What you put on your plate today could have a profound impact on your brain health decades from now. A massive long-term study just revealed that women who closely follow a Mediterranean style of eating have a significantly lower risk of suffering a stroke.
This diet, often recommended by doctors due to other health benefits, focuses on produce, beans, fish and healthy fats like olive oil. It’s light on dairy, meat and other foods high in saturated fat.
The findings, published recently in Neurology Open Access, a journal of the American Academy of Neurology, add to a growing pile of evidence that food truly is medicine. While the research does not prove that the diet directly prevents strokes, it uncovers a powerful and undeniable connection between your everyday food choices and your long-term neurological health.
To understand this link, researchers tracked more than 100,000 women for an average of 21 years. Each woman received a comprehensive diet score ranging from zero to nine.
Participants earned a point if they ate more than the average amount of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, beans, fish and olive oil. They also earned a point for moderate alcohol consumption. Then, they gained points for eating less red meat and less dairy than the general public.
Over the two decades of the study, researchers recorded thousands of strokes among the group.
Women who scored the highest on the diet scale — meaning they most closely followed the Mediterranean model — were 18% less likely to experience any type of stroke compared to those with the lowest scores.
This lower risk applied to both major types of stroke.
The most common type happens when a stubborn blood clot blocks blood flow to a specific part of the brain. Women who strictly followed the Mediterranean diet saw their risk for these dangerous clot-based strokes drop by 16%.
The diet proved to be even more protective against an often more severe type of stroke caused by sudden bleeding inside the brain (hemorrhagic strokes). The women with the highest diet scores experienced a massive 25% lower risk of these bleeding strokes.
This specific finding is vital because bleeding strokes are much harder to treat and have been studied far less frequently in terms of any connections to daily nutrition.
The research team made sure to account for other major lifestyle factors that naturally influence stroke risk, like smoking, physical activity levels, and high blood pressure.
Even when all of those outside factors were removed from the equation, the association between the Mediterranean diet and lower stroke risk remained.
Study author Sophia Wang, a researcher at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, noted that stroke remains a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. She explained that it is exciting to realize that simply improving our daily meals could realistically lower our overall risk for such a devastating condition.