In the study, the famed Dr. Dean Ornish (who is best known for a 1990 study that used a similar intervention to reduce heart attack risk) at the University of California San Francisco took patients with early-stage dementia and divided them into a control group (who didn’t do anything in particular) and a study group who received an intensive lifestyle intervention that consisted of:
A low-fat vegan diet
Regular meditation and yoga for stress reduction
Daily “cardio” type exercise
Prioritizing good quality sleep
The results after 40 weeks were that the people in the control group got worse (as expected), whereas in the people receiving the intervention, 46% improved and 37% stabilized on a series of cognitive tests. Put another way, 83% of people doing the lifestyle program did a lot better than the people not doing the lifestyle program.
