The Dementia Free Diet?

The TLDR of our Research Video Summary:

• Research on the Greek island of Ikaria, a "blue zone" known for longevity, found remarkably low rates of dementia.
• The Ikarian diet, a "Mediterranean diet on steroids," is rich in diverse teas (including herbal and root teas), wild greens/weeds, and coffee.
• This reinforces existing knowledge about the benefits of antioxidant-rich foods and plant-forward diets for both physical and cognitive health, suggesting varied plant consumption as a potential strategy against cognitive decline.

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Transcript:

Good afternoon everyone, Dr. Wells here from St. Augustine Beach. Hope you're having a great day. I got some new research updates.

This one isn't going to be as much of a research update as some of the other ones. I figured a nice light-hearted article might be nice. So this one actually I read in the New York Post.

So it's not a peer-reviewed research article, but it's more of a a nice kind of article to read about. But many of you might be familiar with the author Dan Buechner. He writes a lot about blue and he also has commented a lot on sauna use and overall his big focus that was on blue zones.

And those are places where people live extraordinarily large, but long lives, but very high quality lives. And so a lot of his work is out of the Mediterranean and Costa Rica and things. This specific article was focused on a specific area in the Greek islands called the Icarians.

Specifically what he notices the Icarians had almost no reports of dementia. As you know in the United States and a lot of western societies, dementia is on the rise. Cognitive decline is on the rise.

Part of why we think that is it's multifactorial, right? There's not just one cause. We know there's vascular dimensions. We know that there are also dimensions related to heavy metal exposure.

We also know that there may be a pre-genetic disposition towards developing some diseases like Alzheimer's. But interestingly enough, this researcher found the Icarian diet really yielded some strong results. And what was that diet? It was effectively a Mediterranean diet.

However, he called it a Mediterranean diet on steroids. What does that mean? Well he drank, they drank a lot of different teas, specifically teas that were made from different herbs and roots and even weeds. They consumed a lot of weeds, a lot of grassy, leafy vegetables.

And the other thing they did is consume a lot of coffee. So again, antioxidant-rich foods. This data is not surprising.

The Harvard Healthy Eating Index talked about this years ago. Consuming tea and coffee daily can help, as well as a plant-forward diet, which we've talked about in our peer-reviewed evidence-based continuing education courses for physical therapists, right? How that plant-forward Mediterranean-style diet is beneficial not only for the heart, but also for the mind. And in the end, it's not earth-shattering or shocking, but it's a nice, refreshing article and something that maybe we should encourage some of our patients, maybe not to go in their yard and eat their own weeds, but to look at how we should be eating a more varied diet and trying different vegetables and fruits on a daily basis.

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