Eating less processed red meat can reduce your chances of dementia

Skip the bacon and those holiday hot dogs: A new study finds that eating processed red meat increases your chances of dementia.

Overall, just two servings of processed red meat per week was associated with a 14% increase in dementia risk, compared to people who ate fewer than three servings per month.

The finding made sense to Heather Snyder, vice president of medical and scientific relations for the Alzheimer’s Association, given what experts know about diet and the brain.

“Preventing Alzheimer’s disease and all other forms of dementia is a major concern, and the Alzheimer’s Association has long encouraged eating a healthier diet – including foods that are less processed – because they are associated with [a lowered] risk of cognitive decline,” Snyder said in an association news release. “This large, long-term study provides a specific example of a way to eat healthier.”

The findings were presented on Wednesday at the International Conference of the Alzheimer’s Association in Philadelphia.

The study was led by Yuhan Li, now a research assistant at the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She conducted the research while she was a graduate student at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

Li’s team has collected more than 43 years of data from 130,000 people in the long-running Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. The researchers specifically looked at the associations between red meat intake and dementia.

Every two to four years, participants were surveyed about how much and how often they ate a variety of foods, including processed red meat. A serving from that category may include bacon (two slices), hot dog (one), sausage or kielbasa (2 ounces or two small links), salami, bologna or other processed meat sandwiches.

People were also asked about their intake of servings of nuts and legumes, including peanut butter (1 tablespoon), peanuts, walnuts or other nuts (1 ounce), soy milk (8 ounce glass), string beans, beans or lentils, peas or lima beans (1/ 2 cup), or tofu or soy protein.

A total of 11,173 cases of dementia emerged during the study period.

The key finding: People who said they ate a quarter-serving or more of any form of processed red meat per day had a 14% higher risk of developing dementia than those who ate less than 1/10th of a serving daily.

The study was only intended to reveal links and could not prove cause and effect.

Li’s team also looked at the “cognitive aging” of a subset of nearly 17,500 study participants.

They found that each additional serving of processed red meat eaten per day was linked to about 1.6 years of cognitive aging for “global cognition,” including language, executive functions and mental processing. That extra daily serving was also linked to nearly 1.7 years of cognitive aging of verbal memory: the ability to remember and understand words and sentences, Li’s team reported.

However, there are dietary changes that can help stop this decline.

The study found that when people replaced their daily serving of processed red meat with nuts and/or legumes, people had a 20% lower risk of developing dementia and 1.37 fewer years of cognitive aging in global cognition.

“Research results on whether there is a link between cognitive decline and meat consumption in general are mixed, so we took a closer look at how eating different amounts of both processed and unprocessed meat affects cognitive risk and functioning,” Li said.

“By studying people over a long period of time, we found that eating processed red meat could be a significant risk factor for dementia. Dietary guidelines could include recommendations that limit this to promote brain health.”

She noted that processed red meat can be bad for the brain “because it contains high levels of harmful substances such as nitrites.” [preservatives] and sodium.”

And it’s not just the brain that is at risk.

“Processed red meat has also been shown to increase the risk of cancer, heart disease and diabetes,” Li noted.

The study also looked at unprocessed red meat, such as hamburgers, steaks or chops. No significant link was found between that type of meat and the risk of dementia.

Because these findings were presented at a medical meeting, they should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

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