What is the best way to protect your mind? As you age, how can you best ensure that your mental capacities are in good working order?

These issues rarely get raised by doctors during annual physicals or other appointments. And yet they remain vital for the health of patients, especially us older people.

Fortunately, much is known about how best to support the good health of the brain.  Overall, the best way is to take good care of your body. This means attending to the behaviors that influence your brain.

This surprising response is solidly based on scientific findings. Exercise, good nutrition, education, refusal to smoke, control of stress, an active social life, and fighting against obesity: these turn out to be some of the most effective ways of protecting and enhancing the life of the brain.

This information comes from Douglas Powell, a long-time acquaintance of mine, whose valuable new book The Aging Intellect details the scholarship behind these conclusions.

What makes the research findings so startling is the body-mind connection. Like me, you might have presumed that direct mental activity would be the surefire best method of enriching the life of your brain. But attending to the body turns out to be the most effective way to go.

OK— but how, for instance, does a good social life promote the flourishing of your mind? It does so, among other ways, by protecting you against low spirits and depression. These conditions can do harm to your inner life, both your body and your brain.

Thus it’s important to have friends you can talk with. Even one or two close companions can make a vital difference in your feelings about yourself and in your outlook on the world.

And similarly, eating well boosts not just our bodily health but our mental well-being also. Those whose diet features good food are likely to be sharper intellectually than those who eat bad stuff.

Another important way of supporting the health of the mind is controlling stress. Hypertension can prove harmful to both mind and body. Medication serves as an effective means of keeping blood pressure under control.

Many Americans receive blood-pressure prescriptions—but, astoundingly, fifty percent of these patients fail to take their medication.

By now, almost everyone knows about the harmful effects of smoking. If older people do not know by now the highly undesirable effects of tobacco on their bodies and minds, they have been living on another planet.

Even a wise and active life is, of course, no guarantee against the possible onset of dementia. Many of us have seen how it can still afflict those who have done the right things.

However, taking on the actions mentioned here may well prove to be the most effective way of staving off Alzheimer’s and related diseases. At a recent international conference on Alzheimer’s, held in Paris, one presentation gave reasons to take this idea seriously.

This study calculated that “if people addressed these risks — by exercising, quitting smoking, increasing their education or losing weight, for example — that a significant number of Alzheimer’s cases could be prevented.” Of course the word could needs emphasis because a specific connection between these behaviors and this disease has not been proven. 

I have taken to heart the findings offered here. Let me suggest their value for improving the quality of life at every stage but, in particular, for making old age a better experience.