To stay sharper while aging, get active, challenge your brain, and eat healthy
That's according to initial results released Monday from a rigorous U.S. study of lifestyle changes in seniors at risk of developing dementia. People following a combination of healthier habits slowed typical age-related cognitive decline — achieving scores on brain tests as if they were a year or two younger, researchers reported in JAMA and at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference.
It's not too late to get started -- study participants were in their 60s and 70s -- and it doesn't require becoming a pickleball champ or swearing off ice cream.
'It was the first time I felt like I was doing something proactive to protect my brain,' said Phyllis Jones, 66, of Aurora, Illinois, who joined the study after caring for her mother with dementia and struggling with her own health problems.
It's too soon to know if stalling age-related decline also could reduce the risk of later Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. But Jones and other study participants underwent brain scans and blood tests that researchers now are analyzing for clues – such as whether people also saw a reduction in Alzheimer's-related protein buildup.
'We're all on a cognitive aging clock and anything we can do to slow that clock down, to me, that is a significant benefit,' said Laura Baker of Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who led the study.
What's good for the heart is good for the brain
Doctors have long encouraged physical activity and a healthy diet for brain fitness. Those steps fight high blood pressure and cholesterol, heart disease and diabetes, factors that increase the risk of dementia.
But until now the strongest evidence that specific lifestyle changes later in life could improve how people perform on brain tests came from a study in Finland.
Would it work for a more sedentary and culturally diverse U.S. population? With funding from the Alzheimer's Association and the National Institute on Aging, Baker's team tested the strategy for two years in 2,100 adults ages 60 to 79.
Here's what study participants had to do
Half of participants were randomly assigned to group classes for exercise and dietary changes plus brain-challenging homework – with peer support and coaches tracking their progress.
They did a half-hour of moderately intense exercise four times a week -- plus twice a week, they added 10 to 15 minutes of stretching and 15 to 20 minutes of resistance training.
They followed the 'MIND diet' that stresses lots of leafy greens and berries plus whole grains, poultry and fish. Nothing is banned but it urges limiting red meat, fried or 'fast food' and sweets, and substituting olive oil for butter and margarine.
They also had to meet someone or try something new weekly and do brain 'exercises' using an online program called Brain HQ.
Other study participants, the control group, received brain-healthy advice and minimal coaching — they chose what steps to follow.
Both improved but the groups fared significantly better.
Combining social engagement with exercise and dietary steps may be key, said Jessica Langbaum of the Banner Alzheimer's Institute, who wasn't involved with the study.
'Americans want to have that one easy thing – 'If I just eat my blueberries,'' Langbaum said. 'There is no one magic bullet. It is a whole lifestyle.'
How to exercise your body and mind on your own
Moderately intense physical activity means raising your heart rate and panting a bit yet still able to talk, said Wake Forest's Baker. Pick something safe for your physical capability and start slowly, just 10 minutes at a time until you can handle more, she cautioned.
Make it something you enjoy so you stick with it.
Likewise there are many options for brain exercise, Baker said – puzzles, joining a book club, learning an instrument or a new language.
Jones, a software engineer-turned-tester, learned she loves blueberry-spinach smoothies. Her favorite exercise uses an at-home virtual reality program that lets her work up a sweat while appearing to be in another country and communicating with other online users.
One challenge: How to keep up the good work
Researchers will track study participants' health for four more years and the Alzheimer's Association is preparing to translate the findings into local community programs.
Will people with stick with their new habits?
Jones lost 30 pounds, saw her heart health improve and feels sharper especially when multitasking. But she hadn't realized her diet slipped when study coaching ended until a checkup spotted rising blood sugar. Now she and an 81-year-old friend from the study are helping keep each other on track.
The lifestyle change 'did not just affect me physically, it also affected me mentally and emotionally. It brought me to a much better place,' Jones said.
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Time Magazine
33 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
Inside the Parent-Led Movement For Phone-Free Schools
Before she had four kids and moved to rural Vermont, Laura Derrendinger was a public-health nurse for Doctors Without Borders. She spent eight years in places like Kosovo, Sudan, and the Congo-Uganda border, treating children with preventable illnesses like cholera, malaria, and measles. She learned the best way to stop disease is before it begins, with 'upstream' interventions to remove the pathogen from the environment. These days, nearly two decades after her last field assignment, Derrendinger is taking on a new pathogen that she thinks affects nearly every child in America. 'In malaria, the mosquito is the vector of disease,' she says. 'Here, the phone is the vector that's carrying the disease of toxic online content.' Derrendinger is just one dedicated organizer in a growing constellation of parent-led groups working to break Big Tech's grip on children. She helps lead the Distraction Free Schools Policy Project, she's on the leadership council of Smartphone Free Childhood US, and she's a member of the Screen Time Action Network, ScreenStrong, Mothers Against Media Addiction, Tech Safe Learning Coalition, and the Vermont Coalition for Phone and Social Media Free Schools—all interconnected organizations with overlapping membership and converging goals. Much of their advocacy is focused on pushing for the simplest way to address social-media addiction in kids: making American schools into phone-free environments. Two years ago, banning phones in schools seemed almost unthinkable. Now, thanks in part to parents' organizing efforts, support for phone-free schools is rising quickly levels in a country that can't seem to agree on much else. A Pew Research Center study in July found that 74% of U.S. adults now support preventing middle schoolers and high schoolers from using their phones during class, up from 68% last year, while 44% support banning phones for the entire school day, up from 36%. Roughly two-thirds of Americans think phone-free schools would improve students' social skills, grades, and behavior in class. Read More: She Says Social Media Algorithms Led to An Eating Disorder. Now She's Suing. State lawmakers from both parties are listening. As of this summer, 37 states have banned cell phones and other internet-connected devices during class. About half of those states and D.C. are phone-free from 'bell-to-bell,' which keeps kids from accessing their phones during lunch and between classes. Republican states like Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma have passed bell-to-bell laws, while deep-blue New York just became the largest state to go phone-free for the entire school day starting this fall. 'To be frank, I thought we'd be socializing the idea of phone-free schools with state legislators this year,' says Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, one of the central organizations in the network of parents, educators, and advocates working to combat social-media addiction in kids. 'The fact that so many of these bills have already passed is a testament to how quickly this movement is coming together and to how angry parents are.' The rapid momentum reflects a growing understanding that phones and social media can present serious harms to kids' mental health and social development. So while some 14-year-olds get a phone for their birthday, Derrendinger got her son something she thought was much less dangerous: a chainsaw. Parents have long sensed that smartphones were transforming childhood. But it's only recently that they've finally had the language to describe what's happening. Last year, Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation was published to broad acclaim. The book, which argues that smartphones and social media have transformed a 'play-based childhood' into what Haidt calls a 'phone-based childhood,' has spent 70 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and spawned a grassroots movement and public-awareness campaign advocating for less screen time and more real-world independence for kids. Advocates who had been pushing to reduce screen time suddenly found themselves flooded with new volunteers. 'The momentum came from his book,' says Kim Whitman, who co-leads Smartphone Free Childhood US. 'But it's a lot of us moms out there doing the actual work. We're the boots on the ground, pushing it forward.' In the year since The Anxious Generation was published, parents formed a loose coalition of advocacy groups focused on pushing school administrators, superintendents, and state legislatures to make schools phone-free. Many of these groups are connected through Fairplay, an advocacy organization that was founded 20 years ago as the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. In 2017, Fairplay launched the Screen Time Action Network, which became an incubator for the movement to get phones out of schools. At first, many dismissed worries about screen time as a vaguely crunchy domestic concern, like 'gentle parenting' or the push for organic foods. That changed in 2020. Parents stuck at home with their kids during the COVID-19 pandemic saw their children's phone addiction firsthand. New research linked social media to a worsening mental-health crisis among kids and teenagers. After the movie The Social Dilemma was released in 2020, parents who had lost children to that mental health crisis began to find each other. Fairplay saw an influx of these so-called 'survivor parents,' who had lost children to harms encountered on social media. With Fairplay's help, those parents formed a group called Parents for Safe Online Spaces. 'The Anxious Generation has turbocharged everything, but a lot of these pieces were coming together before that,' says Golin of Fairplay. For years, parents faced a choice between exposing their kids to unknown dangers on social-media platforms or fighting a constant battle that would leave their kids isolated and miserable. 'There's now community in resisting the phone-based childhood.' Derrendinger, Whitman, and their fellow advocate Deb Schmill first met through Fairplay's Screen Time Action Network. Every Wednesday at noon for the past six months, they lead a Zoom forum for parent-advocates from around the country, called Distraction Free Schools Policy Project. The group includes parents from 30 states, strategizing about everything from how to draft a bill to how to build relationships with state legislators to how to create local pressure to pass phone-free legislation in their states. The advocates all agree that 'bell-to-bell' policies, rather than ones that allow students to use phones between class, are the best way to reduce distractions and break social media addictions. The call begins with some quick housekeeping from Derrendinger, but the Zoom quickly fills with eager conversation. Some parents had questions: 'When they do bell-to-bell, what's the rule for teachers?' asked one mom from Pennsylvania. Others had complaints about how the rules have been poorly enforced: 'They're still allowing phones in backpacks,' said a mom in New York, lamenting that her school district's policy 'basically has no teeth to it.' Another from Illinois reluctantly reported that her state's phone-free legislation had passed the Senate but stalled in the House. 'While you're figuring out what the solution should look like, kids out there are struggling,' she said. 'Parents are struggling. Schools are struggling.' At the end of the call, Schmill announced the next steps. 'The goal for next year is to find champions in the states that did not pass bell-to-bell. And that's best done in the summer,' she explained. Derrendinger chimed in. 'Summertime is the best time to build these allies,' she said. 'See if you can have coffee and connect in a human way with some of these legislators.' After the meeting ends, Derrendinger sends a follow-up email to the group. It includes a call to action reminding members to speak to their local school board or state board of education. 'We will get this fixed,' Derrendinger writes in the email. 'Remember, we move fast and fix things!' For some of the moms dedicating themselves to changing the way kids interact with technology, the issue is deeply personal. Deb Schmill's daughter, Becca, died in 2020 after taking drugs that were laced with fentanyl. She was 18. Deb Schmill believes social media led to Becca's overdose, fueling a series of traumatic events that dramatically shaped her adolescence. When Becca was 15, according to her mother, she was drugged and raped by a boy she and her friends had met on a group chat. In the months that followed, Deb Schmill says, Becca was the victim of revenge porn circulated around her high school via social media. 'These two traumas within a couple months of each other sent her spiraling,' Schmill says, causing Becca to develop addiction issues. In 2020, Deb and Becca temporarily relocated to Maine to get away from Becca's drug dealer. 'With her phone, she could just track down a drug dealer with social media and pick something up,' Schmill recalls. 'It was laced with fentanyl. And we lost her.' Over the years since, Schmill has struggled to make sense of the cascading tragedies that led to her daughter's death. In each trauma, she concluded, technology was partly to blame. Group chats made it easy for teens to connect with strangers, like the boy from another town who allegedly raped her. Without social media, 'there wouldn't be a place for revenge porn where people can post the most humiliating moments of your life online,' Schmill says. And when these traumas became too much for Becca, her mother says, her phone also gave her 'easy access to drugs.' Schmill runs the Becca Schmill Foundation, but is also an active member of many other groups. She is among the 'survivor parents' lobbying Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, which would create a 'duty of care' making social-media companies legally required to prevent and mitigate harms on their platforms. The bill, known as KOSA, passed the Senate overwhelmingly last year before stalling in the House. (It was re-introduced in May.) 'A lot of these organizations are working on different pieces of the puzzle,' Schmill says. 'Because no one solution is going to fix this.' One day in the spring of 2023, Derrendinger invited Vermont state senator Terry Williams to her home before breakfast. They sat on her porch on a frigid morning, before Derrendinger's four kids woke up. Derrendinger blasted Williams, a Republican, with a 'firehose' of data about the dangers of screens for kids. A few months later, Williams was invited back; this time Derrendinger had also invited three other moms. As they drank lemonade and the children played in the yard, Derrendinger laid out their request for Williams. The parents had drafted a bill to make Vermont schools phone and social-media free. It was a bell-to-bell phone ban that also included other devices like smartwatches, and it forbade schools from communicating with students via social media. All Williams had to do was introduce it. Williams was skeptical at first. 'Everybody was against it,' he says. Many parents wanted their kids to have phones at school so they could be reached if necessary. Teachers didn't want to have to enforce a state law. Still, Derrendinger's data on the subject was persuasive. She kept calling Williams about it. He agreed to co-sponsor the bill that Derrendinger and her group had drafted. 'I said, 'Don't get your hopes up,'' Williams recalls. He would introduce it, he told the parents, but once it went into the relevant legislative committee, 'You're pretty much on your own.'' That was fine with Derrendinger's group. They had an army of advocates at the ready. The original bill failed in 2024, but the group revived it in 2025 with the help of Rep. Angela Arsenault, a Democrat who co-sponsored the new bill in Vermont's House of Representatives. Rep. Arsenault says the grassroots momentum from parent advocates was what got the bill over the finish line during a busy legislative season. 'I am certain that that bill moved this year because of the parent-led movement,' she says. Williams says the public support was so overwhelming that his office got more than 1,500 emails urging him to support the bill, even though he was already a co-sponsor. 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Blake Fabrikant has seen the benefits of phone-free schools as the dean of students at The Sharon Academy, a small independent high school in Sharon, Vt. Starting in 2015, Fabrikant began to notice a change in the school's social dynamics. 'When students had free time, they were going on their phones instead of integrating with each other and building social skills,' he says. Attention spans decreased. Students made fewer friends. The culture of the school started to atrophy. Fabrikant had been pushing to go phone-free for years, but he finally got the school to implement a bell-to-bell phone ban in the summer of 2024. It was 'a tremendous success,' he says. Grades are up, according to Fabrikant, and students are paying more attention in class without the temptation to check Instagram. 'Two years ago you'd walk through the hallways and kids would just be glued to their phones,' he says. Now, "they're going outside and playing volleyball together. A student brings a boombox to school and they all dance together.' The benefits to students' academic and social advancement, Fabrikant says, have been 'exponential.' For these parents and advocates, phone-free schools are just the beginning. The broad consensus that phones are harming children has opened up a whole new range of possibilities. 'We've moved from arguing about whether there was a problem,' says Fairplay's Josh Golin, 'to arguing about what the solutions are.'
Associated Press
33 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Denmark zoo asks people to donate their small pets as food for captive predators
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New York Post
2 hours ago
- New York Post
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I'm going the extra mile for myelin. I travel the world to deliver neurological care in places with limited resources. Along the way, I have learned several important lessons about protecting brain health and preventing brain disease. My perspective was forever altered on one of my first trips to Uganda for the Department of Neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Advertisement I met a 14-year-old boy unable to move the left side of his body. Our medical team discovered the teen had undiagnosed and undetected HIV since birth. I was surprised to learn that HIV could be associated with stroke because it is an advanced feature of the virus that is infrequent in the US now. That knowledge changed my perceptions and attitudes towards brain health. Here is some wisdom from my visits to Uganda and Ghana, including two simple steps to halt and reverse brain damage. US vs the world The biggest difference in brain health challenges in the US and places like Ghana is simply access to care. 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Advertisement No matter what neurological disease you may have heard of, the rate and severity of that disease are lessened with regular exercise. Exercise crosses cultures — I've seen it manifested in different ways as I've traveled the world and delivered neurological care. The other aspect of the culture in Uganda and Ghana that really struck me — in a good way — was the lack of alcohol and cigarette use. Drinking less alcohol and smoking less are well-established behaviors that lead to better brain health. The vast majority of both populations do not regularly partake in these activities. Advertisement Follow these recommendations to protect your brain as you age — and consult your physician with any concerns. Dr. Jaydeep Bhatt is the director of the Division of Global Health for the Department of Neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
