Fatty Foods Affect Memory and Exercise Performance

Death Metal writes "Eating fatty food appears to take an almost immediate toll on both short-term memory and exercise performance, according to new research on rats and people. Other studies have suggested that that long-term consumption of a high-fat diet is associated with weight gain, heart disease and declines in cognitive function. But the new research shows how indulging in fatty foods over the course of a few days can affect the brain and body long before the extra pounds show up."

Comments

Anecdotal evidence supports this

[Swizec]

Anecdotal evidence everyone is probably familiar with seems to confirm this. When you're at the office all day and decide to eat a pizza for lunch it seems very obvious that you're at least half way out of commission for the rest of the day. I had always assumed it was simply because one gets so stuffed from pizza, but apparently the high fat content played a big role too.

Needless to say, I'm sticking to my low-fat diet with even more fervor henceforth ... although an occasional blunder feels SO good! Not while working though, this study clearly showed that.

I just had a Mars bar and I want to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

... erm, i forgot.

Must be early onset alzheimers

What's worse

[hansraj]

On top of all that fatty food leaves you feeling bloated.

That is why for my short-term memory loss and performance hit in physical activities I prefer marijuana.

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, what was I going to say? Oh well, back to eating.

Grace period

[illm]

Switching your intake to a low-carb-high-fat diet involves a grace period a week or so. This is to allow the body to "reshape" itself to use the fat as an energy source instead of the previous intake of carbonhydrates.

Symptoms of switching away from carbs to fat include; fatigue, dizzyness, high irritability and headache.

"After only a few days on the high-fat diet, the rats performed 30 percent worse on the treadmill. After five days of testing, the treadmill performance of the rats eating fatty foods had declined by half."

Any bells? So, nothing previously unknown to the lowcarbers here.

Personally, I tried the lowcarb-highfat diet about half a year ago, and actually did lose a few kilos, but the most interesting change for me was that I felt more awake, my stomach stopped producing funny amounts of gas, and never ever felt hungry. I got tired of it after a while though - I kinda missed the occasional potato and pasta - so I've taken back the lost kilos again. These days I just don't shun fat and avoid sugary stuff. Both me and my previously upset stomach feels great now.

more high carb propoganda

[romeanthem2]

More fat is bad rubbish. I am supposed to believe that eating saturated fat is bad but of course eating lots of carbs is good. Of course the first thing the body does to excess carbs is to convert them to saturated fat in the liver. Why not just eat fat directly and give the liver a break, whilst maintaining my insulin sensitivity? If any one still believes the lipid hypothesis I suggest you log onto Hyperlipid and spend some time reading.

Re:more high carb propoganda

[Delifisek]

Totally agreed.

3 years before I start to work from home. My daily activity nearly zero. I sit chair every day. And I don't do any sport activity. Even barelly walking. Then I begin to gain weight. Probably I reach somewhere 125 kg.

2 months before I watch a documentary about eating Macs and dropping weight. Commentor says he was on low carb diet.

So I say why not ?

I Cut every carb, coke, icecream, sugar, bread, rice, pasta, cookies, chips even water mellon. And begin to eat meat etc.

Guess what ?

I'm melting man. I'm melting while I eat same amount of food. My skin get better, I do not get hugry as before. My wounds heal faster.

Now I'm about 110 kg. It was very nice to drop weight while, sitting and eating barbecue.

I just wonder what if I goto fitness center and do for example one hour working a day.

Just drop your blood sugar level. Your body will recover.

Re:more high carb propoganda

[Anne Thwacks]

I was 250kg, then I took up alligator wrestling as a hobby.

Now I have lost an arm and a leg, and my weight has fallen drastically ...

Re:more high carb propoganda

[value_added]

I Cut every carb, coke, icecream, sugar, bread, rice, pasta, cookies, chips even water mellon. And begin to eat meat etc.

It's worth pointing out that doing so means your grocery bill will tend to go up. Not a bad thing, of course, but in a world where people demand things being cheap (i.e., subsidised, or the product of industrial farming techniques), it may be difficult for the average person to see the value in doing so. Chickens, for example, were once upon a time considered "special" and eaten at most once per week. Today, we expect them at the drive-thru window.

Moreover, in tough economic times, the average person will want to lower the amount of money they spend, not increase it for "non-essentials" like healthy food. Poor people doubly so. From least to most expensive, our buying choices could be crudely summarised as:

1. Dirt
2. Refined Sugar or Corn Syrup
3. Carbohydrates
4. Protein
5. Fruits and Vegetables
6. Fats (Olive Oil, Butter, etc.)
7. Nuts
8. Champaign, Caviar or Hookers

So replace protein with carbohydrates if you can. I have lots of wealthy friends who do just that and demand fresh fish (fresh grilled salmon seems the most popular choice) on a daily basis. Those same people are quick to offer up factoids such as "Walnuts are a perfect food" without worrying that they cost more per pound than expensive cuts of meat. By contrast, the poor people I know typically limit their choices to refined sugar and carbohydrates.

Granted, protein is available from different sources (beans, dairy, meat from various animals) at different costs, but most of will always prefer the meat variety to form the basis of our diet.

As for the conclusions of the article, I'd raise the question that if you've succeeded in getting a happy dose of fat into your system at one indulgent sitting, what need or motivation is there for cognitive thinking? It may be that your body is telling you to just enjoy the feeling and do nothing else. Put another way, eating a pint of ice cream is not unlike smoking a joint; it's supposed to be its own reward. If you expected to be doing something else (like drive, work, operate heavy machinery, or do math), then maybe you made the wrong choice. ;-)

Re:Captain Obvious

[Thanshin]

Eating unhealthy foods causes health problems. News at 11. Try the new octo cheese burger while you're waiting.

The news actually are a cleverly disguised "Fat people are dumb".

High-fat, but no carbs

[sopssa]

However how does it compare when you drop almost all carbohydrates and bring your body into ketosis? I always feel really energetic then, after "fat" food too. This doesn't include such fatty food than pizza and deep fried fries, but high-fat and high-protein meat, fish, ground beef and so on. Pizza and such is completely different, I think it comes from when you mix fat and carbohydrates (either "good" or "bad" ones) together.

Also my stomach feels a lot better when eating high-fat/protein food with next to nothing carbs. I also get much more work done that way when I feel great after eating too.

So definitely there is differences in body when eating fat together with carbs, and when eating fat but without carbs.

Re:High-fat, but no carbs

[sopssa]

Just to note before someone comes saying, that drop to ketosis takes 3-5 days and you shouldnt eat more than 15-20g of carbs a day. After 6-7 days your body has adjusted and you start feeling really really great and you have a lot more energy than previously, and wont hungry all the time. But it takes that period to adjust your body into it, so you cant just try it 1-2 days and say you feel like shit.

Re:High-fat, but no carbs

[jamesh]

Low or no-carb diets are bad.

I remember watching a doco on low-carb high protein diets. They found that atkins was on to something, not with the low carbs but with the high protein. The group that had to have a lot of protein but could additionally eat anything else they wanted didn't actually end up eating much of anything else. The high protein seemed to cut down the cravings for snacks, snacks being what ruins most otherwise good diets.

Simple equation: energy in == energy consumed.

I don't think it's quite that simple for everyone. I've been through periods of eating really badly (high fat takeaway for lunch every day for weeks on end) and then really healthy, with identical exercise level (~none), and my weight never moved outside the 69-71kg range that i seem to have been stuck at for the last 5-10 years. I've added up the calories I intake vs the exercise I do (next to none) and by all calculations I should be a balloon. 69-71kg would be about right for my height if there was a bit more muscle on me.

If I don't eat very regularly (eg breakfast at 8am, i'll need something fairly substantial by 10am) I get the shakes and start feeling really really spaced out and crave sugar. If I continue to not eat it kind of settles down and I start feeling a bit normal again but a few hours later i'll get a horrible headache that won't go away for days even with painkillers (although something with a lot of caffeine helps at bit if it goes that far). I've been tested for diabetes and hypoglycemia several times over the years and nothing has showed anything out of the ordinary... i assume i'm just a bit more sensitive to small drops in blood sugar levels than most people.

Re:High-fat, but no carbs

[bjourne]

And two paragraphs down which you conveniently omitted. :) The anti-ketosis conclusions have been challenged by a number of doctors and adherents of low-carbohydrate diets, who dispute assertions that the body has a preference for glucose and that there are dangers associated with ketosis."

It appears that the "no-carb diet" controversy is far from settled.

Re:High-fat, but no carbs

[JasterBobaMereel]

If your body takes in more fat/protein/carbs etc than it needs it will either excrete them or store them... which it does depends partly on your genetic makeup, but more so on your recent pattern of diet/exercise

If you have a healthy balanced diet and do adequate exercise (not very much, and could be normal activity) then occasionally eating unhealthy foods will do no long term harm, your body will not need the extra, and does not think it needs to store it so will simply excrete the excess ....

If you starve yourself of food, or one type of nutrient then when you eat it your body will store any excess, because it thinks times are hard, this is why proper nutritionalists do not recommend mono diets (like Atkins) and when they do advise short term unbalanced diets, then they make sure you come off them slowly so this reaction does not occur ...

Atkins has been proved to work for two reasons, you are on a diet and are having to watch what you eat and you tend to order ordinary meals and then not eat part of it ... so you eat less, and it is high protein so you are getting enough energy so you feel full ....so no snacking, but as a long term diet it is unhealthy and when you stop you can't just go back to a unheathly diet ....

Re:High-fat, but no carbs

[machine321]

We knew about the affects of a high-protein diet LONG before Atkins.

Perhaps, but my wife still won't fall for it.

Re:High-fat, but no carbs

[tchuladdiass]

I always wondered why many people are constantly in a particular weight range, no matter what, even if that range is about 20 - 30 pounds higher than what it should be. My theory: Say you start putting on extra weight. That is more weight you have to carry around during your normal activities. So you burn more calories during the day, which causes you to drop back down to the upper end of your range. Now if you go on a health kick (not necessarily a crash diet) and drop 30 pounds, then go back to your normal routine. All of a sudden you are burning fewer calories a day than you did prior to losing weight, simply because you aren't carrying that extra 30 pounds with you wherever you go.

So the solution to effective weight loss? Wear a weighted belt around your waist. Every time you drop 5 pounds, add another 5 pound weight to your belt (or add the weight to it first, and you will naturally lose that 5 pounds without trying).

Re:High-fat, but no carbs

[Guse]

1) It's unfortunate that you had to stoop to an ad hominem attack in an otherwise decent rebuttal. It really is.

2) You're basically wrong on virtually every account. There *is* ample evidence that low-carb diets are bad for your brain, heart and kidneys.

3) The Inuits lack of farming couldn't have much to do with the fact that they lived in the freakin Arctic Circle, could it?

"Again, there is ample evidence to show that some people (as in many thousands) have consumed well under 2000 calories a month for decades, in the form of carbohydrates, while doing hard physical work - and wound up grossly obese. Just as others (usually much wealthier) have eaten far more than 2000 calories a day for years, while doing little or no physical work, and remained lean and fit."

Really? Under 2000 calories a day and hard work and gotten obese? Please provide this ample evidence.

My theory, developed after I lost 60 lbs, was that whenever you have two things that are diametrically opposed like low-fat, high carb/low-carb, high fat is that the answer is most frequently in the middle. Moderation in both (including carbs, a necessary source of energy) leads to great results. But, that's just my anecdotal evidence talking.

Re:High-fat, but no carbs

[jandersen]

What you replyto may have been uniformed and biased, but you are not much better, I think - you sound almost religious.

AFAIK carbohydrates in any form are not required nutrients. At least, there are plenty of documented cases of people living long, happy, healthy, productive lives without ever tasting them. The Inuit, for instance, used to regard plants as unfit for human consumption, and would never touch them unless they were starving. OTOH there is evidence that excessive carbohydrates (or possibly the wrong kind) can gradually bring about insulin resistance, obesity, and eventually diabetes.

You know wrong, then. Humans, being apes, basically, need a typical ape-diet: mostly fruits and other not too tough plant material supplied with some meat, most of which ought to be insects. Fruits contain lots of carbohydrates, and meat actually contains some too; it's not all protein. I don't know where you have that about the Inuit from, but I find it unlikely that they would shun any source of food, when they live in such harsh conditions. When you put forth such claims, you really need to give proper sources, otherwise they are simply not convincing.

What it is that brings on insulin resistance and diabetes is still very much open to debate. The only thing we are almost certain we know is that a varied diet and exercise is the best way to avoid it. The modern western diet is incredibly montonous in terms of its basic composition, and more so if you live on processed food, which is more or less made from industrial waste and additives (OK, I admit it, not 100% accurate, but still uncomfortably close).

Simple equation: energy in == energy consumed

There is nothing wrong with this equation as such; it really underlies it all. Where the complications come in is in how to consistently eat less than we need for a prolonged period of time, when we are surrounded by easy calory-options all the time. Any one who has been on a diet knows how desperately hard it can be - and it is not even the feeling of hunger that is bad, it is the fact that your body plays all sorts of tricks to make you abandon your diet; suddenly your motivation is all gone, suddenly you don't feel fat at all and so on. No, it really is as simple as eating less than you need, and that really is so difficult.

Again, there is ample evidence to show that some people (as in many thousands) have consumed well under 2000 calories a month for decades, in the form of carbohydrates, while doing hard physical work - and wound up grossly obese. Just as others (usually much wealthier) have eaten far more than 2000 calories a day for years, while doing little or no physical work, and remained lean and fit.

Hard evidence, please? As you say, it is "ample", so it should be easy to produce. And I think you probably mean 2000 kcal a day; only dead people consume less than 2000 kcal a month, and they don't generally look fat too me.

Yes, that's right - join the bulk of the scientific, medical, and political establishments - and the big food manufacturers who fund them - and blame the victims. It might be possible to do as you suggest if they would tell us what constitutes a healthy diet. Most intelligent, open-minded people who have taken the trouble to inquire about the subject and researched it widely for years must be quite bewildered by now.

So, you don't include the medical scientists in those that have researched the subject for years? Interesting. Still, you are misrepresenting things here - what the scientists say has not varied wildly over the years; the fact that you have to eat less than you need if you want to lose weight has never changed; but as we learn more about why people eat and how the body reacts to it, we also have to change our opinion about how to manage the difficult task of losing weight in a healthy way. And of course it doesn't help a lot that every time a new scientific finding is published, it is taken away by some money grabbing idiot, who then trumpets it as the new, sensational diet of the moment.

Re:High-fat, but no carbs

[scorp1us]

You are too dependent on your stomach to supply your blood sugar. I had this same problem in my 20s. While it is scary to be shaking if you wait a few hours you'll be fine. However it is no way to live going to meal to meal and just barely making it before the shakes set in.

Insulin stores excess blood sugar to fat so you don't going into a coma. Glucagon is the opposite, taking fat and putting it in the blood stream as sugar. Insulin work on short (15 minute) time scales. Gucagon work on hour/day time scales. It takes 3 days of no carbs to bring your glucagon levels up to the point of fully being able to provide al the blood sugar you need. Both glucagon and insulin have an inverse relationship. If your insulin is high, then glucagon is shut off. (You don't want it constantly providing blood sugar when you are about to go into a coma.

So what is happening in your body is called hyperinsulinism. You eat something, feel better, you burn some store the rest. Then your blood sugar drops below cellular satiation level. You feel hungry and get the shakes. You reach for more food as the cure... The same thing happens with rats. Take a rat, put it in a cage and provide it two sweetened water sources, one sugar, and the other a synthetic 0 calorie sweetener. At the start of the experiment, it will drink from both equally. But of the course of a few days it will only be drinking from the sugar one. Insulin makes you dependent on insulin because of its fast acting nature compared to glucagon.

I broke the cycle by not eating simple carbs. No sugary drinks, and no breads. Complex carbs like beans are ok. Basically a low-glycemic index diet is what all adults should be on. One benefit of this is with my near-zero carb diet, I can go an entire day without eating an not be hungry or tired. My glucagon level stays elevated and I am in a constant fat-burning mode. If I get hungry it is only because I ate carbs about 4 hours before. (I do allow one day a week to let loose and have cake. It seems that at zero carbs all the time I'd get dizzy and sick whenever I ate them because the rush of blood sugar was too much. I lost my lunch a couple times that way) If you are hungry, the best thing to eat is something that will slowly digest with lasting energy. Proteins are great but won't fix your immediate hunger. The trick I do is this: liquid carbs - like a Vitamin Water 10 (25 cals/bottle) fast acting, then eat something at the same time to provide a longer-duration energy source.

I cannot recommend a low-carb diet enough. It is so liberating. The Aborigines have a saying along the lines of "Western man looks at his watch to see when to eat" which highlights the differences between our diets. We are constantly looking for our next meal because of the carb/insulin dependence caused by our diets. They don't share the diet or the addiction. FYI: A person with a modest 10% body fat can live for a whopping 30 days on those reserves. What you experience in hunger intensity is not proportional to your survival predicament.

FYI: the "Atkins" diet was known to work in the 1800s, when it was called the "Banting diet" after Charles Banting whose physician recommended it. It worked so well he went about sharing it with the world.

I highly recommend everyone read "Good Calories Bad Calories" by Taubes, which is a fantastic book that critically examines what the mainstream media claims about diet.

Re:High-fat, but no carbs

[Tenebrousedge]

I will not dignify that remark by asking for a citation.

Why was it that European civilizations took over large parts of the world, and not e.g. the Chinese or Indian peoples?

'Advanced' civilizations are far more dependent on horses, iron, livestock, and certain grains than innate intelligence. You can't think up iron deposits no matter how much rice you've been eating.

How did European settlers displace the Native Americans? With pigs, cows, sheep, barley, wheat, steel, and the diseases that come from living with livestock. They did not introduce agriculture to the Americas, nor did they outthink the native populations. They simply had a better set of native species to work with.

Please read Guns, Germs, and Steel, to obtain a general overview of the subject at hand. If you must justify your latent racism somehow, then I imagine any criticism of that work would provide you with a base for further argument.

Motivation

[bencollier]

No-one seems to have spotted the fact that the rats who were being fed fatty food may have had less motivation for completing the maze, given that the reward was more food. Am I missing something or is this entire study invalid?

I suppose the type of fats or source should matter

[Shivetya]

because while I can chow down on an ounce, usually more, of almonds which are high in fat it does not "seem" to affect me as much as if I am eating foods the pizza you mentioned.

I am curious what the break down is. As in, which fats are good/bad for the tests they performed. Now I will state in my case I bloat less from fatty foods compared to carb laden food and I have far less trouble with my sugar levels as well. I think we are missing some key information from this article.

Experiment flawed - *change* in diet the cause?

[Ed Avis]

From the article:

To determine the effect of a fatty diet on memory and muscle performance, researchers studied 32 rats that were fed low-fat rat chow and trained for two months to complete a challenging maze.

And then later, some of the rats had their diet changed to a high-fat diet and others kept the same diet as before. But perhaps they just performed worse because the diet differed from what they were used to? To make a fair experiment there should also be a group of rats who were fed on a high-fat diet for two months during training, and then switched to low-fat for tests. Perhaps their performance would worsen too.

what fats?

[tick-tock-atona]

I'm assuming these are saturated or trans-fats, which are known to cause disease and are already suspected to contribute to neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease, rather than polyunsaturated fats are supposedly good for you. Neither TFA nor the study abstract indicate what they actually fed the rats.

Well.. Article is right, kind of..

[sw155kn1f3]

It's very surprising that these scientists don't read basic articles in their field.
Anyone who read at least one article at this topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index knows that eating 50% fat, 50% carbohydrates will make your insulin spike like hell, much worse than just eating all that fat and carbs but separately separated by 2-3 hours.
Insulin spike will cause direct hit on your glucose levels to the point of hypoglycemia, hence the fatigue and slow brain + longterm increased body fat. As a result you're hungry very fast and still have no energy.
Just eat them separately.
Or take more powerful approach with carb cycle diet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carb_cycling
It works. I feel great all the time. Was not the case on Atkin's or any other food plan I ever been on (was obese since childhood, now not).

Re:n/a

[Anoraknid the Sartor]

.. all the participants were rats.

Make what you will of how that applies to Americans...

(Although applying the results of animal studies to humans is always best done with caution.)

Grain lobby propagaunda

[mr_stark]

I'm always amused when this kind of research comes out, talking about how fats are bad for you. Its much more complex than that. You really should be measure total calorie amount not just fat content. Too many calories is bad full stop. As other posters have mentioned the lack of energy is probably only a short term effect of switching to fat as a fuel source. I've switched over to a high fat/low carb diet (F50/P30/C20) and have no issues with lethargy or lack of concentration. I've got no problems with day to day programming tasks and haven't encountered any strength or endurance degradation in the gym.

I'm of the option that fat - esp saturated fat - is a much heather macro nutrient that carbs. The only carbs that the human digestive system can process in a raw state is sugar (think fruit), starch can be converted to sugar also but most of the other so called healthy carb sources needs processing before humans can consume them. Potatoes have to be cooked (try eating raw potatoes and see what happens), as does rice, wheat and grains have to be ground down into a powder. Fat on the other hand can be eaten straight off the animal. Humans aren't evolved to eat significant amounts of carbs.

Re:Grain lobby propagaunda

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm always amused when people who think they know better make fools of themselves.

There are plenty of carbs that humans can digest without cooking -- fruit, nuts, vegetables. Not all grains have to be ground down into a power, either -- ever heard of the term "whole grain"? And what is wrong with the need to cook a food before you can eat it -- how does that automatically make it "bad"?

If your diet works for you, that's good. But please don't spread bullshit.

Re:I suppose the type of fats or source should mat

[JasterBobaMereel]

Polyunsaturated fats - Good
monounsaturated fat - Good
Staturated fats - Bad
Trans-fats - Very Bad

Almonds mostly contain monounsaturated fat which can lower your cholesterol ....

Ridiculous

[Fished]

This is typical of the sorts of studies that try to support the low-fat hypothesis. In this case, the problem is that they didn't give sufficient time to adjust to the new diet. It appears that the rats were only given 4 days to adjust to the high-fat diet, compared with weeks on the low-fat diet. The problem is that when the body switches from burning carbohydrates to fats, the fuel the brain uses changes from glucose to ketone bodies. As anyone who has tried a low-carb diet can tell you, for the first several days (a week or two for some people--no idea what it would be for rats) you feel rather dull and drained for several days. Then one day the "brain fairy" arrives and you have more energy, physically and mentally, than you've had in years.

I spent years as a near-vegetarian on a very low-fat diet and what it got me was literally 200 lbs. overweight and type 2 diabetes. I've now lost 46 lbs. on a low carb diet getting about 60% of my calories from FAT, my type 2 diabetes is basically cured, and I feel better than I've felt in at least ten years. My lipid profile has also improved dramatically.

Every study done thus far looking at low-carb vs. low-fat has shown that low-fat is a failure (read the studies, not just the blurbs or the conclusions). Think about it... over the past 20 years, Americans have reduced their fat intake by 25% and type 2 diabetes has increased by 1000%, heart disease has become MORE prevalent, strokes have become MORE prevalent. The Low Fat experiment is a failure. And make sure to read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes.

Re:Captain Obvious

[radtea]

Eating unhealthy foods causes health problems

The study is actually very poorly designed and proves nothing of the kind. Your comment is an example of confirmation bias, as are the researcher's conclusions.

A well-designed study would start half the rats on the high-fat diet, the other half on the low fat diet. Train them to run the mazes, then switch the diets.

It may well be that the effect being observed here is "massive sudden dietary change reduces cognitive performance."

If you consider how uncomfortable and distracted you'd probably be if you were subject to this kind of violent dietary manipulation you'll see how plausible the alternative explanation is.

I share your biases with regard to fatty foods, but that doesn't mean I can't tell a poorly designed study when I see one.

Rat metabolism != human metabolism

[jpstanle]

Among all the other flaws with this study, I'm surprised nobody else has pointed out that this study was performed with rats who have a vastly different diet than humans. Freshly hunted meat certainly is not a primary portion of a rat's diet, whereas historically speaking, it is for humans.

a high carb diet

[circletimessquare]

is like punching your pancreas: it spikes sugars in the blood, abusing your insulin making mechanisms

a high protein diet

can destroy your kidneys, put you in ketoacidosis, etc., etc., and other such nonsense scare tactics

did you know water can KILL you!?

look: eat carbs: complex unprocessed grains, so your blood sugars rise and fall slowly

eat protein: good sources like fish and egg that have biotin and omega-3s for brain health

and eat fat: good fats like olive oil. you actually want fats in your bloodstream, that's what hdl is. ldl deposits plauqes, hdl sweeps them up

so what do you do about the food you eat? you eat wholesome complex little processed foods, you eat them in moderation, and you get exercise

that's it, that's the magic

for those of you slurping down mountain dew at 3 am and eating bacon cheeseburgers all day: you're taking years off your life. which might be fine with you. in which case, when you read articles like this, toast a cheer your devil-may-care lack of interest in taking care of yourself, and congratualtions on less women being interested in you and your health problems in your 30s and 40s

life is short, take care of your body. it hardly means much now, but you will hate yourself in your 60s if you treat your body so badly. or, you could feel like you are in your 30s when you are in your 60s. its up to you. no pain (temporary, addiction like withdrawal from unhealthy foods now), no gain (a longer, richer life)