By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY
A vegetable stir-fry and a glass of red wine might go a long way toward preventing the formation of the brain gunk that can lead to Alzheimer's disease, studies report Monday.
The findings involving experiments with mice add to an increasing body of evidence, including human studies, that suggest the high-fat Western-style diet might lead not just to heart attacks but also to Alzheimer's, a disease expected to afflict up to 16 million people in the USA by 2050.
But if new research by Narayan Bhat of the Medical University of South Carolina and others pans out, Americans might be able to change that future in part by steering clear of artery-clogging foods.
Bhat took healthy lab mice and fed them a diet with lots of saturated fat and cholesterol.
After two months, he gave the mice, which were middle-aged by then, a memory test and found that those fed the bad diet flunked: They made errors finding their way around a water maze.
Mice eating the bad diet also had an increase in a toxic brain protein called beta amyloid, Bhat says. Many scientists believe that beta amyloid deposits in the brain lead to the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
Bhat presented the results on Sunday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Atlanta. The findings raise the hope that a diet low in saturated fat might prevent that build-up of beta amyloid — and Alzheimer's disease.
A study posted online this month suggests just that: The report in the Archives of Neurology found that people eating a Mediterranean-style diet — low in saturated-fat animal products and high in fruits, vegetables and whole grains — had a lower risk of Alzheimer's than people eating standard American fare.
Italians and others who live around the Mediterranean often drink red wine with dinner, and a second study at the neuroscience meeting adds to evidence suggesting that something in red wine or grapes might offer protection against Alzheimer's.
Giulio Pasinetti of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York gave mice that had been genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's a small dose of red wine every day for 11 months. Then Pasinetti gave a memory test to the wine-fed mice and a control group that received no wine.
The Alzheimer's mice that were given no wine faltered on the test. But the mice that had been drinking small amounts of Cabernet Sauvignon found their way around the maze surely and swiftly, a sign that they still had a sharp memory, Pasinetti says.
Alcohol consumption can cause many health problems. So people who already drink should limit their consumption to about a single glass of red a day, Pasinetti says.
And don't expect wine or any other single food to compensate for a diet that has lots of unhealthful fat, says P. Murali Doraiswamy, an Alzheimer's expert at Duke University: "You can't wash down a double cheeseburger with a glass of red and expect to get a brain benefit."