Junk Food and Dementia

 

There are all sorts of very good reasons for you to limit or, better yet, eliminate fast foods and highly processed foods from your diet. These include weight gain, increased risk for cancer, diabetes and heart disease, high blood pressure and many more benefits. Now a new study is adding yet another reason to the list. Ohio State University scientists report ultra processed foods actively harm memory function within older brains. 

The study is preliminary and more research is needed, but it raises a concern over the possible relationship between a diet high in processed foods and dementia. In the study, researchers fed a group of older rats a diet of highly processed food for four weeks and observed a strong inflammatory response and behavioral signs of memory loss. Importantly, younger rats fed the same highly processed diet did not experience similar memory declines.

The study used a specially crafted diet to re-create ready-to-eat human foods like potato chips, frozen foods, and deli meats containing preservatives. “The fact we’re seeing these effects so quickly is a little bit alarming,” says senior study author Ruth Barrientos, an investigator in Ohio State’s Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research and associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral health. “These findings indicate that consumption of a processed diet can produce significant and abrupt memory deficits and rapid memory decline has a greater likelihood of progressing into neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. By being aware of this, maybe we can limit processed foods in our diets and increase consumption of foods that are rich in the omega-3 fatty acid DHA to either prevent or slow that progression.”

If you need that last part decoded, it means eat more fish. If you can remember.