In 2015, 15,696 people were murdered in the United States. In that same year, homicide happened only 604 times in Canada, the country seen as most like ours.

But even without knowing these two totals, you probably already knew that when compared to other First World countries, the U.S. is a rather violent place to be.

But did you know that we do this worst possible form of violence to ourselves more often than we do it to others? It’s sad but true. For every homicide in the United States of America, there are two suicides.

And did you know that depression is given as the explanation for slightly more than two out of every three suicides?

Do those stats mean that the U.S. is a really messed up place to be? Or could they just mean that our eating habits are really messed up?

Last week, you read about a study where a number of men and women with moderate to severe depression and terrible eating habits were found no longer to be depressed after 12 weeks on a modified version of the Mediterranean diet.

This study supported of a pattern detected seven years before in a comprehensive review that revealed those who ate a form of the Mediterranean diet were not nearly as likely to become depressed as those who did not. But that comprehensive review also unearthed something equally as important: a link between poor diet and dementia, including that very specific and very frightening form of it, Alzheimer’s disease.

Studies since then have found the correlation between a specific result of poor diet, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer’s so pronounced that some now darkly refer to Alzheimer’s as type 3 diabetes.

In July, the journal Physiological Reports published a paper penned by three researchers at Brock University in Ontario, Canada that provided more proof of this link. Rebecca MacPherson, Bradley Baranowski, and Kirsten Bott, fed a group of aging mice a high-fat, high-sugar (HFS) diet that made them obese while feeding another group of old-timers a standard diet that allowed them to maintain a healthy weight.

Twelve weeks on the HFS diet, though, did more than just add weight. When compared to the standard-diet group, the HFS-diet group showed higher levels of inflammation, cellular stress, and insulin resistance in their brains — all established biomarkers of Alzheimer’s.

A study of more than 5,000 people over the course of 10 years published in the journal Diabetologia last January may strike you as an even more ominous sign of the link between the typical fast food diet and loss of mind. It found that people with elevated blood sugar levels — though not high enough to be considered diabetic — had a faster rate of cognitive decline than those with normal blood sugar.

In other words, according to Atlantic staff writer Olga Khazan, in her oh-so appropriately titled article “The Startling Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer’s”: “[T]he higher the blood sugar, the faster the cognitive decline”

But regular readers of this column knew about the sugar/Alzheimer’s connection well before Khazan wrote about it. They also know why all of these previously mentioned and seemingly negative studies ultimately have a positive spin.

If poor eating can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, then healthy eating can decrease it.

Martha Clare Morris, PhD, a nutritional epidemiologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago certainly feels this way. With the help of her colleagues, she incorporated elements of the Mediterranean and DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diets to create the MIND (Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay) diet.

The 2015 press release about her initial study of the new diet revealed that subjects who followed it “rigorously” reduced their risk of Alzheimer’s by 53 percent. Subjects who followed the diet “moderately well” reduced their risk by 35 percent.

In short, the MIND diet, encourages you to eat liberal amounts of food from eight “brain-healthy food groups”: vegetables (especially green leafy ones), nuts, berries, beans, whole grains, fish, poultry, and olive oil, while permitting one glass of wine with dinner. Similarly, you are supposed to limit your consumption of the foods from five unhealthy groups — red meats; butter and stick margarine; cheese; pastries and sweets; and fried or fast food — significantly.

Ideally, you consume less 1 tablespoon of butter per day and eat cheese, pastries and sweets, fried or fast food no more than once a week. But Morris stresses that “one of the more exciting things about this [diet] is that people who adhered even moderately to [it] had a reduction in risk for AD,” a feature of the diet which should serve to “motivate people” to use it and stick to it.

That the Rush University findings have been replicated should serve as further motivation. At the Alzheimer Association’s International Conference held in the U.K. in 2017, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco presented a paper in which the subjects who followed the Mediterranean diet or the MIND diet (which is the easier of the two to follow) reduced their risk of cognitive impairment by 35 percent.