We will all be fed up with the effects that a diet rich in saturated fat and refined sugar has on our physical health. Now an unprecedented investigation has revealed that fast food has a very negative impact on our brain.
A study last week in International Journal of Obesity He first revealed that fast and processed foods have a negative impact on a very specific part of our brain.
Using a Virtual Reality System (RV), scientists at the University of Sydney (Australia) demonstrated a link between diets rich in fat and sugar and the Commitment of spatial navigation and memory.
In, 120 young adults underwent an inquiry into fat and sugar intake (DFs) so that researchers could evaluate their average intake approximately in the previous 12 months.
Wearing an RV helmet, participants had to navigate a three -dimensional maze with reference lanes to find a treasure chest at the end. As it details, they had to do this six times, and if they found the treasure chest in less than four minutes, they advanced to the next attempt – the final phase.
Even when adjusted to the BMI (body mass index) and working memory, participants with higher scores in terms of DFs performed significantly worse In the location of the chest than those who had less fat and sugar in their diets.
The results suggest that diets rich in fat and sugar cause some kind of hippocampus commitmentpreventing its spatial navigation and memory function.
“After controlling the working memory and the BMI, measured separately from the experiment, the intake of sugar and fat of the participants was a reliable indicator of the performance in the final test,” said the corresponding study author of the study Dominic Tranin New Atlas.
This means that even in relatively healthy people with normal IMC rates, a Inadequate diet can still impair cognition long before developing other metabolic conditions.
The investigators warned the causality is not yet proven. Still, the results are aligned with previous rodent studies that showed how rich fat and sugar diets have affected spatial learning and animal memory.
“The good news is that we believe this is an easily reversible situation. Changes in the diet can improve the health of the hippocampus And therefore, our ability to navigate our environment, as when we are exploring a new city or learning a new way home, ”said Tran
“We have long known that eating too much refined sugar and saturated fat increases the risk of obesity, metabolic and cardiovascular diseases and various types of cancer. We also know that these eating habits accelerate the appearance of age-related cognitive decline and elderly,” he concluded.
