A Few Days of Fatty Foods Can Disrupt Your Memory, Causing Cognitive Impairment
Talk about fast foods. A new study suggests that a few days of consuming high-fat foods, like cheeseburgers and fries, could mess with your memory.
Reported in Neuron, the results lay the foundations for new interventions, treatments, and therapies that could potentially protect your mind in the short- and long-term, reducing your risk of cognitive decline and possibly preventing dementia and Alzheimer’s over time.
“This work highlights how what we eat can rapidly affect brain health and how early interventions, whether through fasting or medicine, could protect memory and lower the risk of long-term cognitive problems linked to obesity and metabolic disorders,” said Juan Song, a study author and a professor of pharmacology at the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine, in a press release. “In the long run, such strategies could help reduce the growing burden of dementia and Alzheimer’s linked to metabolic disorders, offering more holistic care that addresses both body and brain.”
Read More: Just Three Days on a High-Fat Diet Can Harm Your Brain
Obesity, Metabolic Disorders, and Cognitive Decline
Obesity and metabolic disorders, such as diabetes, are tied to an increased risk of cognitive decline, with high-fat diets playing a part in both conditions. In fact, the consumption of a high-fat diet can contribute to metabolic dysfunction, and is also associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. But despite these close associations, the cellular and the molecular mechanisms that connect obesity and metabolic disorders to cognitive decline remain uncertain.
To understand how a high-fat diet impacts the brain, Song and a team of researchers turned to mouse models, uncovering that the specialized cholecystokinin interneuron cells, or CCK interneurons, in the brain’s hippocampus increase their activity after the consumption of high-fat foods, thanks to the brain’s reduced ability to take in glucose. The increased activity of these cells impairs the hippocampus — the brain region that’s responsible for the formation of memories — after only a few days of fatty food consumption.
“We knew that diet and metabolism could affect brain health, but we didn’t expect to find such a specific and vulnerable group of brain cells, CCK interneurons in the hippocampus, that were directly disrupted by short-term high-fat diet exposure,” Song said in the release. “What surprised us most was how quickly these cells changed their activity in response to reduced glucose availability, and how this shift alone was enough to impair memory.”
Read More: Too Much Sugar and Fat Can Cause Cognitive Problems — Even in Young People
Fatty Foods Work Fast
To arrive at their results, Song and the other researchers fed mouse models foods that mirrored the typical high-fat diet of a human. Then, they monitored the brain activity and behavior of the mouse models. After only four days, the CCK interneurons in the mouse models’ brains were overactive, impairing the mice’s memory performance in tests of their behavior. Surprisingly, the impairment was seen before any of the mice gained weight or developed metabolic disease.
The study suggests that fatty foods have a host of short-term and long-term impacts on the brain, with the former appearing “almost immediately,” according to the press release, and the latter appearing over time. Not only that; the team stresses that the short-term impacts could potentially transform into long-term ones with continued consumption of high-fat foods, since it’s possible that the diet causes an increased risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Further testing of the mice revealed that the short-term impacts of fatty-food consumption were fortunately reversible through intermittent fasting. By restoring the brain’s ability to receive glucose, the fasting reduced the activity of the CCK interneurons and restored the memory function of the mice — outcomes that stress the potential of dietary and pharmacological solutions for memory problems connected to a short-term high-fat diet.
According to the team, future research will reveal more about the applicability of these solutions to humans, and about the connections between obesity and metabolic disorders, cognitive decline, and diet — all in the hopes of improving human health, both body and brain.
Read More: Food Can Trigger Positive and Negative Emotions — Here’s How To Regulate It
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