Obviously, overeating unhealthy foods can lead to overweight. But looking beyond direct effects on expanding waistlines, our lab studies how mental functioning is related to diet. We’ve found a troubling link between a fat-rich diet common in the West and brain-related ailments that can actually impair our ability to avoid overeating.
Research in our lab and elsewhere has repeatedly shown that feeding rats a diet with levels of saturated fat and sugar much like those in the human western diet weakens the blood-brain barrier(BBB) and thereby allows potentially harmful substances to pass into the brain.
Do these deficits have anything to do with our ability to resist eating high-fat and sugary foods? We think they do.
The result of overeating could be a vicious cycle in which eating a western diet produces hippocampal dysfunction which weakens the ability to use internal cues to counter eating elicited by cues in the environment. This could lead to progressively more eating of western diet based on progressively greater deterioration of hippocampal function.
How to break this feedback loop is an important research question. But until other answers are found, the only protection we have is knowing that an excessive intake of a western diet may harm both our physical and mental well-being.
Read full, original story: Fat and sugar-heavy diet harms your brain – and makes you keep on eating
