What is Mind Diet? Study shows how it is linked to better focus in school-aged children

A recent study suggests that a diet designed to help prevent cognitive decline in adults may also help boost attention in teens. Future nutrition programs aimed at enhancing children’s cognition may benefit from the findings.

The new study looked at two dietary patterns: the heart-healthy Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND) diet, which combines a Mediterranean diet with the heart-healthy dietary approach to stopping hypertension (DASH) diet, and the Healthy Eating Index – 2015 (HEI-2015), which is based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

“We assessed how adherence to these diets was associated with children’s attentional inhibition — the ability to resist distracting stimuli — and found that only the MIND diet was positively associated with children’s performance on a task assessing attentional inhibition,” said Shelby Key, PhD, who worked as a doctoral student in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and will be an assistant professor there this fall.

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“This suggests that the MIND diet may have the potential to improve children’s cognitive development, which is important for success in school.” Key will present the findings at Nutrition 2023, the annual flagship meeting of the American Society for Nutrition, held July 22-25 in Boston.

Like DASH and the Mediterranean diet on which it is based, the MIND diet emphasizes fresh fruits, vegetables and legumes such as beans, lentils and peas. However, it also includes recommendations for specific foods, such as leafy greens and berries, that promote brain health. Although the MIND diet has been shown to have positive effects in adults, very few studies have been done in children.

The new research used data collected in a previous cross-sectional study led by Naiman Khan, PhD, professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The study’s 85 participants ranged in age from 7 to 11 and completed seven-day dietary records, from which the researchers calculated HEI-2015 and MIND dietary scores.

To assess attentional inhibition, participants also completed a task that requires spatial attention and executive control, with their reaction time and accuracy recorded. Children with neurological disorders such as ADHD or autism were excluded from the study to reduce confounding factors.

The researchers found that MIND diet scores, but not HEI-2015 scores, were positively related to study participants’ accuracy on the task, meaning that study participants who followed the MIND diet better performed better on the task. The researchers caution that although the study shows an association, an intervention study would be necessary to draw any causal conclusions.

Next, the researchers would like to study the relationship between the MIND diet and attention in younger children, including preschool-age and younger children, to determine whether there are differences based on age and whether any developmental effects are involved.