8,681 older adults in central China were scored on the MIND diet. The higher scorers did better on a memory test, but weekly exercise showed no link once schooling and income were counted

The MIND diet was put together by researchers at Rush University in Chicago as a blend of the Mediterranean and DASH diets aimed squarely at the brain: more leafy greens, other vegetables, beans, nuts, berries, whole grains, fish and poultry, olive oil as the main cooking fat, and less red meat, butter, cheese, fried food and pastries. Most of the evidence behind it comes from American and European cohorts. A study published in Frontiers in Nutrition on 28 October, by the Henan Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, asked whether the same pattern holds among older people in central China, and whether being active adds anything on top.

In 2023 field teams visited 17 districts and counties across Henan, picked to cover cities and countryside, and randomly chose people aged 60 and over in each village or neighbourhood. After dropping missing answers and implausible activity reports, 8,681 people were analysed. This was a mostly rural group (85%), and nearly half (48%) had never learned to read or write. Each person answered a food frequency questionnaire scored on the 15 MIND food groups (0 to 15 points), reported how many hours a week they were physically active, and took the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), a 30-point test of orientation, memory, attention, language and drawing.

Diet scores were low: 3.9 out of 15 on average. Even so, every extra point on the MIND score went with an MMSE score 0.26 points higher, after adjusting for age, sex, schooling, income, living alone, smoking, drinking, weight, blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, heart disease or stroke, daily-living disability and depression. By simple arithmetic, someone four points higher on the diet scale would be expected to score about one point higher on a test where this group averaged 23.3. Looking inside the test, the link showed up for registration (repeating three words), attention and calculation, and recall, but not for orientation or language.

Exercise told a different story. Without any adjustment, more active people scored better, and the diet and exercise seemed to interact. As soon as age, sex, schooling, income and living arrangements were added, the activity link shrank to nothing and the interaction faded with it. The authors' reading is that much of the apparent benefit of activity in this group was really a marker of who had more education and money. They are careful not to say exercise doesn't matter: activity here was self-reported as hours per week, a blunt tool, and in a sensitivity analysis that kept the most extreme activity reports the diet-by-activity interaction came back as borderline (p = 0.049).

The big limitation is the design. This was a snapshot, so it can't show that eating the MIND way protects thinking; people whose memory is slipping may also shop and cook differently, and diet was recalled by people being tested for memory. The study had no data on medicines or family history of dementia. The authors also point out that a three-year randomised trial of the MIND diet in the United States, published in 2023, found no difference in thinking or brain scans between the diet and a comparison group that also cut calories. What this survey adds is that the observational link reaches well beyond the Western, well-educated groups where it was first seen.