doudou's Healthy Living Hall

The most practical way to prevent dementia is a balanced "Mediterranean diet."

Eat an orange every day, can you reduce the rate of dementia?
A friend turned from LINE to an animation: "Love is a blessing for oranges." The film says that a citrus every day can reduce the rate of dementia by 23%. My friend asked me if it was true. I decided to use an article to answer her.

. Research from Japan

I first surfed the Internet and read the paper published by the Tohoku University in Japan in the April 2007 issue of the British Journal of Nutrition: Tracking 13,373 people in the city of Osaki, who are over 65 years old, Seven months later, it was found that people who ate citrus every day had a 23% less chance of dementia than those who ate less than twice a week.

Japan is rich in citrus, so there are citrus research, and other local materials, similar observational epidemiological studies, and small-scale clinical trials, such as: green tea, red wine, curry, oyster mushrooms, grapes, strawberries, cherries The main basis of the juice, blueberry juice and chocolate is that these foods contain flavonoids with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.

There are many types of flavonoids, such as: citrus peel with nobiletin, cherry and blueberry with anthocyanin, curry with curcumin, green tea with catechin (EGCG), and red wine with grapes There are resveratrol, which are flavonoid-rich fruits.

Some researchers have also found in animal experiments that nobiletin and curcumin can enhance the memory of mice and reduce the amount of starch in the brain of mice, and "the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain" is Alzheimer's disease. One of the main lesions.

Food and dementia are not 100% related
However, epidemiological studies can only say that foods such as citrus are related to dementia, but they are not 100% absolute and cannot be directly interpreted as causality. Moreover, the questionnaires were adopted by the participants on the intake of the food, which was difficult to be accurate based on the memory of the participants and the estimation of the researchers.

In addition, even if animal experiments show that a certain food can strengthen the memory of mice, or reduce the starch-like content in the brain of mice, people, after all, are different from other animals and do not necessarily have the same effect in humans.

Curcumin prevents dementia? Inconclusive
To demonstrate the efficacy of a drug to prevent a disease, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase III clinical trial must be used, but food is difficult to achieve.

The so-called "double-blind" is that participants and evaluators (often doctors) do not know that participants are taking drugs or placebos. In the drug trial, it is easy to make a placebo with the same appearance as the drug, but the food knows at a glance that it is difficult to design a placebo with the same appearance and taste as the food. Moreover, participants are required to eat certain amounts of food every day for several months during the trial period, not only ethically, but probably no one will participate.

However, if the active ingredients of the food can be extracted and made into capsules, clinical trials are feasible. A paper from the University of California, Los Angeles, published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry in 2008, forty-five 51-84 years old with mild cognitive impairment or no dementia Participants were randomly assigned to two groups: one group was taking 180 mg of active curcumin daily, and the other was taking placebo daily. After one and a half years, the memory and concentration of the curcumin group improved significantly, but the placebo group did not change. However, the number of subjects in this study is small, so it is not yet conclusive.

Mediterranean diet to prevent dementia, the most convincing
Although the drug development for the treatment and prevention of Alzheimer's disease has been very vigorous, but there has not been a breakthrough, so many people turn to the diet to seek solutions. In fact, the most convincing and practical is the balanced "Mediterranean diet", that is: eat more fruits and vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts and olive oil, eat fish, dairy products, red wine and a small amount of meat products in moderation. .

Diet is not only for health, but also a kind of enjoyment, eating the food you like, how satisfied and happy! As for the "flavonoids" we discussed at the outset, in fact, the anti-oxidant flavonoids are widely found in fruits and vegetables, so as long as you like, you can eat anything, local and seasonal production is better.