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Brains of Overweight People Look Ten Years Older Than Those of Lean Peers, Says Report (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The brains of people who are obese or overweight appear to have aged an extra 10 years compared to their lean peers from middle age onwards, brain scanning research has revealed. The difference, scientists say, corresponds to a greater shrinkage in the volume of white matter, although they don't know the cause. It might be down to genes causing both brain-shrinking and obesity, or it could be that changes occurring in the brain lead to overeating. Either way, it does not appear to affect cognitive performance. White matter is tissue, composed of nerve fibers, that aids communication between different regions of the brain. The volume of white matter in a human brain increases during youth and then decreases with age for both lean people and those who are overweight or obese. But researchers have discovered that this shrinkage differs depending on a subject's BMI. "The overall message is that brains basically appear to be 10 years older if you are overweight or obese," said Lisa Ronan, first author of the study from the University of Cambridge. Despite a higher BMI being linked to a smaller volume of white matter, it did not appear to have any link to mental prowess, with no difference seen between lean and overweight or obese participants when they were subjected to IQ tests. Scientists from the University of Cambridge and Yale University have published their findings in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.
Since they said specifically that there seemed to be no differences in cognitive performance between the skinny subjects and the fat ones, this is unlikely to be the cause of the difference.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
As the article mentioned, they could not measure a difference in intellectual functioning, just a loss of white matter (nerve fibers) without a significant effect on cortex. They did not look at other brain structures, which are also involved in cognition. The loss of white matter may not relate directly to cognitive functioning because it can happen, for example, by a reduction in fiber thickness, without a loss of fiber number. Therefore, if being fatter affects nerve fiber diameter (or myelin sheath thickness) then this would show up as reduced white matter volume. But all the connections would still be there.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Having lost 150lbs over the past few years, I have read innumerable articles over that time about nutrition and have come to a conclusion: Nobody has any fucking idea what they're talking about. Carbs are bad for you, fat is bad for you, refined sugar is bad for you, all sugar is bad for you, processed food of any kind is bad for you, artificial sweeteners are bad for you, and on and on. I can find an article and a study to back up just about any claim you care to make about nutrition. It's all bullshit pseudo science.
Here's the consensus: Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight, and try to eat some vegetables every once in a while to ensure you get some vitamins. That's about it.
If you're having trouble gaining weight, you're not eating enough. Simple as that. Here's what you do: Eat what you normally would every day, then eat an entire loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter every night. That's an extra 10000 Calories or so every day. If you can't gain weight on that then you're a medical marvel or an Olympiad in training. Will it be hard to force yourself to eat all that? You bet it will. It's at least as hard for people on the opposite end of the spectrum who have to force themselves not to eat, trust me. So it's really just a matter of how bad you want it, isn't it?
When looking at an entire populate, the very muscular athletes are outliers. High BMI almost always indicates obesity.
It's all bullshit pseudo science.
That's what I concluded from years of following discussions, and I never even tried to start any fad diet.
The one thing I started with after reducing my working days to just a few hours was only eat when I'm really hungry.
Not when I feel peckish or something looks good. No, my stomach gives a clear signal that the body needs food and then I eat. And with just a little restraint at first and stop eating when I feel full enough, my portions became automatically smaller.
Since the start of the year I've gone down from 110kg to hitting 96kg on the scale as of last week. With the increased energy I also did a bit more weightlifting.
Even my girl who's overweight has followed my lead and only started eating when really hungry has lost 4 to 5 kg in just over 1 month (with light exercise). She now has more energy and feels much better.
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Thanks for the most insightful post on Slashdot on this matter ever. Damn that I don't have any modpoints to give you. The only reason that "don't eat fat" or "don't eat carbs" work is because they make people eat less, i.e if you skip carbs then there is a lot of calories on a lunch plate that you suddenly don't eat anymore. Also if you skip fat or carbs you automatically don't eat a lot of the junk food. Myself I started to calculate calories and so far have lost 180lbs.
While that is true, one of the things that is a marker of healthy aging is higher than average insulin sensitivity, which a certain number of general things are known about:
1- Centenarians consistently have excellent insulin sensitivity, resulting in lower heart disease, cancer and chronic degenerative brain disorder numbers.
2- One way of improving insulin sensitivity is to lower carbohydrate intake in relation to total calories, for some this works for others it needs to be balanced by exercise.
3- Ketogenic diets originally were formulated to provide relief in seizures for children who suffered from epilepsy. The ketogenic diet, while not for everyone is well studied and it is known and well documented that it does not cause heart disease and promotes good cholesterol numbers.
4- Once people lose a lot of body fat through diet or exercise by restricting dietary carbs or overall calories (or both) they can titrate in more carbohydrates and in the presence of better insulin sensitivity tend to do better in keeping the fat weight down, all other things being equal.