Slashdot Mirror
High-Fat, High-Sugar Diet Can Lead To Cognitive Decline
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from Oregon State University have completed a study into how the sugar and fat content of a diet relates to cognitive flexibility. They found that diets with high amounts of either led to a decline in cognitive function. "This effect was most serious on the high-sugar diet, which also showed an impairment of early learning for both long-term and short-term memory." After four weeks on a high-fat or high-sugar diet, the performance of mice on various mental and physical tests started dropping. One of the scientists, Kathy Magnusson, said, "We've known for a while that too much fat and sugar are not good for you. This work suggests that fat and sugar are altering your healthy bacterial systems, and that's one of the reasons those foods aren't good for you. It's not just the food that could be influencing your brain, but an interaction between the food and microbial changes."
What’s often referred to as the “Western diet,” or foods that are high in fat, sugars and simple carbohydrates, has been linked to a range of chronic illnesses in the United States, including the obesity epidemic and an increased incidence of Alzheimer’s disease.
The part about fat has being disproved in the last several years.
This is just one study. We'll see if the results can be duplicated.
Healthy food is tasty as hell once your palette has had a chance to get used to it again. All I can ever taste anymore with so much food in the States is either salt or sugar/HFCS. It's so fucking gross.
And i quote:
As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
There's something to be said for laziness. It's easy to cook up a healthy, tasty, low-effort inexpensive meal, but convenience seems to trump all of that for a good chunk of the populace. Nobody knows or cares how to cook up a decent meal.
If you shop for and buy processed foods (the goop in the center aisles of the grocery store), again, yes, this is all your gonna get. But if you take a little time and look around, VERY good food choices can be had.
It's not that easy. At QFC and Safeway, EVERY bread they sell is overly sweetened. The only bread I've found without too much sugar is Trader Joe's rye.
Recent studies have researchers concerned that pot use in the under-18 crowd causes cognitive decline. Since pot is a Schedule 1 (most restrictive) substance in the US, I argue sugar and fat must also be put on Schedule 1 since our Oregon friends at OSU have discovered similar effects in youngsters.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
omce again human nutritional claims are being based on rodent model work, despite there being very little reason to expect the results to e replicable in humans. Stop giving PRELIMINARY and non-confirmed trials coverage as though they actually mean something. This trial only applies to mice at the moment. Maybe it can be extrapolated to all rodents in general, but the leap from rodents to humans directly is pure bull shit over reach.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Well...breads would indeed be one of the 'goop' type highly processed foods found in the center aisles I was talking about.
IMHO, it should be eliminated or at least made an extremely small portion of your diet. Try sticking to veggies, fruits and animal proteins. And yes, for some people I think a bit of dairy is ok. Just try to stick to foods that don't spike your blood insulin and for the most part, you should be ok.
If the label has ingredients you can't readily decipher, or pronounce, likely as not, it should not be something you want to consume.
Or, if the top ingredients include sugar or HFCS...you should likely pass that one by too.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I think you meant you'd eat it like Doritos if they added flavoring they way they do to junk food.