The MIND Diet Plan for Brain-Healthy Patient Education
Put your patients on the MIND Diet Plan to guide them through a practical brain-healthy eating plan that will help reduce the risk of cognitive decline and/or dementia.
What is MIND?
MIND is an acronym for the Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay. It’s a combination of the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet with a goal of creating dietary habits that have a focus on brain health. The research shows that eating certain foods and avoiding others on this diet slows brain aging by 7.5 years and lessens the risk of cognitive decline and dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.
The MIND diet was published in 2015 in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia by Dr. Martha Clare Morris. The study performed by Dr. Morris and her colleagues follows 758 dementia-free participants who kept diligent food diaries for 4.5 years. They divided foods into 10 brain-healthy food groups and 5 brain-unhealthy ones. Participants’ diets were assessed weekly with a MIND diet score — a tally of brain healthy and unhealthy foods consumed.
Those with the highest MIND diet score, eating more brain healthy and less brain unhealthy foods, had a 53% reduction in Alzheimer’s risk. Those that did not follow the guidelines rigorously — meaning they ate a lot less brain healthy foods — still had a significantly reduced risk of Alzheimer’s of 35%.
How Can a Diet Help the Brain?
Our brains tend to function the best when receiving the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants that it needs to remain well nourished and protected against oxidative stress, which is an imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants in your body.
If our brains are deprived of good quality nutrition and fueled with diets high in refined sugar or other harmful substances instead, they can be greatly damaged which results in negative effects. What we eat directly affects the structure and function of your brain and, ultimately, your mood.
This is why it’s important that your patients are following a brain-healthy diet, especially if they are at risk of cognitive decline and/or dementia, or if they just want to get a head start on protecting their brain. Research has found that the foods that are best for your brain are the same as those that protect your heart and blood vessels. Nutritionists have also emphasized that a great strategy to follow is a dietary pattern that incorporates fruit, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains while getting protein from plant sources and fish. Healthy fats such as olive oil should also be chosen over saturated fats.
What Are the Guidelines for This Plan?
The principles of this diet are simple and are similar to those of the Mediterranean and DASH diets. The MIND diet encourages loading up on vegetables, berries, healthy protein sources, and choosing healthier types of fat over saturated fats and hydrogenated oils (trans fats), both of which have been associated with many different diseases, including heart disease and even Alzheimer’s.
Here’s an overview of what the diet looks like:
What to Eat:
- Green, leafy vegetables
- All other vegetables
- Berries
- Nuts
- Olive oil
- Whole grains
- Beans
- Fish
- Poultry
- Wine (primarily red, no more than one glass daily)
What to Avoid:
- Butter and margarine
- Full fat cheeses
- Red meat
- Fried food
- Pastries and sweets
All of the foods to avoided are higher in saturated and trans fats. The plan also includes more in-depth information on each food for your patients to educate them on why each one is good or bad.
While exercise is not technically part of the diet, the diet will also emphasize the importance of regular physical activity. Fitting regular exercise into everyday life will allow your patients to achieve the maximum results throughout the MIND diet. Physical activity increases blood flow to all parts of the body, including the brain, so it’s important to keep it moving.
BodySite’s MIND diet also goes into detail on the 6 pillars of brain health: physical activity, food & nutrition, medical health, sleep & relaxation, mental fitness, and social interaction. Each pillar is equally important to brain health and should be kept in mind throughout the daily lives of your patients.
What’s Inside the Plan?
Guiding your patients through new eating habits and lifestyles can be difficult, and it can definitely be a chore to collect all of the needed information.
Fortunately, their program will provide them with daily recipes, guidance, videos, and tasks in order to help them transition to the MIND Diet made specially for them. This way, they can maintain their brain-healthy eating plan even after the 28 days are up.
Each day, their program will start with some helpful tips for maintaining and improving their brain health that they can follow throughout their everyday lives. Here is an example:
These are intended to keep your patients motivated to use these tips and ideas that will help them maintain a brain-healthy lifestyle during and after the MIND Diet Plan. Patients can take in the information provided and use it throughout their daily lives.
Their daily motivation or tips are then followed by daily tasks that will keep them on a healthy, grounded schedule throughout their plan. Here is an example:
These tasks encourage patients to make sure they are tracking the food and metrics that need to be tracked in order to keep you updated with their progress. On certain days, the daily tasks are followed by daily messages, which are educational videos that have to do with the topic of that day.
Following these tasks/daily messages are the daily recipes with instructions that your patients will follow. They are provided with a shopping list for each week so that they never miss a day of good meals. Here is an example:
Each day provides this content for your patients and are a great help when it comes to easily adjusting to their new lifestyle.
Why the MIND Diet?
We recognize that some doctors and some patients may need individualized approaches to wellness plans, so that’s why our MIND Diet as well as our 60+ other remote care programs are all customizable using our content management system, if you choose to modify the program.
Their program will also come with access to a complete remote patient monitoring web portal and app for iPhone and Android. Patients will be able to track their progress, keep a journal, and follow your prescribed program materials everyday with ease, all while making the process of health monitoring much easier for you.
Use the MIND Diet today and help your patients experience the benefits that this eating style has on their brain, including a reduced risk of cognitive decline/dementia. If you’re not already using the BodySite remote care platform, you can sign up for a free trial at this link. If you’re already a member, check out the MIND Diet today!
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