Cooking is not my superpower. Thankfully, Wayne loves to cook. When we were first married (52 years ago), I cooked, baked, and even canned. There is even a family joke that goes: “One day, one of our children came home just in time to eat dinner. I asked, ” Are you ready to eat?” The cautious look on his face prompted another child to say, “It’s okay, Dad’s cooking”. We refer to my season of domestic adventure as Wayne’s first wife.
As it turns out, there are a few things I do enjoy mixing up together. They include making 1-1 and 2-1 sugar syrup and fondant for our honeybees. I also like creating a fragrance that attracts honeybees to a swarm box when they decide to swarm, as well as making the 1-4 sugar syrup that hummingbirds enjoy.
The one area I have remained proficient at is occasionally baking bread and cooking peanut butter toast.
Cooking is good for our brains
Imagine my surprise when I saw the headline on a study, “Learning to Cook Could Lower Your Dementia Risk By 70%, New Study Says”. The researchers in the study followed almost 11,000 adults ages 65 and older for about six years.
Although cooking a meal even once a week was a bit of a stretch for me, I read the article, published in Eating Well, which cited the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study to learn more. One of the immediate advantages is that to benefit from home cooking you only need to cook one meal a week. Still a lot, but maybe doable.
A quote by Julia Child offers guidance about the best way to approach cooking: “You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces – just good food from fresh ingredients”
Cooking from scratch improves health
The study theorized that older adults tended to rely on frozen, take-out, or home-delivery meals. So, cooking from scratch might even provide healthier meals as well since home cooking adds an added benefit by promoting healthier eating habits, such as eating more fruits and vegetables and less processed food. The best part is that those who usually cooked the least benefited the most by cooking, though everyone benefited by almost 30%.
This agrees with a study conducted by JAMA Network titled, “Diet Quality and Dementia Risk in Older Adults With Alzheimer Pathology“. It found that adherence to a dietary pattern with lower inflammatory potential was associated with lower dementia risk. I also addressed this in a previous blog post, “MIND(full) Eating may Reduce your Risk of Dementia”.
Dancing and Cooking – a great combination
The dementia-reduction benefit of cooking is similar to that of dancing, which also lowers our risk of dementia by an amazing 76%, according to a long-term observational study published in the American Medical Journal titled “Dancing Linked to 76% Lower Dementia Risk”.
Why do those two activities provide such a high benefit? They both check the boxes of multitasking under a time constraint.
Cooking and Dancing both share similarities
Dancing requires stepping in certain ways – usually in sync with a partner, while avoiding bumping into others on the dance floor. It also requires following the musical rhythm and making rapid adjustments in real time. Dancing provides both music, which brings up memories connected to various songs, and social interactions that are valuable for maintaining healthy minds. Learn more about the benefits from a previous article, “Lower Dementia Risk by Dancing“.
Cooking is also a multitasking activity that requires determining what you want to make, remembering the recipe (or knowing where to find it), and gathering the various ingredients. Shopping for missing items could also provide social interaction. That was certainly true where we used to live in Northern California. It was a rare occasion to shop at our favorite grocery store without running into someone we knew. So, it was always wise to allow extra time to shop. Preparing, chopping, and slicing food along with accurate timing is required of each step so that everything is ready at the same time. Of course, there’s the bonus activity of cleaning up afterwards.
Between Cooking and Dancing…
Even reading all the research and articles regarding the benefits of cooking, I’d still rather be dancing, and my favorite kitchen activity is cleaning up and washing dishes. I have, however, found reasons where creating a meal or baking a treat provides an incredible amount of joy. When someone is under the weather, or is coming over for dinner, and I can make or bake something they enjoy, I find all my old, usual resistance to cooking activities melts away.
Considering all the research, what can I say? “Turnip” the music and let the cooking begin!
Has your world been touched by dementia?
My book, “Finishing Well: Finding the Joy in Dementia“, is a collection of stories and tips about doing life with my Mama. May it encourage and inspire you to find joy on your own, unique journey.