Diet of Fast Food and Candy May Cause Alzheimer's

lurking_giant sends along a Reuters report on research out of Sweden indicating that a diet rich in fat, sugar, and cholesterol could increase the risk of Alzheimer's, at least in mice. "'On examining the brains of these mice, we found a chemical change not unlike that found in the Alzheimer brain,' [said] Susanne Akterin, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center... 'We now suspect that a high intake of fat and cholesterol in combination with genetic factors... can adversely affect several brain substances, which can be a contributory factor in the development of Alzheimer's.' ... These mice showed chemical changes in their brains, indicating an abnormal build-up of the protein tau as well as signs that cholesterol in food reduced levels of another protein called Arc involved in memory storage."

Comments

Obvious?

[Max Romantschuk]

I'm not surprised that generally mismanaging your body with bad nutrition would make it more likely to get some kind of degenerative disease... While it's nice to find hard evidence I think at least the geek population would be plain dumb so assume otherwise.

Now if we could only get governments to have some kind of taxes on the bad stuff, and subsidize the good stuff. I'd eat better if I could afford it, quite frankly.

Re:Obvious?

[kestasjk]

Yeah fast food and sugar causes alzheimers, how blindingly obvious is that?

Actually why is that obvious? Alzheimers is caused by the inability for neurons to clean up after themselves properly, it's not obvious at all and in fact this statistical link might not even be correct because we are currently only theorizing on the mechanism.

Why the first two replies are commenting on the obviousness of this I have no idea.

Re:Obvious?

[Craevenwulfe]

Yeah, Coke is WAY cheaper than tap water and mcdonalds/pizza hut cost me so much less than a chicken salad.

Re:Obvious?

[wisty]

Not a great idea. A lot of US agriculture industries have a lot of "government relations" clout. See Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?. Then we can talk about McDonalds, KFC, and Coca Cola.

Re:Obvious?

[JamesTRexx]

*tinfoil hat on*
Don't forget that it's easier to control the sheeple when they're not healthy and strong.
*tinfoil hat off*

Re:Obvious?

[vintagepc]

Stats tend to be quite useless when it comes to these things... Correlation is NOT causation!
e.g. if I eat an orange every day and my stress level goes down, does not mean the orange is reducing my stress!
Granted, it's possible, but it would be more reasonable to assume the brief break while I'm eating the orange is what is beneficial.

Re:Obvious?

[dgatwood]

It is somewhat naive to claim that those things are "really, really, really bad for you", though. While it is clear that these can have significant negative side effects on weight in some portion of the population if consumed in excess, the fact that this does not occur across the population universally, however, means that one could argue that the consumption of these foods by people who do not exhibit extreme weight gain from them might actually be helpful, and that not consuming energy-rich foods may be starving those people's cells. Everyone's body has different nutritional needs in terms of calories, etc., and painting with too broad a brush does more harm than good when it comes to understanding the issues involved.

For example, by some people's standards, caffeine is really, really bad for you. The same goes for alcohol. However, we now know that both of these substances decrease the risk of stroke and heart disease. Caffeine even decreases the risk of Alzheimer's and other neurological disorders. Following conventional wisdom and common sense to answer nutritional or medical questions frequently results in getting entirely the wrong answer.

Re:Obvious?

[six025]

It certainly is not "obvious'. Also, "fast food and candy" are attributes more likely associated with recent generations. Degenerative brain diseases typically affect older people who are much less likely to have lived that kind of lifestyle to a level that is impacting significantly on their health.

My aunty, at 72 years old, and slowly but surely is descending towards full Alzheimer's disease, yet her lifetime diet could hardly be considered "junk food". It was more like the typical diet of the working classes of her generation: "meat and three veg". Later in life (the last 15 years) she lived in the country (very clean air), took regular walks, and ate fresh vegetables from the garden every day.

Diet is very important for many reasons, but I don't think science will find a single smoking gun for these types of brain diseases. Rather there will be a number of highly complex interrelating factors that accumulate over a lifetime, some might even result from subtle behavioural issues, and some will be passed on in genetic code also.

Peace,
Andy.

Re:Obvious?

[gnud]

Why'd you take your tinfoil hat off?
Wait... they've gotten to you!

Re:Obvious?

[Hoi Polloi]

It is obvious? Really? Please tell that to my mother who is developing it after a lifetime of never eating sugar (genetic diabetes) and eating like a bird.

People love to jump to conclusions based on personal biases and zero evidence.

Re:Obvious?

[Bearhouse]

I'd eat better if I could afford it, quite frankly.

Yes, fast/junk food can be astonishly cheap, but that does not make it good value, especially if it's loaded with stuff that's bad for your health, (typically far too much saturated fats, salt and sugar).

But you can eat well, and cheap. For example, if you have no time to cook, get a slow cooker. Throw some natural rice and whatever else you fancy into it, (fish, meat, veg.), turn on & go to work. Hot meal waiting for you when you get home in evening. Ingredients will cost less than a hamburger, and most importantly you know what you put into it...

Re:Obvious?

[flynt]

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Statistics are, to the contrary, one of the best ways to study things such as these. Your hypothetical experiment is of course ridiculous. However, imagine that we had many subjects *randomly* assigned to eating oranges, and many subjects assigned to eating placebo oranges. They did not know which one they were eating, nor did whoever was evaluating their "stress levels". Now, what if the group assigned to eating oranges had a statistically significant lower stress level? Then our conclusion would be that oranges cause lower stress levels. Now, I did not read this experiment, but if mice were *randomly* assigned to different treatments, a causal conclusion could certainly be warranted.

Re:Obvious?

[morari]

I agree completely. I eat very well, and cheaply, as a vegetarian. All of my food is home-cooked and a large majority of it is even home-grown. I wouldn't be able to afford eating out two or three times a day because of the ridiculous price of processed foods. People aren't cheap, they're just lazy. Not being able to sit down and eat a proper meal with your family also says a lot about our culture in and of itself.

Re:Obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else is high in antioxidants? Fruits and vegetables. Chocolate -- especially the sugar-rich, cocoa-poor blends that the average person can occupy the bargain bin at your local supermarket -- is not a health food. To that extent, "common sense" is indeed correct.

Though, due to the absurdities of government packaging guidelines, chocolate bars may soon be putting health claims on their wrappers.

It also buggers common sense to say that a low-soda diet might be depriving anyone of beneficial caffeination. Find me a nutritionist who claims that the benefits of the caffeine in soda outweighs the negative of all those empty calories, and I'll drink a six pack of Mountain Dew, then eat the cans.

If caffeine does show itself to have enough nutritional value to be included in widely-accepted nutritional guidelines, then it would be far better to get it from coffee or tea, many of which have honest-to-Cthulhu anti-oxidants in them.

Common sense is a far better guide than you seem to suggest.

Re:Obvious?

[An Onerous Coward]

Are you saying that, among the three diets you're discussing (the standard American diet (SAD), the broad-stroke, nutritionally recommended diet (BSD), and the genetically individually-tailored, optimal diet (GIT)) that BSD is actually the worst?

Unless by "some portion of the population" you mean 90-95%. Anyhow, "energy rich" doesn't have to mean nutritionally poor. It doesn't even prevent a vegetarian or vegan diet. Look at the energy content of foods like peanut butter, avacadoes, honey, and olives, just to name a few. You can pudge out easily without resorting to junk food.

I have to ask, how can evolution account for these bizarre, junk-food-needing mutants, when true junk food has only been a significant force for a couple hundred years? If you're really insisting that "hey, this new-fangled low-junk food diet craze might not be healthy for everybody", I'll have to assume that you're getting kickbacks from McDonald's.

Re:Obvious?

[An Onerous Coward]

I think it would be sufficient to eliminate the existing subsidies for "the bad stuff". Current agricultural policy rewards vast overproduction of grain, especially corn. That grain has to go somewhere, because it represents way more calories than 300M people need. Grain can be converted into other foodstuffs, like meat, dairy, and alcohol, which are generally bad for us in the quantities we Americans consume. About half the corn we produce goes to feeding animals that will eventually feed us.

Since the demand for actual corn is still inadequate for consuming the amount of corn we produce, a lot of it gets turned into other products, like high fructose corn syrup, and ethanol for fuel. I don't see how either of those are doing us much good.

Eliminate the subsidies on corn, starting with the subsidies for the corporate mega-farms. Then require huge factory farms to abide by the same pollution regulations as any other industry. Finally, make the meat farms pay for their own water. Do these three things, and I can virtually guarantee that Americans will start getting slimmer and healthier. I would want to see all those things happen before we consider a junk food tax.

Re:Obvious?

[Max Romantschuk]

Sadly, the price on vegetables in Finland where I live is such, that it's a hell of a lot more expensive to go on a healthy diet. In fact, a chicken salad does indeed cost more than a McMeal, at least for the same energy content.

Re:Obvious?

[Hurricane78]

How is healthy food more expensive than bad food?
Bad food is always processed food. Processing costs money. Always.

The only reasons you pay more, are that most products that are marketed as healthy actually aren't, and those that are healthy are not marketed,
and that healthy stuff is produced in smaller quantities and sold by smaller shops. Those companies can't afford dump prices like that.

There is an easy rule for healthy food: Healthy = unprocessed.
That's mostly it. And I mean really unprocessed. Like, raw plants, fruits, meats. The best conservation method for them is to (shock-)freeze them.
A bit worse, but mostly acceptable are fermented foods. Like pickles, salami, (real!) cheese/yogurt, (real!) beer, and so on. (Pay attention to processed fakes, like, the most you can buy in a supermarket.)
Then come cooked foods. Here the heat has destroyed and denaturalized much. But if it wasn't too hot and/or too long, much of it is still OK. For example (real) whole-grain bread (NOT pure starch like "Wonderbread") never reaches the temperature to destroy the b-vitamins at the inside, because it "sweats" and thereby cools itself in the oven.

Everything that's processed more should be avoided. Conserves, preparations and so on. Cake, cookies and so on mostly are conserves, because white flour is a (very unhealthy) conserve. Sugars are preparations (in the chemical sense) and are the worst of all.
Fat is completely OK. As long as it's not saturated. You can recognize non-saturated fats/oils, because they have a higher liquidity. (This is why even the most natural margarine is often even worse than butter. They chemically saturate it, and then use more chemistry to add non-saturated fat to it. This process creates very unhealthy trans-fats.)
The only problem with fat is the high energy density. So combine it with something with low energy density if your body does not need such a high energy level. (So if you're a hard working Eskimo, you can eat all the fat you want. ;)

The trick with the carbohydrates is: The longer, the better. The easiest way is to use the glycemic load, because that value goes mostly parallel to the length of the molecules in the food. There are tables for this value.
Glucose, sugar, starch and non-whole cereals are the worst. The sugar inside eats up all the b-vitamins and gives the body none. But they are essential for a working brain.
And then they flood the body with too much energy for a too short time to be of use, and go straight to your fat pads. So it's the sugar that makes you fat and stupid.
Don't let them fool you by telling you that the body converts any carbohydrates to sugar and sugar is the energy molecule of the body. They are right, but what they don't tell you is all the stuff above. Especially the part that it's too much for a too short time and about the missing b-vitamins wreaking havoc in your system.

For the rest: The more variations the better. That way you get all the vitamins, minerals, micronutrients, and even the non-researched/unknown stuff. (Yes, we still don't know everything, even if some people behave as if.)

You see. It's quite easy to eat healthy and cheap and tasty food. Just get your ass up and prepare it yourself from non-processed stuff.

Oh, and to all my fellow Slashdotters: If you're eating too much and move not enough, 99% of the time, this is a pure psychological problem. You replace food for sex, love or something different. Or you simply do is because you're used to it. You don't need a diet or sport. You need a therapy and then some time with something that can replace your replacement. And then a change in diet, some sport and a girlfriend. :)

P.S.: I know all this because I'm working on it right now... ;)

Re:Obvious?

[Repton]

You wouldn't be able to afford it, because you'd eat at a reasonably nice restaurant. What if you just hit the chippie?

For poor people, who might not have enough money to pay rent, power, telephone, and food, but who still need energy to live and work, the equation might not be the same. A guy in England looked at the price of food per calorie. 100 calories worth of broccoli? 51p. 100 calories worth of chips? 2p. The equation was similar for other foods: cheap, fatty sausages give you more energy for your pound than good quality ones. I couldn't find the original article I read (a few months ago), but there's some quotes and links here: http://povertyblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/the-habitual-food-of-the-working-man-varies-according-to-his-wages/ . Another website I read claimed that in the Seattle area, the price of junk food had gone down slightly over the same period that the price of healthy food had increased by 15% or so.

Sure, it would be nice to buy vegetables (if the price of power goes down), or even grow your own food (if you're lucky enough to have a garden), but it may not be an option for everyone.

Re:Obvious?

[an unsound mind]

And he ate 5000 kcal per day.
If you eat double what you should according to nutritionists - and hey, last I checked McD also hands out the same info with every meal - it's no wonder your health starts failing.
You can eat yourself immobile with almost any food, and certainly any food including meat. No fault of McD's there.

Re:Obvious?

[sydneyfong]

I'd mod you you if I had mod points.

Except for this tiny tidbit -

How is healthy food more expensive than bad food?
Bad food is always processed food. Processing costs money. Always.

Conspiracy theories aside, not even the evil corporations want you to eat crappy food if healthier food can be made as cheaply. A lot of the commercial processing is to make the food last longer for storage, so that storage and shipment costs can be lower. So that the food products can be produced in bulk. Which means less expensive.

"Everything in moderation"

[macraig]

That's an ancient cliche but very relevant. Eating too much rock dust would cause cancer. So too would anything else consumed in a quantity that creates an imbalance.

Re:"Everything in moderation"

[Nefarious Wheel]

Such as refined sugar. It's amazing how hard it is to find a decent lunch in some places that isn't full of sugar. This bothers me because it did lead to a degenerative disease in me -- I'm diabetic. Didn't know any better growing up. We know better now, but there's this amazing momentum to the food industry -- will they change now that everyone knows? Without regulation? I'm not sure.

Re:"Everything in moderation"

[macraig]

Both my parents are Type II diabetic... meaning it wasn't hereditary. Been there, seen that, hoping it skips a generation.

That's not to say my dietary habits are perfect; I have an aggressive sweet tooth and love fatty junk like cookies, chips, and ice cream (Breyer's Natural Vanilla!), but I'm very conscious of it. I'm within 15 pounds of my ideal 150 weight, and never more than 40 past it. In my twenties I had 5% body fat and a 43 pulse (from cycling and hiking). Contrast that with my father who even in his early twenties, according to my uncle, would binge on pastries and crap, starve himself for a day or two, then go right back to eating more junk. I grew up watching him stand in the kitchen eating peanut butter mixed with honey! He was always obese, not surprisingly.

I think another cliche applies here, in my case: "sins of the father". Trying not to repeat them....

Re:"Everything in moderation"

[JaBob]

It's sad how many peoples' lives would be better by this little principal. I grew up with a fat parent and fat siblings. I would see the way that people would treat them and didn't want to be treated the same way. Looking for some advice, I ended up getting a subscription for a men's health magazine (also for the humor and the quality of the non-health articles) and over the course of about 10 years or so that I read it, the only thing that seemed to last was 'moderation.' It's funny that it not only works for food, but for exercise, work, hobbies, relationships, money, etc. Never too much or too little of anything. And everyone should have some vices, as long as you keep tabs on them and don't let them run amok, and they don't cause you to neglect any other aspect of your life. It's a dead simple rule to follow too.

Hogwash

[vtcodger]

Sounds like absolute hogwash to me. Now I have to head for the candy machine and get me one of those ... you know ... what are they called? ... things.

Re:Hogwash

[Afecks]

Whatchamacallit, the official candy bar of Alzheimer's sufferers.

Meanline, a control group of mice ...

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . fed on a diet of nicotine and alcohol, behaved in a way described by Dr. Akterin as "ladish", and taunted her with "tits out for the mice!"

This just in!

[forgoil]

Living will kill you.

Re:speculation

[geekmux]

The world is already full of FUD, comeback with real prof please.

You know the difference between "we suspect" and "we conclude"? About 10 million dollars.

Still looking forward to funding this with your hard-earned tax money?

Alzheimer's is the new Cancer?

[SoapBox17]

Sounds like Alzheimer's is going to become the "new cancer" where everything causes Alzheimer's. Can we just fastforward to the part where they admit they don't have a clue what causes it, please?

Re:Alzheimer's is the new Cancer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, actually they do research on what causes Alzheimer's because they don't know what causes it. You see, the scheme here is, if you don't know something, you do research, and then eventually you can come to a conclusion that answers your question.

I thought MSG and Nutrasweet caused it...

[PRMan]

Before anybody runs to diet products because they shouldn't have sugar: There's plenty of anecdotal evidence...

What about the sugar

[benj_e]

The title states that a "Diet of Fast Food and Candy May Cause Alzheimers" and the link states that "diet rich in fat, sugar, and cholesterol could increase the risk of Alzheimer's".

Yet in the body of the article we get this little gem: "We now suspect that a high intake of fat and cholesterol in combination with genetic factors ... can adversely affect several brain substances...".

Seems they conveniently left out sugar in the summary.

Interesting

Re:FDA

[gEvil (beta)]

The United States has a Food and Drug Administration. Think about it.

Of course they're in it together. Ever wonder why the US has a 100% mortality rate?

Bad scientist!

[durrr]

The study is quite flawed, she might as well feed them a diet "rich in rat poison" and conclude that it's quite fatal for the critters.

There are more studies needed, focusing on the separate compounds; is a diet rich in sugar bad? Is the sugar rich diet bad if the net caloric intake is low? Is the sugar rich diets bad when combined with nutritional supplements that cover the nutritional needs that sugar doesn't provide? Is a combination diet of sugar and fat worse or better than the single sugar or single fat ones? Is HDL cholesterol a equal factor as LDL cholesterol? In what manners do the mice metabolism change in the diets? Could these changes perhaps be blocked by medication, and if yes, will it prevent alzheimers?

The study tells us what we already know, a diet of junk food is bad for you. However, most likely a diet of junk food will kill you trough some other pathway before you develop alzheimers.

Re:Remember when eggs were bad for you?

[ravrazor]

Just to stop anybody on slashdot from switching from (or staying with) butter because this comment has been moderated "interesting"... margarine IS better...as long as you pick a decent one that's not 59 cents per 1 kg tub.
From the Mayo Clinic: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/butter-vs-margarine/AN00835
The American Heart Association: http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=532

And if you're looking for more info, here's how a search engine works:
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=butter+margarine

More bad research and unsupported conclusions

[brian0918]

As you'll find with almost all dietary research, the conclusions are baseless. They fed the mice junk food, and focused on only a couple measures of the contents of the junk food - "fat", cholesterol, sugar. What about the other crap in junk food? What about the nutrients you DON'T find in junk food but that are crucial to life? Do any of those components (or lack thereof) correlate better? Blank out. What types of fat are bad, and what types are good? Trans fat? polyunsaturated? monounsaturated? saturated? long chain, medium chain, or short chain? WHICH TYPES OF FAT?! Blank out.

Nope, you won't find that here. All fat is assumed to be bad. Other studies show all cholesterol to be bad, or all protein to be bad, or all carbs to be bad, without actually examining in detail the nutrient content of the food to find what component actually correlates the most with their definition of "bad".

Until a randomized, double blind study is done, the only thing you can conclude from this is that junk food correlates to a certain degree with Alzheimer's. Nothing can be said about "fat", nor about cholesterol, nor about sugar.

Re:More bad research and unsupported conclusions

[Neuronaut137]

"Correlation is not causation" is probably the most overused and misapplied tag on this site. If there is a control, and there was, then it's not just a correlation. Whether the cause is actually sugar/fat or some other difference between the "bad" diet and the control diet is subject to debate, but there is a cause here, not simply a correlation. And this is rodent research, so there is no such thing as a double blind study.

Re:More bad research and unsupported conclusions

[An Onerous Coward]

Why is it that, whenever the media gets a hold of a single research paper, then draws wildly inaccurate or overly broad conclusions, people accuse the study of misinforming the public? From the story:

"All in all, the results give some indication of how Alzheimer's can be prevented, but more research in this field needs to be done before proper advice can be passed on to the general public," she said.

You wrongly claim that the researchers "fed the mice junk food." What they actually fed them was a high-fat, high-sugar diet that bears some
nutritional similarity to a junk food diet. Again, from the story:

She studied mice genetically engineered to mimic the effect of the variant gene in humans, and which were fed a diet rich in fat, sugar and cholesterol for nine months -- meals representing the nutritional content of fast food.

Had they actually been feeding the critters junk food, including a hodge-podge of chemicals found nowhere in nature, then you could criticize the study for a lack of controls. I know that it's your inalienable right as a member of forum Slashdot to criticize the results of a study without

A) understanding how the study was conducted, or

B) understanding what the researchers are claiming, or

C) ever letting cross your mind the thought that maybe, just maybe, the people who make livings designing research experiments might have been smart enough to have accounted for the potentially confounding factors that you -- the untrained layman -- immediately spotted.

However, I still retain the right to find it annoying as hell.

Huh? Tax it?

[electrosoccertux]

Just wondering, who do you think you that you can run around getting government involved in everything? Seriously, tax it? Where did that come from? Because more government is all we need, right? If people want to put crap into their bodies, so be it.
Are you going to tax healthy restaurants too? Which menu items will you tax? I hope you won't tax the Salad+Vinegarett combos. I suppose if you support universal healthcare then you could make a case for taxing unhealthy foods. I love people that think we need the government to baby our citizens into behaving and eating well.

On a side note, I haven't RTA, but my guess is they correlate these two, and do not find the cause.
IANABiologist, but I've read some papers that make a fairly convincing case that Alzheimers is simply diabetes in the brain.
Fast foods (and candy of course) are terribly rich in starch. The starch/sugar-> glucose process takes very little effort on behalf of your body, and is very fast. Result is tons of glucose spikes in your blood, which over time decreases insulin sensitivity of your (muscles, brain). That's not even mentioning the free radicals (cancer agents) released when processing the starches.

So the answer is not a blanket "avoid fast food" (or, heaven forbid tax it) but when you go out to eat, choose what you eat carefully. Stay away from the simple carbs like fries, get proteins and fibers.

Re:Interesting

[lyml]

Damn, that explains Alzheimer's and cancer and diabetes and stuff over a hundred years ago; it was all the Big Macs and pizza slices and sodas... Oh, WAIT. They didn't have that stuff a hundred years ago. Wow, maybe the Government needs to fund a study on what caused say, Alzheimer's, one hundred years ago if it wasn't a Big Mac.

That a implies b doesn't mean that c cannot imply b.

I now hope to never hear this flawed argument again.

Re:EVEN MORE OBVIOUS!!!

[philspear]

So there remains nothing that is the absolute cause of altzheimers. Fast food joins genetics, aluminum, and all manners of early symptoms in that category.

It's already been blindingly clear for some time that alzheimers is a complex disease requiring many different factors to produce the disease. A little like cancer, in fact. Lung cancer almost certainly existed before smoking, and non-smokers can get it. Does that mean that smoking does not cause lung cancer? Only to complete simpletons.

It's important to identify risk factors for alzheimers to be able to prevent the disease and possibly even understand the mechanisms behind the cause.

Diet of Diet Foods Might Not Be So Good Either

[roguetrick]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy

I drink a ton of diet tea myself, and its all about weighing risks:

1) Eat a bunch of sugar and you get the terrible pains in old age that obesity and diabetes cause.

2) Eat a bunch of vegetables and you get viruses from the water used to irrigate them.

3) Eat a bunch of red meat and maybe get bowel problems.

4) Eat a bunch of chicken and contribute to the destruction of your environment due to a cavalcade of chicken shit.

5) Eat a bullet and dream without worry.