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Eating a high-fat diet affects more than just your waistline. A new study found that overloading on fatty foods for just three days can impact your memory, inflammation, and anxiety as you get older.
Obesity has been linked to dementia so researchers at The Ohio State University wanted to understand the connection between what we eat and cognitive decline. They found that even when the subject was not obese to start, they were still impacted by just a few days of eating fatty foods.
In the 12-week study, researchers fed mice food with 60% of calories coming from fat. Older mice showed signs of memory trouble after just three days which continued to exist throughout the three-month study. The same couldn’t be said for younger mice: at no point did the high-fat diet seem to affect their cognitive skills.
Of course, eating a fatty diet can also lead to changes in the way your body metabolizes food and affects your gut health. Researchers saw those changes in both young and old subjects, but they took far longer to occur than the impact to memory.
The researchers said the speed at which a high-fat diet impacted the body was “striking” and should be further investigated.
“We’re really looking for the effects of the diet directly on the brain. And we showed that within three days, long before obesity sets in, tremendous neuroinflammatory shifts are occurring,” said Ruth Barrientos, the senior study author.
Because the fat content had to be so high to run this study, the mice did not eat their typical grain-based food. The researchers note that future studies can examine whether a lower percentage of protein or carbohydrates could have played a role in the changes they saw.
You can read the full study in the journal Immunity & Aging.
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