Do Gut Changes on the Mediterranean Diet Improve Health and Memory?

The TLDR:

• We know the gut is linked to the brain: but could gut changes really impact function and health?
• There are many health benefits of the Mediterranean Diet with a recent RCT showing promise that it might help with positive gut changes, memory, and LDL.
• Many of the cognitive changes may be related to gut biome changes...check out our video for more details!

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Hello everyone, Dr. Wells here with a nutrition research update. I'm here from nutritionalphysicaltherapy.com and today we're going to talk about a study, yes it's a rat study, but it's a randomized controlled trial done by a woman named Solsh Atiano et al, and it's published in the Gut Microbes Report. The reason why I think this rat study is significant is that it's one of the more powerful ones in terms of looking at dietary patterns as well as cognition and thinking, and I know there's a lot of debate and discussion about what diet is best, you know, is it ketogenic diet, is it a whole food plant-based diet, is it an ultra processor, unprocessed diet, right? But this study looked at one that we support a lot within our courses and that's the Mediterranean diet.

So specifically these authors have looked at cognition in youth, that's between 15 and 24 age according to them, and they found that the Mediterranean diet was shown to improve cognition with their studies. So they said, well let's take this a step further and see what is driving this connection. Is it specific parameters in the diet, certain things that happen in the body? So it's hard to study that in humans, so they used rats.

So there's some limitations with a study, take it with a grain of salt. It was basically a 14-week study where they took these rats and they were assigned 10 to each group either in a Western diet, that would be your diet rich in saturated fat, lots of animal proteins, very minimal fiber, very minimal fruits and vegetables, or the Mediterranean diet which is described as a lot of fiber, so fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lots of minimally processed proteins in the form of like fatty fish. And what they found before they put these animals on the diet is they traced their ability to go through a maze, that's their ability to remember and also problem-solve.

They also looked at their serum cytokines as well as their LDLs and other markers of inflammation, particularly neuro inflammation. In the end what they found out was the animals that were on the Mediterranean diet had a significant improvement in their ability to overall solve the maze. They also had a significant improvement in their LDLs and more importantly, one of the factors I didn't mention is they looked at their gut microbiome, so they actually analyzed what microbiome species before their diet and then after their diet to see if there was changes and shifts.

And what they found was there were significant changes in the gut microbiome which isn't surprising. We talk a lot about this in our courses about how diet can shift the gut microbiome and how the gut-brain axis interacts which can promote disease, turn on disease, turn off disease, promote inflammation, etc. But overall what was interesting is they didn't see any significant difference within their markers of neuro inflammation.

There was no changes in their glial cells or the blood-brain barrier, but there was those changes in the gut microbiome like I mentioned, their ability to have cognition, improved cognition within the mazes, and they had improved serum and cytokine activity. Overall the gene expression wasn't changed in the brain and some of the defenses of the brain weren't changed so this may not be the one factor that we see within mild cognitive impairment or you know brain disease specifically, but it certainly seems like it could be one of those. Anyhow, if you like this content check out more.

We'll be at CSM so if you'll be there, great, reach out to me. You can reach out to me here on on my Instagram or on Facebook and maybe we can meet up for a coffee or a nice Mediterranean meal and there'll be content there at CSM as well but not nearly as in-depth as our three-part course series. So if you're interested in nutrition, you want to learn more, sign up today and hope you have a great day.

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