Slash your risk of hearing loss with a healthy diet

It might sound illogical, but what you decide to have for dinner tonight could have a long-term effect on your hearing.

The good news? If you eat a Mediterranean-style diet — which is not only healthy, but delicious — you can easily fill your plate with foods that naturally protect hearing.

If you haven’t heard about the Mediterranean diet, it emphasizes eating fresh produce, lean proteins, whole grains, nuts, extra-virgin olive oil, legumes, and even red wine!

Aside from the wide array of foods to choose from, there are plenty more good reasons why this diet has become so popular. Not only is it ideal for maintaining a healthy weight, but it’s also proven to support heart and artery health while also keeping your bones strong. (You can click here to read more about the bone benefits, along with a detailed list of the delicious components of this diet.)

In a recent study from Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, researchers used 22 years of data collected from nearly 71,000 women who participated in the Nurses’ Health Study II.

Researchers looked at the dietary habits of their subjects, paying particular attention to the choices that reflected those featured in a Mediterranean diet or the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet. Their analysis showed that women who followed a Mediterranean or DASH diet slashed their risk of suffering moderate to severe hearing loss by 30 percent compared to women who did not.

As someone who copes with hearing loss due to tinnitus (ringing in the ears), I’d strongly encourage you to follow any diet that helps preserve your hearing, but with this one important caveat: The DASH diet has some basic elements that should be avoided.

DASH is similar to the Mediterranean diet in some ways with its inclusion of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fish. So far so good. But it breaks down completely with promotion of low-fat dairy.

For instance, DASH recommends margarine over butter, which is absolute madness. Butter is a real food with nutritious fat. Margarine contains trans fats that are particularly dangerous for your heart — a terrible choice for a diet that’s supposed to reduce blood pressure and keep your heart healthy!

DASH also restricts salt — another unwise choice.

Reducing your intake of junk forms of sodium (like monosodium glutamate, or MSG) is an excellent idea which you can accomplish by cutting back on processed foods — especially those that include lots of “seasonings.” (You can read more about that here.)

But salt is an excellent source of sodium, a nutrient we all need — yes, even folks with high blood pressure. And severe sodium restriction can cause weak muscles and dementia symptoms. Obviously, a much better way to control blood pressure is to balance your intake of sodium and potassium — just as nature intended.

In addition to eating well to save your hearing, there are a number of nutritional supplements that can help protect it as well. To read about some of Dr. Marc Micozzi’s hearing-preservation recommendations, simply click here.

SOURCES

academic.oup.com/jn/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jn/nxy058/4993343?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Adherence to Healthful Dietary Patterns Is Associated with Lower Risk of Hearing Loss in Women
The Journal of Nutrition
May 11, 2018