Researchers at the American Academy of Neurology have discovered a link between certain combinations of foods and an increased risk of developing dementia. It all boils down to yet another condemnation of highly processed meats, but this time they’re aided and abetted in their dietary skullduggery by another class of foods…
Sausages consumed in Buns or beside Potatoes might constitute a perfect
dementia-inducing dietary storm for those who eat them a lot…
We’ve all heard, many times, that consumption of highly processed foods – especially cured Meats – can have a wide range of negative effects on our health. Now, researchers have discovered a link between combinations of highly processed Meats and other foods that can be even worse for your brain.
What they did
Researchers at the American Academy of Neurology wanted to see if there was a link between processed Meats and neurological disorders – specifically dementia.
“There is a complex inter-connectedness of foods in a person’s diet, and it is important to understand how these different connections, or food networks, may affect the brain because diet could be a promising way to prevent dementia,” said Study Author Dr. Cécilia Samieri of the University of Bordeaux in France. “A number of studies have shown that eating a healthier diet, for example a diet rich in green leafy vegetables, berries, nuts, whole grains and fish, may lower a person’s risk of dementia. Many of those studies focused on quantity and frequency of foods. Our study went one step further to look at food networks and found important differences in the ways in which food items were co-consumed in people who went on to develop dementia and those who did not.”
Samieri’s team assembled two groups of people, 209 people with an average age of 78 who had dementia and 418 people, matched for age, sex and educational level, who did not have dementia.
According to an abstract of the study report, participants had completed a food questionnaire five years previously describing what types of food they ate over the year, and how frequently, from less than once a month to more than four times a day. They also had medical checkups every two to three years. Researchers used the data from the food questionnaire to compare what foods were often eaten together by the patients with and without dementia.
What they found
Researchers found that, while there were few differences in the amount of individual foods that people ate, overall food groupings, or networks, differed substantially between people who had dementia and those who did not have dementia.
“We found that more diversity in diet, and greater inclusion of a variety of healthy foods, is related to less dementia,” said Samieri. “In fact, we found differences in food networks that could be seen years before people with dementia were diagnosed. Our findings suggest that studying diet by looking at food networks may help untangle the complexity of diet and biology in health and disease.”
The takeaway
“Processed meats were a ‘hub’ in the food networks of people with dementia,” said Samieri. “People who developed dementia were more likely to combine highly processed meats such as sausages, cured meats and patés with starchy foods like potatoes, alcohol, and snacks like cookies and cakes. This may suggest that frequency with which processed meat is combined with other unhealthy foods, rather than average quantity, may be important for dementia risk. For example, people with dementia were more likely, when they ate processed meat, to accompany it with potatoes and people without dementia were more likely to accompany meat with more diverse foods, including fruit and vegetables and seafood.”
My take
Please note that this study concentrates on people who ate fairly large amounts of highly processed meats frequently. So I’m not going to worry about the odd Ham Sandwich or Sausage Pizza upping my risk of dementia appreciably. Where the connection between dementia and highly processed Meats weighs in heavily, I think, is in folks whose cultural and other dietary influences include a lot of highly processed Meats and Starches. Some Eastern and Central European, and Scandinavian cuisines come immediately to mind.
~ Maggie J.