Eating breakfast every morning is an extremely important habit as you age. Eating breakfast on a regular basis can help lower your risk of heart disease while skipping breakfast can contribute to higher cholesterol and increased mortality.
Along with these effects, it’s also been found that breakfast can enormously affect how quickly your brain ages as you get older. And while it’s crucial to make sure you’re eating breakfast regularly and not skipping out on this important meal, there’s also value in what you’re eating for breakfast as well.
To learn more, we talked with Amy Goodson, MS, RD, CSSD, LD author of The Sports Nutrition Playbook and member of our Expert Medical Board. According to Goodson, one of the worst breakfast habits that ages your brain is eating too much saturated fat and added sugar. This is why she suggests following the guidelines of the MIND Diet.
“The MIND Diet is a brain-healthy diet that stands for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, and it’s a blend of the DASH Diet and Mediterranean Diet that focuses on food groups that can help boost your brainpower and protect it from age-related problems like Alzheimer’s disease,” says Goodson.
Read on to learn more about how eating foods on the MIND diet for breakfast can help your brain health, and for more healthy eating tips check out Best Eating Habits to Have if You’re Over 50.
The MIND diet encourages people to avoid processed foods and red meat while eating plenty of vegetables (especially leafy greens), fruit, legumes, beans, whole grains, and fish, while allowing for poultry products. This way of eating has been proven to help with cognitive performance in elderly populations and is known for providing your brain with crucial nutrients as you age in order to help prevent age-related cognitive decline or illnesses.
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So how can someone follow the MIND diet at breakfast time? For starters, Goodson suggests avoiding a couple of specific items when you can.
“The goal is to eat fewer saturated fat foods and foods with added sugars, and at breakfast time that means cutting out bacon, high-fat breakfast sandwiches like those with higher fat meats on croissants and biscuits, as well as pastries that are loaded with added sugar. So, skip the crepe, scone, muffin, and breakfast bread.”
And if you’re looking for delicious breakfast foods that fit the MIND way of eating, you have plenty of options!
“Being MIND-ful at breakfast means adding berries to your high-fiber oatmeal, scrambling veggies (specifically dark green leafy veggies) into your omelet with reduced-fat cheese, or adding nuts to your whole grain cereal,” says Goodson.
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