Doctor names 3 foods that can treat and prevent dementia and depression

Doctor names 3 foods that can treat and prevent dementia and depression They're all basic foods you can buy in any supermarket. Leading science, food and health experts have named foods that can potentially both treat and prevent dementia, depression and other mental health issues. And far from being obscure, expensive or difficult to find, these are foods readily available in all supermarkets. Prof Felice Jacka and Prof Tim Spector were discussing the impact food can have on brain health. Prof Jacka said some people with depression can be successfully treated by changing their diet and that studies have shown links between improved brain health and diet. Conversely, they also said that eating too much unhealthy food let to negative changes in the brain. Prof Jacka is a leading researcher of nutritional psychiatry, a new field of study that looks at the role of diet in mental and brain health. She is also the co-director of the Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University in Australia and president of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research. She has a doctorate in philosophy. Prof Spector is a former GP, one of the world's most-cited scientists, co-founder of the Zoe science and nutrition firm and a professor at King’s College London. Prof Spector said: "We now know that if you improve your diet significantly from the poor diet that most people with brain disorders are on., that will shift your gut microbes [which] can produce these healthy chemicals... or anti-inflammatory compounds... and these then have effects on the brain and can improve a lot of the symptoms." He added: "The effects of a healthy diet on brain symptoms are not trivial. We're seeing effects that are bigger than you would get with starting an anti-depressant, on average. We know that some people do well on anti-depressants but many people don't." The first food named was yoghurt. Prof Jacka said she ran a trial (in partnership with a large dairy company) involving 40 healthy women in which those who were given yoghurt saw improvements in brain function and in the production of chemicals in the body which "help to protect the brain". The next was fermented foods. Fermented foods cover a wide range of foods but some commonly-referenced ones are sauerkraut, kefir, kombucha and kimchi, as well as yoghurt and cheese. Prof Spector said a trial involving 6,000 people showed that 50% of them who started eating fermented foods "showed an improvement in mood and energy". Next was whole grains. Prof Jacka said: "Whole grains come up again and again and again as the strongest correlate of better health outcomes, whether it's physical health or mental health. Things like oats (not the really processed ones), barley, rye, spelt, quinoa, these types of things." The link between food and the brain Prof Spector says food has a major impact on the gut microbiome, which in turn has an effect on the brain. He said: "A healthy brain is one that has hardly any inflammation in it. It's getting the right signals from the rest of the body. It gets its main signals from the gut. The gut gets its healthy signals if it's eating the right foods and the microbes are converting that into the right chemicals. "So that, I think, to me is the crucial link and I think... we're getting this consistent message that we have to look after our guts if we're going to look after our brains. And it's not just limited to depression and anxiety — everything I've looked at, every mental health disorder, has an element that you can link back to gut and diet or inflammation." How do ultra-processed foods affect the brain? Prof Jacka said: "We hypothesise that there's something about the actual processing itself that might be problematic. We published this huge umbrella review a couple of years ago in the British Medical Journal, created news all over the world, showing that 70% of the health outcomes that we studied were linked to a higher intake of ultra-processed foods, with particularly strong evidence for... any cause of death, for heart and diabetes diseases and common mental disorders."