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Food for thought: How diet affects the brain over a lifetime

American Heart Association

If you’re not already eating a healthy diet, making that change could be difficult, said Dr. Kevin Volpp, director of the Penn Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

It’s not necessarily that people don’t know how to eat healthier, said Volpp, who co-authored a recent paper in Nature Reviews Neurology on the importance of diet for maintaining brain health. People might not have easy access to healthier foods or enough money to pay for them, he said. But even when they do, it’s not easy to resist the temptation of tasty but often unhealthy foods people have become accustomed to eating.

“It’s important for patients to recognize that any single indulgence may not seem to matter – and probably doesn’t – but over time, their choices will influence their long-term health,” Volpp said. “And we need to be aware of that in terms of the patterns we put in place.”

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