Watch out: Eating a high-fat diet can expand your waistline and shrink your brain.
Highlights
- High-fat diet can cause bigger waistline and smaller brain
- Following a high-fat diet for a long time can increase your body weight and shrink your brain size
- People who eat too many fatty foods are more likely tosuffer both obesity-related diseases and mental health problems
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High-fat Diet Linked to Bigger Waistline, Smaller Brain
An international study led by UniSA neuroscientists Professor Xin-Fu Zhou and Associate Professor Larisa Bobrovskaya has established a clear link between mice fed on a high-fat diet for 30 weeks, resulting in diabetes, and a subsequent deterioration in their cognitive abilities, including developing anxiety, depression and worsening Alzheimer’s disease.Mice with impaired cognitive function were also more likely to gain excessive weight due to poor metabolism caused by brain changes.
Larisa Bobrovskaya says that the research adds to the growing body of evidence linking chronic obesity and diabetes with Alzheimer’s disease, and is predicted to reach 100 million cases by 2050.
“Obesity and diabetes impair the central nervous system, exacerbating psychiatric disorders and cognitive decline. We demonstrated this in our study with mice,” she said.
In the study, mice were randomly allocated to a standard diet or a high-fat diet for 30 weeks, starting at eight weeks of age. Food intake, body weight and glucose levels were monitored at different intervals, along with glucose and insulin tolerance tests and cognitive dysfunction.
Genetically modified Alzheimer’s disease mice showed a significant deterioration of cognition and pathological changes in the brain while fed the high fat diet.
“Our findings underline the importance of addressing the global obesity epidemic. A combination of obesity, age and diabetes is very likely to lead to a decline in cognitive abilities, Alzheimer’s disease and other mental health disorders,” she states.
Source-Newswise