Anyone who thinks that the effects of a bad diet are restricted to the waistline is mistaken. A diet rich in fatty and sugary foods causes damage to the brain, which can even persist even after a change in diet.
The conclusion is in recent research published in the scientific journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. In studies with rodents, scientists at the University of Southern California, in the United States, discovered that a diet rich in sugar and saturated fats unbalances a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. The substance is fundamental for the functioning of the nervous system and is involved in learning and memory storage.
“What we noticed in this paper, and in some of our other recent work, is that when mice grow up on a junk food diet, they have memory problems that don’t go away,” said Scott Kanoski, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. .
How the study was carried out
During the study, researchers fed rats a “junk diet” between 26 and 56 days after birth – a stage compatible with human adolescence, when the brain undergoes significant development. Other rats, in the so-called control group, received healthy food.
Then, during memory tests, the mice that followed the diet of fatty and sugary foods were unable to identify objects in a scene that they had explored days before. Rats in the control group demonstrated better results.
It also caught the researchers’ attention that these memory problems persisted even when the group fed on junk food switched to healthy food for 30 days, a time equivalent to adult life.
“Acetylcholine signaling is a mechanism to help them encode and remember these events, analogous to ‘episodic memory’ in humans, which allows us to remember events from our past,” explains lead author and nutrition researcher Anna Hayes. “This signal does not appear to be happening in animals that grew up eating a fatty, sugary diet.”
The researchers recognize that there are limitations to the study and that the results should not simply be extrapolated to humans, but they reaffirm the importance of this new area of study on food and the brain.
