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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 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]