So, how are those new year’s resolutions going, especially regarding your diet? Have you continued to commit to healthier eating or are you already slipping back into your old ways of cookies and croissants? Even with the best of intentions, it’s an uphill battle to maintain your discipline and stick to a healthy diet. The temptations to stray are ever-present. The portion sizes and calorie contents of fast food options continue to skyrocket and marketing campaigns along with supermarket offerings push ultra-processed food that’s been stripped of nutrients and filled with ingredients (sugar and salt) that make them virtually impossible to resist. Before you surrender for good, you may want to take a glance at what experts recommend to be on the plate of older adults. The challenge? After age 50, you need fewer calories but just as many nutrients, so the nutritional “density” of your food becomes ever-more important.

And the evidence keeps mounting that when you substitute heavily processed food for more wholesome options, you increase the potential harm to your heart, your gut, and your brain. For example, a new study just out from Rush University in Chicago reports that even for those committed to such healthy eating as the Mediterranean diet, moments of weakness and sneakiness (like downing some fries while no one is looking) may ultimately wipe out whatever cognitive gains you’ve made because of your health-conscious diet. According to the research, those who stick with the Mediterranean diet have brains an average of 6 years “younger” than those who eat a more traditional (processed) Western diet. If you’re outwardly committed to the Mediterranean diet, but secretly add sweets and fried foods to the mix, whatever cognitive benefits you’ve gained by eating healthily will soon disappear. So before you give in to temptation, give a look at the study results here. 

Further fueling the need to pull back from processed foods is new research out of Italy that found that eating ultra-processed food over an extended period of time leads to an increased risk of mortality regardless of the cause (26%) and a whopping 58% increase in the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. So before you bite into that Big Mac, check out the research here. And adding fuel to the fire, another large international study published in Nature Medicine just reported that the more processed the food you eat, the more impact it will have on your gut microbiome, which it turns out is largely influenced by what you eat rather than your genetic disposition. Processed food, therefore, may not only negatively affect your cognition (recognizing there’s a link between your gut and your brain) but can also produce harmful microbes that can worsen your cardiovascular and metabolic health. In essence, nothing positive for your health comes out of eating highly processed food. So grab an apple and increase your awareness of the gut-good food connection here.