This new year, resolve to eat a healthy diet – The News Herald

The holiday season is a time for joy, but it is also a time for serious reflection. So it is the right time to think about our food.

And the facts are clear — the food that most of us eat every day makes us sick.

We have all known that for a long time. But now, a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Neurology indicates that our bad eating choices can also impair cognition, even bringing on dementia. This doesn’t mean that we can never indulge in a snack, but it does mean that most of us need to change our approach to our overall diet.

How much evidence do we need before we change the way we eat? I have friends who routinely dismiss information like this, seeing it as coming from “health nuts.” But the data we have on a poor diet is not from fringe groups obsessed with an extreme agenda. At this point, one has to be living in denial to dismiss what we all know — a poor diet will make us sick and affect our ability to think.

If we are being honest with ourselves, we have known for a long time that poor nutrition contributes not only to obesity, but also to diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke and certain kinds of cancers. And now we know it can lead to impaired thinking, even dementia.

One of the main reasons for this is that we eat too much “ultraprocessed” food, which includes additives (chemicals) designed to add artificial flavor, artificial color, artificial texture, artificial scent and preservatives. The National…