MIND diet could improve child cognitive function

Key takeaways:

• The MIND diet was originally designed to assist adults with cognitive improvement.
• Adherence to the diet resulted in better cognitive function among children.

A diet for adults that emphasizes certain foods with neuroprotective benefits may also be beneficial for children, a study presented at Nutrition 2023 found.

The Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND) diet is a dietary pattern that encourages adults to consume foods, such as vegetables, nuts, berries, beans, whole grains, fish, poultry, olive oil and red wine while avoiding red meats, butter and stick margarine, cheeses, pastries and sweets, and fried or fast food, for the purpose of maintaining brain health as one ages.

At least one study in recent years has shown that adherence to the diet has been associated with a 54% reduction in Alzheimer’s disease incidence.

“Recent work regarding the MIND diet has come out in the older adult literature where they speculate it may be protective against cognitive decline,” Shelby Keye, PhD, an assistant professor in the department of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as of this fall, told Healio.

Keye worked on the study while a doctoral student at Urbana-Champaign, alongside colleagues in the school’s nutrition laboratory under the direction of fellow author Naiman Khan, PhD. She said the lab has examined “diet as well as certain nutrients' relationship with cognitive function in children and adults for a few years.”

“We were interested in the other side of the age spectrum and wanted to take a developmental perspective,” Keye said. “Therefore we decided to look at whether or not better adherence to the MIND diet was associated with better attentional inhibition skills in school-aged children.”

In the cross-sectional study, 85 children ranging from age 7 to 11 years kept 7-day diet records, from which researchers calculated a MIND diet score and a healthy eating index (HEI) score, which Keye describes as “an index of one's adherence to the dietary guidelines for Americans.”

“They also completed a cognitive task called the flanker task that requires an upregulation of attentional and inhibitory control,” Keye said. “We then assessed whether either diet was related to better performance on the flanker task, via accuracy and reaction time.”

Ultimately, the researchers found that a child’s MIND diet score was related to better accuracy on the task, whereas HEI scores were not.

“We were a bit surprised that HEI did not relate to flanker task performance as other studies in children have shown these are related,” Keye said. “Although, we did expect for the MIND diet to be associated with their performance [because] the purpose of the diet surrounds better cognitive health.”

Because of the diet’s emphasis on foods such as dark leafy greens and berries has shown to be related to better cognition, “it’s possible that if children have a diet high in these foods, [they] may have better cognitive development,” Keye said, although she did caution that intervention and longitudinal studies would be necessary to truly answer that question.

“There is certainly a need for a dietary intervention in children to understand if the MIND diet is truly improving children's cognitive development,” Keye said. “The work regarding [the] MIND diet has been centered around the aging population, but it is worth consideration in children as they grow and develop. It would be useful to know what dietary pattern can maximize a child's cognitive development as this can inform future dietary guidelines.”

References:

Keye, et al. MIND diet pattern is selectively associated with attentional control in preadolescent children. Presented at: NUTRITION; July 22-25, 2023.

MIND diet linked with better focus in school-aged children. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/995511?. Published July 23, 2023. Accessed July 24, 2023.