A house with good foundations.
Funke's mother is 78 and sharp as a tack, still correcting everyone's grammar on the phone from Ibadan and remembering birthdays nobody else does. Her aunt, two years younger, no longer reliably knows which of her daughters she is speaking to. Funke has watched both of them this year and wondered which version of old age has her name on it. She assumes the matter was settled long ago by her genes.
It is far less settled than she thinks. Genes load the gun, as we say in lifestyle medicine, and daily life decides whether the trigger is ever pulled. Food is one of the strongest hands on that trigger, which is wonderful news for anyone holding a wooden spoon.
I wrote a whole series once on brain fog, the brain you are living in this week. Today is about the brain you'll be living in at 70 and 80, and the choices of our forties and fifties are laying that foundation now.
What the research says
The best-studied eating pattern for long-term brain health is the MIND diet, developed at Rush University, where people following it closely showed substantially slower cognitive decline than their peers. Here is what it asks for: green leafy vegetables daily, other vegetables daily, beans and nuts most days, berries a few times a week, oily fish weekly, whole grains, and olive oil as the main fat.
Read that list with your own kitchen in mind, because the interesting part is what you already do without trying, and what is genuinely missing.
What our kitchens already do well
A proper pot of efo riro (a Nigerian stew of leafy greens cooked down with peppers and onions) with mackerel through it covers the greens, the vegetables and the oily fish in one serving. Ewedu, okra soup with fish, garden egg stew, beans in almost every form, groundnuts by the handful. Nobody called it a brain protocol, and it was doing the work anyway. If your grandmother's greens were cabbage, kale or chard, the same is true of her cooking. Most food cultures got the greens and the beans right long before anyone ran a trial, which is why the foods women in my clinic feel vaguely guilty about are frequently the very foods the evidence supports.
Where the honest gaps are
Two of them in a West African kitchen, and I'd rather name them than pretend.
Berries. They were not on our grandmothers' tables in Ibadan or Enugu, and the flavonoid evidence behind them is genuinely good. Frozen ones cost a good deal less than fresh, keep for months, and nothing gets thrown away furry at the back of the fridge. A handful into yoghurt, ogi or porridge two or three times a week is the whole change. If berries are not your thing, dark grapes, pomegranate and unsweetened hibiscus (zobo) carry similar compounds.
The oil. The research used olive oil, which is not our tradition. Unrefined red palm oil has real virtues, and carries carotenoids and vitamin E that the bleached supermarket version has lost. It is also high in saturated fat, so keep it for the dishes that genuinely need it and don't let it be the only fat in the house. Make olive oil your everyday one, for cooking as well as for dressing. You can cook with it, whatever you've heard: when researchers heated ten supermarket oils hard, extra virgin olive oil held up better than several with higher smoke points. Deep-frying a pot of akara is another matter, mostly on cost.
Your one thing this week
Greens on your plate every day. That's it, and I've chosen it deliberately over everything else in this letter.
Partly because of the Rush work: following nearly a thousand older adults for five years, the people eating around a serving of leafy greens a day were declining at a rate equivalent to being eleven years younger than those who rarely ate any.
And partly for a second reason, which is your blood pressure. Leafy greens are rich in dietary nitrate, which your body turns into nitric oxide, the molecule that tells your blood vessels to relax. Vegetable-heavy eating lowers blood pressure measurably in controlled trials, and that matters for your memory as much as your heart, because the small vessels that feed your thinking are protected by the same thing. Your heart and your brain share the pipework.
Efo, ewedu, ugu, spinach, kale, cavolo nero, whatever your shop actually sells. Frozen counts, and frozen spinach is cheaper and lasts. The berries and the oil can wait until greens are automatic.
And on the week when everything is on fire, the floor is a handful of frozen spinach dropped into whatever is already on the stove. That still counts. Decide now what your floor looks like, because the week you need it is not the week to be inventing it.
Health in your body, peace in your soul, purpose in your step.
Lolu :)
