A Few Days of Fatty Foods Can Disrupt Your Memory, Causing Cognitive Impairment
Talk about fast foods. A new study suggests that a few days consuming foods rich in fat, such as cheeseburgers and fries, could spoil your memory.
Reported in NeuronThe results have found the foundations of new interventions, treatments and therapies that could potentially protect your mind in the short and long term, by reducing your risk of cognitive decline and possibly prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s disease over time.
“This work underlines how what we eat can quickly affect brain health and how early interventions, whether through fasting or medicine, could protect memory and reduce the risk of long -term cognitive problems linked to obesity and metabolic disorders,” said Juan Song, author of the study and teacher of pharmacology at the School of Medicine of the University of North. “In the long term, such strategies could help reduce the growing burden on dementia and Alzheimer’s linked to metabolic disorders, offering more holistic care that treats both the body and the brain.”
Find out more: Just three days on a diet rich in fat can harm your brain
Obesity, metabolic disorders and cognitive decline
Obesity and metabolic disorders, such as diabetes, are linked to an increased risk of cognitive decline, with regimes rich in fats playing a role in both conditions. In fact, the consumption of a regime rich in fat can contribute to metabolic dysfunction and is also associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. But despite these narrow associations, the cellular and molecular mechanisms which connect obesity and metabolic disorders with cognitive decline remain uncertain.
To understand how a regime rich in fat has an impact on the brain, singing and a team of researchers turned to mouse models, discovering that the specialized cholecystokinin cells, or CCK interneurons, in the brain hippocampus increase their activity after the consumption of foods rich in fat, thanks to the reduced capacity of the brain to take in glucose. The increased activity of these cells alters the hippocampus – the region of the brain responsible for the formation of memories – after only a few days of consumption of fatty food.
“We knew that diet and metabolism could affect the health of the brain, but we did not expect to find such a specific and vulnerable group of brain cells, the CCK interneurons in the hippocampus, which were directly disturbed by exposure to a diet rich in short -term fats,” Song said in the press release. “What surprised us the most is at what speed these cells changed their activity in response to reduced availability of glucose, and how this change alone was sufficient to alter memory.”
Find out more: Too much sugar and fat can cause cognitive problems – even in young people
Fatty foods work quickly
To achieve their results, Song and other researchers have fed models of food mouse that reflected the regime rich in a human fat. Then they monitored brain activity and the behavior of mouse models. After only four days, the CCK interneurons in the brains of mouse models were hyperactive, altering the performance of mouse memory in the tests of their behavior. Surprisingly, the impairment was observed before one of the mice is gaining weight or developed a metabolic disease.
The study suggests that fatty foods have a multitude of short and long -term impacts on the brain, the first appearing “almost immediately”, according to the press release, and the second appearing over time. Not only that; The team stresses that short -term impacts could potentially transform into those in the long term with continuous consumption of foods rich in fats, because it is possible that the diet causes an increased risk of dementia and Alzheimer.
Other mice tests have revealed that the short -term impacts of fatty food consumption were fortunately reversible thanks to an intermittent fast. Restaurant the capacity of the brain to receive glucose, fasting has reduced the activity of CCK interneurons and has restored the mouse memory function – the results that highlight the potential of food and pharmacological solutions for memory problems linked to a diet rich in short -term fats.
According to the team, future research reveals more about the applicability of these solutions to humans and the links between obesity and metabolic disorders, cognitive decline and diet – all in the hope of improving human health, body and brain.
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