As many as 6.5 million Americans have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The number, enormous to say the least, increases if we consider dementia more generally which, according to statistics, affects 1 in 10 Americans over 65 in the United States and currently around 1.2 million people in Italy: in practice more than the entire population of Naples.
Attention: dementia is not a specific disease, but a biological “condition” characterized by cognitive decline, or reduced ability to remember, process thoughts and activate decision-making processes, which affects everyday life.
The causes of dementia, understood as cognitive decline, are multiple and interconnected but a study conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and validated and published by the prestigious journal JAMA Neurology, certifies that some foods contribute to increasing the risk .
Foods to blow your mind
The research published in Jama Neurology involved a sample of 10,775 people, men and women, with an average age of 51 years, whose eating habits were followed for 10 years and the changes in cognitive abilities over time were evaluated, through specific questionnaires and tests. The team was thus able to establish that those who took about a third or more of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods recorded the greatest cognitive decline: in a 2000-calorie diet, this means about 600 calories a day from “junk food”.
Ultraprocessed foods
For Brazilian researchers, if more than 20% of the daily caloric intake is made up of ultra-processed foods, the risk of senile dementia increases significantly. In practice, according to the definition of the Airc- association for cancer research, it is the “packaged foods ready to be heated or consumed directly, the result of repeated industrial processes“, the same ones who can “create health problems and increase the risk of colon cancer by as much as 30 percent“.
In practice, ultra-processed foods are a vast range of products that we make extensive use of in the Western diet: sugary drinks, snacks, chips, salty and sweet snacks, processed meats. Many ready-to-eat and frozen dishes also fall into the category, including foods that are erroneously considered healthy, such as breakfast cereals or sweet fruit yoghurts, as explained by the Airc which specifies “Recognizing these foods is not always easy, but reading the label on the package can be of great help: if a food has not been processed, the only ingredient is generally the food itself (for example: carrot or apple). If, on the other hand, the list of ingredients gets longer, the probability that this food has been processed or ultra-processed also increases“.
In any case, the problem is not the exception, but the rule, i.e. the habit of consuming daily and even several times a day foods rich in sugars, salt and fats that promote inflammation processes, the source of all metabolic diseases and therefore constitute the real threat to our body, including the brain.
