Researchers observing the effects of various diets on the brains of genetically engineered mice bred for studying Alzheimer's disease found quite unexpectedly that mice fed a high protein, low carbohydrate diet, developed brains that were five per cent lighter than those of mice fed other diets.
The study was the work of lead author, Sam Gandy, a professor at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and a neurologist at the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx, New York, and colleagues from research centers in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the UK. The study is published in BioMed Central's open access journal Molecular Neurodegeneration.
Many other studies have already suggested that low calorie, low fat diets rich in vegetables, fruits, and fish may delay or slow down Alzheimer's disease, so Gandy and colleagues decided to take this a step further and compare the effects of several different diets on mice that were genetically engineered to have some of the disease characteristics of Alzheimer's.
