Cooking at home can reduce risk of dementia

Ok...I know it’s hard to believe, but a new study in the British Medical Journal shows cooking at home reduces your risk of dementia by 30%. And for novice cooks, it was even higher than that. Really? How could that be? So, let’s unpack the study and see what it says.

First off, it’s in a good journal. Fair enough, but there's lots of good journal research that turns out to be false. Next off, it takes place in Japan as part of the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study, looking at 11,000 people free of memory problems over a six-year period.

There is one insurance provider in Japan, the government. So it was easy to eliminate anyone from the study who needed extra care because of memory issues.

Study participants’ cooking skills were evaluated at the beginning of the study. As you can imagine, some were frequent cooks and others rarely cooked. Then the men and women in the study were matched by age, education, how much money they had and so on.

In Japan, eating habits are a bit different than ours, so that can be a factor. But researchers found that those who cooked at home consumed better food and that they ate less take-out stuff, ultra-processed foods and frozen dinners.

Hmm, that last part might be one factor. But the other might be cooking itself.

Cooking-related activities such as going to the supermarket, planning and preparing meals are major physical activities for older adults. And if you prepare your food at home, you eat it on plates that you need to wash and put away. All of this involves being active.

Aspects of daily life in which physical activity may take place include leisure time, household chores, mobility and occupational exercise. As older adults lose occupational exercise on retirement, a higher proportion of their physical activity is achieved through household chores.

Therefore, daily cooking-related activities represent an important source of physical activity for older adults. And as for mental activity, it’s a series of complex tasks. 

1. Thinking about what to cook and planning the ingredients.

2. Purchasing the food and, for some, following a budget.

3. Preparing the food.

4. Cooking the food.

5. Plating the food.

6. Cleaning up.

During the past 50 years, people have become more reliant on restaurants, take-out foods, prepared foods and frozen foods for their basic meals, and home cooking has become less frequent. The loss of someone to cook meals and living alone as a result of a death, divorce or other family changes are more frequent when you are older.

Older people with no one to cook their meals were found to have a three times higher risk of undernutrition, especially if they had poor cooking skills.

This study dovetails with other studies showing that productive activities are associated with less risk of cognitive decline and dementia. A study conducted in Sweden showed that weekly productive activities, including gardening, housekeeping, cooking, paid work, volunteering and handicrafts were also associated with a reduced risk of dementia.

My spin: Home cooking allows you to pick your ingredients and make more healthful food that’s less likely to be ultra-processed and industrialized. This study also shows there are benefits to preparing the food, not just the food itself.

It opens a different way to look at nutrition — it’s not only what you eat, but how much you are involved with the process. Stay well.