Junk Food and the Brain

07/27/2015

No matter how you say it, the hill we climb is a hill we climb together…I’ve said it once, but I’ll say it again: I truly believe we can raise this wounded world into a wondrous one, and I am here for the climb.
Poet, Amanda Gorman

An article on the TakePart website, "Junk Food Isn't Just Making People Fat — It's Making Them Stupid," reports on a study conducted by researchers at Oregon State University that "suggests that high-fat, high-sugar diets have a detrimental effect on what they refer to as 'cognitive flexibility,' or the power to adapt and adjust to changing situations."

"The research was performed using laboratory mice that consumed diets with varying levels of fat and sugar before facing a gamut of tests — primarily mazes and basic puzzles — to monitor changes in their mental and physical function. The researchers paid specific attention to the types of gut bacteria present in each control group....

"One of the first studies to link gut bacteria to brain function was performed by researchers at the Gail and Gerald Oppenheimer Family Center for Neurobiology and Stress.... They took three groups of women and had one group consume yogurt loaded with supplemental probiotics daily for four weeks, had another group eat a substance that looked and tasted like yogurt but had no probiotics, and gave the third group nothing specific to eat. Not only did the sans-probiotic group suffer in cognitive tests, just as the mice in the Oregon State study did, but it also faltered in emotion-based tests, linking poor gut health to stress."

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