One of today’s most pressing topics in the health and wellness community is brain health, and there’s a lot of advice flying around on the best ways to take care of it.
As it turns out, one of the most efficient ways you can take good care of your brain is to feed and fuel it with good things, like clean, nutritious foods and beverages. In addition to that, it’s also best to avoid things that can harm your brain, over time, subsequently hurting essential functions like your memory. Using information from health experts, we’ve compiled a list of four foods that can easily accelerate brain aging and memory decline. Read more about them below.
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1. White Bread
Although eating a few slices of white sandwich bread every once in a while isn't going to do much damage, frequently keeping it in your diet can do more damage than you think. White bread is known as one of the least healthy versions of bread, as it's a refined carbohydrate that's been stripped of its beneficial nutrients.
"Refined carbohydrates may also affect the gut-brain axis and cause inflammation in the body, including the brain," noted health experts at Healthline. "These effects have been shown to affect your ability to think and increase the risk of anxiety and depression."
2. Frozen Meals
Frozen dinners you see in the freezer aisle at the grocery store are tempting to pick up, as they're often flavorful, full of yummy ingredients like pasta or fried proteins, and are super easy to make. After all, it can be a lot more convenient to heat up a frozen dinner versus cook something from scratch on a bad day. However, these meals are often examples of "ultra-processed foods," which are notorious for hurting various aspects of your health.
"People who eat diets high in ultra-processed foods, such as packaged cereals, frozen meals, and sweets, may have a higher chance of feeling depressed and anxious than those who eat fewer of these foods—and they may also have an increased risk of cognitive decline," wrote researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health.
3. Margarine
There is a lot of misconception out there that butter is one of the worst foods you can eat. While it is very high in fat, which can be dangerous for your health in large quantities, its alternative, margarine, isn't super great for you either. Margarine is typically made from seed or vegetable oils, and, as Dr. Janine Bowring, a naturopathic doctor, says, "has a lot of those trans fats."
Consuming large quantities of foods that are heavy in trans fats can easily harm your cognitive function and slow you down.
4. Sugary Drinks
If you struggle to get through a day without a fix of some kind of full-sugar soda or juice, you might want to reconsider and swap it for something cleaner. While a soda is fine in moderation, consistently drinking beverages that are high in refined sugar won't just add inches to your waist, but can also hurt your brain.
"By damaging metabolic health, messing with the brain's vascular system, and increasing inflammation, it's no wonder that a higher consumption of SSBs (sugar-sweetened beverages) is linked to a higher risk for dementia," Dr. Austin Perlmutter wrote for Psychology Today. "Right now, there are over 50 million people with dementia, and that number is slated to hit over 150 million in the next few decades. If cutting back on SSBs could offset even a fraction of this, we really need to be taking this seriously."
