and pasta.
Fish is a popular protein source in Japan, as an island nation, it has it in abundance.
Green tea is traditional in the Japanese diet.
The scans were performed twice over the course of two years, with the goal of determining how much brain tissue each group lost over time.
They found that women in the Japanese diet group had, on average, lower levels of brain atrophy, or shrinkage, characteristic of dementia, than women on a Westernized diet.
This finding comes after increased attention was paid to Japan’s lifestyle as it was revealed to contain one of the world’s five ‘blue zones’.– regions with lower rates of chronic diseases and higher life expectancies than the rest of the world.
Only 6.7 percent of people over 65 living in Okinawa Prefecture in Japan develop dementia according to Dan Buettnerauthor of ‘The Blue Zones Solution’.
That’s about half the rate in the United States, which is about 11.3 percent.
What distinguishes blue zones from the rest of the world are the lifestyles of the people who live there, which includes their diet. Other regions that stood out were Greece, Costa Rica and Italy.
“Eating a traditional Japanese diet may also be beneficial for brain health, and better than the typical Western diet,” said study authors Shu Zhang, a nutritional epidemiology researcher at the National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology in Japan, and Giovanni Sala, psychology professor. at the University of Liverpool he wrote for the conversation. Was published in the Nutrition Diary in March.
Seaweed, or nori, appears in dishes and as a snack in the Japanese diet.
Yuzu is a popular citrus fruit that researchers highlight in the Japanese diet
As a whole, Japan actually has a higher dementia rate than the United States, despite Okinawa’s bright spot.
For example, as last officially measured in 2014, the national dementia rate in people over 65 was 15 percent in Japan, and 11 percent In the USA.
This could have to do with the fact that Japan has the highest proportion of elderly people in the world: they represent approximately 29.1 percent of the total population of the country. In the United States, older people represent approximately 17.3 percent of the population.
The study authors defined a traditional Japanese diet based on fish, shellfish, rice, soy, green tea, citrus fruits, pickles, mushrooms and seaweed. In comparison, the Western diet contained refined carbohydrates such as noodles, high-fat foods, soft drinks and alcohol.
The Japanese diet is generally believed to be protective because it is rich in vitamins, polyphenols, phytochemicals, and good fatty acids, all of which can help the body fight inflammation.
Avoiding long-term inflammation can help lubricate the brain and keep its neurons functioning in the long term, the study authors wrote.
The authors of the study highlighted shitake mushrooms
Japanese pickles are made with more salt than vinegar
To investigate these effects versus other diets, the study examined 1,636 Japanese adults between 40 and 89 years old. The authors gave them a disposable camera to take pictures of their meals and asked them to keep a food diary documenting everything they ate and drank. .
They also noted a genetic history and noted other lifestyle factors, such as smoking habits, physical activity, and existing health conditions. This way, they were able to adjust the data to make sure that the differences they saw at the end of the study were caused by changes in diet, not other factors.
Over the two-year period, 589 participants ate a traditional Japanese diet, 697 participants ate a traditional Western diet, and 350 people ate a primarily plant-based diet.
The final, and most crucial, aspect of their study was performing regular brain scans, called MRIs, on the participants. They were monitoring each participant’s loss of brain tissue, known clinically as age-related brain atrophy, because it is a marker of dementia, the authors wrote.
In conclusion, the authors found that women who followed a Japanese diet had significantly less brain shrinkage than women who followed a Western diet. There were no differences between the two groups for men.
“Interestingly, this effect was only apparent in women,” Zhu wrote.
The authors provide two possible explanations for this effect. One, the Japanese diet is full of magnesium and phytoestrogens, which have a greater protective effect in women than in men.
Steamed rice is a common accompaniment to the Japanese diet.
Phytoestrogens They are compounds similar to the female sex hormone estrogen, found mainly in plants and are sometimes called plant estrogens.
Previous research from the Institute for Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease Research supports this idea and states that increasing the intake of plant estrogens could help women fight the cumulative effects of stress on the body.
Second, the authors found that men were more likely than women to deviate from the traditional Japanese diet. They then ate more Western foods, such as noodles and sake, which could mean they would have seen fewer protective effects of the Japanese diet.
Regardless, there are particular parts of the Japanese diet that they recommend incorporating, which are seen in other Blue Zone diets. These include increasing consumption of vegetables and fish and reducing consumption of red meat, the authors wrote.
“Adopting elements of the traditional Japanese diet and including foods such as fish, seafood, soy, miso, seaweed, and shiitake mushrooms may not only help improve cognitive function but also overall health,” they stated.