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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: 2) by gringer on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:52PM
I thought the wording used in the article sounded familiar. Some of this effect can be explained by Pavlovian conditioning, as outlined in an earlier (2013) paper by the same author (Terry Davidson):
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1074742713001275 [sciencedirect.com]
Because the article text is not so easy to access, here's the abstract:
An enormous amount of research has been aimed at identifying biological and environmental factors that are contributing to the current global obesity pandemic. The present paper reviews recent findings which suggest that obesity is attributable, at least in part, to a disruption of the Pavlovian control of energy regulation. Within our framework, this disruption occurs when (a) consumption of sweet-tasting, but low calorie or noncaloric, foods and beverages reduces the ability of sweet tastes to predict the postingestive caloric consequences of intake and (b) consuming diets high in saturated fat and sugar (a.k.a., Western diet) impairs hippocampal-dependent learning and memory processes that are involved with the use of interoceptive ‘‘satiety’’ signals to anticipate when food and eating are not followed by appetitive postingestive outcomes. The paper concludes with discussion of a ‘‘vicious-cycle’’ model which links obesity to cognitive decline.
And the penultimate section:
The interrelationship between energy regulation and cognitive function that is represented in our model anticipates what we (Davidson, Kanoski, Walls, et al., 2005; Kanoski & Davidson, 2011) have termed a ‘‘vicious-cycle of obesity and cognitive decline’’ (see Fig. 7). That is, if eating a HE or Western diet interferes with the functioning of the hippocampus, and this interference has the effect of impairing the ability to inhibit retrieval of the memory of the appetitive postingestive consequences of energy intake by environmental food-related cues, then this impairment would increase the likelihood that those cues would evoke additional appetitive behavior and intake of the Western diet, which would give rise to further impairment in hippocampal function and memory retrieval inhibition. Unchecked, this cycle would result not only in overeating and weight gain, but also in the progressive deterioration of hippocampal-dependent cognitive functioning. Furthermore, while it may be the case that overeating produces impaired cognitive functioning, the vicious-cycle framework also allows for the possibility that cognitive impairment is a cause of overeating. Consistent with this latter interpretation, the results of a recent longitudinal study suggest that low scores on tests of cognitive abilities in young children predict subsequent excess body weight and obesity (Guxens et al., 2009). Future research is needed to establish the direction of the relationship between obesity and cognitive performance. Fig. 8.
Links to recent papers, all similarly paywalled:
I will reiterate what I've mentioned previously: anything that screws with your body's perception of taste (or more specifically, messes up the method of associating taste with energy output) is a bad idea.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by dvader on Friday January 06 2017, @09:28AM
I don't get it. A tasty cake contains both fat, sugar and plenty of calories, so it should be perfectly OK then? The taste predicts the caloric intake well. Or, is the problem that the taste doesn't correlate with satiety? Enough cake makes you full though...
Could someone explain what this means?
(Score: 2) by gringer on Friday January 06 2017, @08:41PM
Yes, a tasty cake would be fine, as long as your other dietary consumption doesn't include any caloric intake-falsifying foods.
One example is an artificially-sweetened cake that tastes exactly the same as the standard tasty cake. Your body / brain will get used to the low caloric value of the artificially-sweetened cake and (for example) consume more of it. That's fine as long as your diet only includes artificially-sweetened food... but it doesn't.
Suppose at some future time you consume the ordinary tasty cake. Your brain has been conditioned to the caloric value of the artificially-sweetened cake, so ends up craving more of the normal cake, resulting in excess caloric intake. That's pavlovian conditioning in a nutshell.
Think about this the next time you consider using something like Splenda:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splenda [wikipedia.org]
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]