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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.
except you look at a lot of the big branded beef jerky on the grocery store and they are full of added sugars as well.
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.
Pipe down, and eat your tofurky.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No, when your palette gets used to it again, it becomes bearable ("as hell" is quite an apt a metaphor, actually) — but not especially tasty. Ice-cream or chocolate will still trump "healthy" and an ongoing effort of will is required to stick to broccoli.
I'd say, the results of the study show, that we increase cognitive abilities, when experiencing shortages, rather than decline, when eating, what we want. Which makes sense from evolutionary stand-point — if you are starving, you better think harder about finding sustenance...
But, however one spins the same facts, we better adapt to the 21st century of plenty. All of our evolution to day was spent with starvation constantly looming and occasionally hitting whereas today — and only for the last few decades — "starving" became a synonym for "dieting". And that we view the thinness as beautiful today is not a result of some evil conspiracy, but simply a reflection of what is healthy today — for a never-starving Westerner. Our super-thin ideals of today would not have survived even in the 19th century... The still-hungry Africans, for a counter-example, still think "fat is beautiful" and Mauritania even has a concept of "wife-fattening".
It is not "cultural" — they just still remember famine, whereas the "golden billion" has blissfully forgotten it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Well, if all you seek out and eat in the US is fast food, or the lower level chain restaurants, then sure, that's all you're gonna get.
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. And there is really NO excuse for only having bad foods at home. Ever heard of cooking? (and no, I don't mean popping something pre-made/frozen in the fucking microwave).
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Would switching to a high veggie low fat diet reverse the trend and rebalence flora?
It has been stated weight gains happen with fecal transplants. So different flora over time could reverse
http://saveie6.com/
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
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.
So what??? Bread should be a TINY portion of your diet. At QFC and Safeway it is trivially easy to find whole-food products: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, meats, dairy...
Yeah well, I'm sure I would learn to really appreciate the taste of dogshit if all I ate every day was dogshit. But that doesn't make it tasty to anyone else.
That's okay. If nobody else likes it, more dogshit for you.
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.........
This misconstrues so much. First, beyond the fact that it's not up to you what the study shows (without even reading it no less), lets [i]assume[/i] that we experience an increase in cognitive ability during a shortage. You're deciding to conflate sustenance with "eating what we want" when the dialogue here is healthy vs unhealthy - as if to depict healthy eating as a shortage when, in actuality, poor eating habits cause malnutrition along with obesity. Ironically that's the true shortage in this context. I promise you that eating shit food isn't increasing your cognitive ability. Second, I'd say Western society's conception of what healthy is is not necessarily in line with media's depiction, which wavers anyway (this seems to be "generation ass", as hips are back in favor and seemingly larger than those of 40's pinups.. not universally of course, but prominently). Third, It's amusing to think that super-thin idols "wouldn't have survived" in the 19th century when the vast majority (i.e. the peasant class) had to do just that, farming and supplying meats to the upper-class while surviving on soup and hard bread, laboring for long hours. The revolution in eating habits for proletariat didn't really occur until the 20th century for most of the world, mind you this happened quicker in the U.S. than, say, Italy.
I think you meant you'd eat it like Doritos if they added flavoring they way they do to junk food.
It would be interesting to see what we came up with if a significant number of people knew that working on things they're interested in was a viable choice. You could also no longer use the excuse "but I have to eat" for doing unethical things at the behest of your employer. Which is why it will probably never happen.
No, when your palette gets used to it again, it becomes bearable ("as hell" is quite an apt a metaphor, actually) — but not especially tasty. Ice-cream or chocolate will still trump "healthy" and an ongoing effort of will is required to stick to broccoli.
Speak for yourself: tasty vs bearable is learned behaviour. I travel a fair bit, and the USA is a major outlier in what's regarded as tasty. To many (maybe most) Europeans, typical mainstream US food is pretty unpleasant - too much salt, too sweet, too over-seasoned, too thick, too bright, too colourful, too large, too in-your-face. That's why many products like soft drinks are formulated differently for European markets to match local tastes.
Personally, I'll take a light lunch in an Italian trattoria, a French bistro, a Greek Taverna or a Spanish tapas bar ahead of your ice-cream or chocolate any day, thank you very much. I could happily live the rest of my life without chocolate, but the thought of a tomato-free existence would destroy my soul.
I guess it depends on what you consider to be healthy. A good peasant bread, cheese, tomatoes, olives and wine is what I consider to be healthy food. Eggs are healthy. The only food that is unhealthy are those pre-packaged with tons of salt, sugar and fat and have had all it's nutrients removed in the cooking and preserving stages.
Pasta and red sauce is healthy.
Roasted chicken is healthy.
Avocado is healthy.
Walnuts and almonds are healthy.
Sushi is healthy.
There's tons of delicious healthy stuff.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
So many people in the US South, whose cooking and tastes are high on both, keep voting against their own self-interest....
mark, wondering what the average diet of a libertarian is
It certainly is up to the reader (myself include). The study offers the following finding: people with plenty of fats and sugars have lower cognitive ability than those, who do not. Whether
is a debate as sensible, as arguing about a half-empty/full glass.
That the study makes no distinction between the two vastly different classes of foods — sugars and fats — leads me to the conclusion, that the key here is the total caloric intake, not the particular foods.
Yes, they had to do that, and perished periodically from famines.
Of course — because the US is a vastly richer (and better governed) country, which maintained a far better standards of living than others throughout its history.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Oh! Was I supposed to read the article?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond