Western Diet Lowers Cognitive Performance

In teenagers, consumption of junk food can make the cognitive performance poorer, says study.

Researchers from UWA and the Telethon Kids Institute, conducted a study that involved 602 members of the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) Study, where each participant filled out a food frequency questionnaire at age 14, then underwent a battery of cognitive tasks three years later.

Junk Food Makes You Dumb and Forgetful
Experiments link junk foods to memory loss. Rats on a poor diet were found to lose memory in as early as six days.

It was found that the participants with a western dietary pattern, characterized by high intakes of takeaway food, red and processed meat, soft drink, fried and refined food, scored lower in cognitive tasks, particularly those involving reaction time/psychomotor function, visual attention, learning and memory.

Chips and crisps came in for a particular drubbing, as their high consumption was significantly associated with longer reaction times on detection tasks.

In contrast to their peers, study participants with a high intake of fruits and leafy vegetables had better cognitive performance, which according to lead researcher Dr Anett Nyaradi could be due to increased micronutrient content.

Fast Foods
Fast foods contain as much as 500 calories per serve which is even higher than the calories that a lunch or dinner should provide. Majority of Indians have a flawed perception of healthy food options.

She added that several factors could be at play in the diet-related decline in cognitive skills, including the level of omega-6 fatty acids in fried foods and red meat.

High intake of saturated fat and simple carbohydrates has been linked to impairment in the functioning of the hippocampus, a brain structure centrally involved in learning and memory that increased its volume during adolescence, said Dr Nyaradi.

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Source-ANI

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