How junk food impairs brain function — long term.
Well, we all know that junk food is bad for us, don’t we!?
Yes, I hope so. But Western societies still consume vast quantities of junk food.
And what happens to the brain?
That is precisely the question that Anna Hayes and colleagues of the University of Southern California wanted to answer. There are piles and piles of research into how so-called Western diets (highly processed, high fat, and high sugar) are harmful for us and the correlations with all sorts of diseases including Alzheimer’s. But there is little knowledge of the precise mechanism that are at play in the brain.
I thought it was inflammation?
Yes, that is one mechanism in that this diet causes low level inflammation — basically stress in the brain. There are others such as the change in the gut microbiome. Suffice to say it is really not good for you.
But the question here is can we measure this over time and the impacts in the brain? This is precisely what the researchers did. They fed baby rats an unhealthy Western diet and then monitored the changes in the brain compared to a control group.
