Processed food promotes obesity Also harms the brain and affects memory

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Processed food promotes obesity Also harms the brain and affects memory

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Processed food promotes obesity Also harms the brain and affects memory.

Eating processed food not only promotes obesity, but also harms the brain and affects memory.

In modern society, in order to improve efficiency, increase taste, extend shelf life, etc., the food industry uses industrial manufacturing processes and chemical formulas to make food. This type of food is also called processed food .

Various snacks such as instant noodles, potato chips, biscuits, and cooked meats that contain preservatives are all processed foods. In recent decades, the consumption of processed foods worldwide has been increasing, which may lead to an increase in the incidence of chronic diseases and obesity in humans.

A short-term high-fat diet is enough to damage memory and increase the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines in the brain, which indicates a causal relationship between neuroinflammation and diet-induced cognitive impairment.

Similar to a high-fat diet, processed foods that have been packaged for a long time, added with various chemicals, and are rich in low-quality refined carbohydrates can also damage memory, and rapid memory decline may develop into Alzheimer’s disease. And other neurodegenerative diseases. Therefore, it is urgent to clarify the mechanism of this damage.

Aging is related to the decrease of the omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) in the brain . DHA has a variety of functions in the brain, including neuronal signaling, altering membrane structure and function, and the production of lipid mediators.

Importantly, DHA also plays an important role in reducing inflammation in the brain. Supplementing DHA can prevent or reduce various inflammatory damage to the brain . However, whether DHA can prevent cognitive damage and neuroinflammation caused by processed foods remains unclear.

Recently, a research team from the Ohio State University Institute of Behavioral Medicine published a study paper titled: Dietary DHA prevents cognitive impairment and inflammatory gene expression in aged male rats fed a diet enriched with refined carbohydrates in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

The study found for the first time that eating processed food for four weeks can cause a strong inflammatory response in the brains of elderly rats, accompanied by behavioral signs of memory loss, and supplementation with DHA can prevent memory problems and almost completely reduce the inflammatory effects of elderly rats. .

Therefore, it is recommended to limit processed foods and increase DHA-rich foods (fish, nuts, etc.) in the diet of the elderly to prevent or slow down memory loss.

The research team randomly assigned 3-month-old young rats and 24-month-old old rats to a normal food diet group (calorie distribution: 32% from protein, 54% from wheat bread, and 14% from fat) , processed food diet Group (calorie distribution: 19.6% from protein, 63.3% from refined carbohydrates (cornstarch, maltodextrin and sucrose), 17.1% from fat) or processed diet group supplemented with DHA .

The elderly mice on the processed diet showed signs of memory loss in behavioral experiments . They forgot to spend a few days in an unfamiliar space.

This is a sign that the memory function of the brain’s hippocampus is malfunctioning, and they did not show signs of memory loss.

The expected fear behavior of danger signals, which indicates that the amygdala is abnormal, because the amygdala is related to emotions, fear and anxiety, and event-related memories.

If this area of ​​the brain is dysfunctional, it may miss signals that predict danger and may lead to wrong decisions. However, these abnormal signs are not obvious in young mice.

Further research found that compared with young rats on any diet and old rats on DHA supplementation, in the hippocampus and amygdala of aged rats on a processed diet alone, it was combined with powerful pro-inflammatory proteins and other inflammatory markers. Related genes are activated significantly.

The DHA supplementation in older rats eating processed foods in the diet can prevent the behavioral signs of increased inflammation in the brain and memory loss .

They also found that the processed diet significantly increased the body weight of young and old rats, and that the body weight of old animals was significantly higher than that of young animals . DHA supplementation has no preventive effect on weight gain associated with eating highly processed foods.

This is a key finding: Just like humans, long-term consumption of highly processed foods will gain weight, and health problems such as high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes will follow.

But don’t think that you can enjoy processed foods with confidence as long as you take DHA. A better option to prevent the multiple negative effects of highly refined foods is to focus on overall diet improvement.

In summary, this work shows that a highly processed food diet can cause a strong inflammatory response in the brain, accompanied by memory loss, and DHA supplementation can prevent memory problems and almost completely reduce the impact of inflammation .

However, supplementing DHA can only remedy memory. To prevent negative effects, restricting the intake of refined carbohydrates is the kingly way.

Original link:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2021.08.214

Processed food promotes obesity Also harms the brain and affects memory

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