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Being overweight can raise your blood pressure, cholesterol and risk for developing diabetes. It could be bad for your brain, too.
A diet high in saturated fats and sugars, the so-called Western diet, actually affects the parts of the brain that are important to memory and make people more likely to crave the unhealthful food, says psychologist Terry Davidson, director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at American University in Washington, D.C.
He didn't start out studying what people ate. Instead, he was interested in learning more about the hippocampus, a part of the brain that's heavily involved in memory.
[...] In the process, Davidson noticed something strange. The rats with the hippocampal damage would go to pick up food more often than the other rats, but they would eat a little bit, then drop it.
[...] "It's surprising to me that people would question that obesity would have a negative effect on the brain, because it has a negative effect on so many other bodily systems," he says, adding, why would "the brain would be spared?"
Original URL: The Wrong Eating Habits Can Hurt Your Brain, Not Just Your Waistline
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday January 05 2017, @07:51PM
I don't see much about correlation/causation in the article. Maybe dummies are more likely to end up as tubbies.
Well, the correlation/causation in the rats is much clearer. (Original study link [apa.org].) They had different groups of rats trained with particular eating behavior and responses, and when they gave subgroups brain lesions, the brain-damaged rats developed different responses to food, and those lesioned rats that were freely given food became obese.
So, there is a correlation (at least in rats) between particular brain damage and and appetite control -- specifically in the hippocampus, which is known to correlate strongly to memory abilities.
Admittedly, the connections to humans are somewhat more tenuous, but we can't exactly do a scientific study where we randomly select people to do brain damage to. Instead, the article notes a few memory studies which are intended to test function in the same area of the brain (hippocampus) that the rats had lesions. These human studies indicated possible worse brain function in that area among obese people.
I'd hardly call the connection conclusive, but there is a logical chain to the argument here. Yes, it could ALSO be that those who ALREADY have brain problems are simply more likely to be obese (or a number of other possible interactions between cause and effect). But this research is at least suggestive -- and if nothing else a call for specific research asking whether people who BECOME obese have measurable CHANGES happen to their brains like those observed. (There's already some research out there suggesting that.)