How to eat your way to a healthier brain in 2021

So while she would never advocate a diet of Victoria sponges, Wilson believes that if you’re getting enough leafy greens, enough fibre and enough oily fish then essentially you have built a resilient physiological system. “It’s going to be able to handle a slice of cake and a couple of biscuits.”

However, she would like people to know how to prepare more nutrient-dense foods in a way that is palatable, affordable and easy to prepare. “Because that’s not where we are at the moment. When people think healthy food, they think bland salad, and that’s just a plate of misery. We need better messaging.”

One of her favourite dishes is tinned sardine spaghetti. “I use lots of garlic, olive oil and some toasted breadcrumbs. It’s quite cheap but it’s really rich and really delicious.”

Food prices might be rising, but Wilson believes it’s a false economy not to invest in our diets. Eating cheaper, yet nutrient-poor food just stores up financial costs in the future.

As well as diet, Wilson says, sleep and exercise are power tools for brain health, and increasingly so as we age. A recent review by The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected scientific research journals, estimated that, if we carefully followed the best lifestyle advice, we could prevent up to a third of global cases of Alzheimer’s; up to 15 million fewer people.

“Exercise has probably the most robust evidence base we have for the effect of a lifestyle intervention on brain health,” says Wilson. “It literally helps to build your brain; there’s a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is kind of fertiliser for the brain, it just makes it grow. And after acute exercise, a HIIT class or a jog, your levels of BDNF rise in your bloodstream by sometimes up to 300 per cent.”

Improved blood flow to the brain improves the health of your blood vessels, which is important in terms of vascular dementia risk. It also helps to modulate mood and helps to remove chemicals in the bloodstream that are toxic to the brain. “Exercise is absolutely crucial for good brain health,” says Wilson.

Sleep, meanwhile, is where the garbage disposal of your brain happens. “It’s bin day in your brain overnight,” says Wilson. It’s particularly important in preventing Alzheimer’s disease where one of the key characteristics is the build up of the protein beta-amyloid, which is cleared out while you sleep. “One of the hypotheses of Alzheimer’s disease is if you’ve got a build-up of this compound then your brain cells can’t send the messages. And if the message isn’t getting through, the assumption of the brain is that this nerve isn’t needed any more, so it retires it. It starts to die back. Obviously you don’t want bits of your brain doing that.”

If she was to add a fourth, bonus foundation to good brain health, it would be “challenge”.

Just like when you challenge a muscle by lifting weights it comes back stronger, when you challenge the brain with learning something, it builds more connections. Continuing to dance, learning to play a musical instrument or speak a language, and generally doing classes in things you’ve never done before can stave off dementia.

“That’s the thing with the brain,” says Wilson. “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh well, there’s nothing I can do. If I get dementia it’s just bad luck.’ But it’s absolutely not inevitable.”

Having read this far, you may already know much of what Wilson has said and still, you struggle to be able to make positive changes regarding diet, sleep and exercise. That is entirely natural, she says. “The brain likes to save energy and lots of these things that are good for you require you to exert some energy. So you are kind of going against your brain’s natural instinct. You have to have a pretty well-developed prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that makes you do the difficult thing. It’s the goal-oriented, long-term planning, getting things done element of your brain.”