Feb. 26, 2001 – Move over green eggs and ham ? a diet rich in fat, will mess up what?s under your hat, says a study on rats.
U of T researchers at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care have discovered that fat-rich diets are not only bad for your heart, they may also impair essential brain functions like concentration and memory. The researchers compared the cognitive function of rats on a high-fat diet (similar to what humans consume if they do not eat nutritiously) with rats on lower fat laboratory chow. After three months, the rats on the high-fat diet showed severe impairment on a wide range of learning and memory tasks relative to those animals that consumed the lower fat diet. The research also showed that giving glucose to the high-fat rats significantly improved their memory.
?Our brain needs glucose ? essentially energy ? in order to function,? said Professor Carol Greenwood of nutritional sciences and one of the authors of the study that appears in the March issue of the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. ?When glucose metabolism is impeded by saturated fatty acids, it?s like clogging the brain and starving it of energy.?
Interestingly, say the researchers, glucose injections into the high-fat rats seemed to work selectively on the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is critical for normal memory function. ?But we shouldn?t fool ourselves into thinking that glucose from a glass of orange juice is all we need to protect our brains from clogging up from a high-fat diet,? added one of the study?s co-authors, Professor Gordon Winocur of psychology and a senior scientist at Baycrest?s Rotman Research Institute.
The researchers hope these findings will make people reconsider a very popular fad diet that is high in fat and protein and low in carbohydrates. ?From a cognitive perspective, that?s probably not an ideal diet,? said Greenwood, a scientist at Baycrest?s Kunin-Lunenfeld Applied Research Unit.
Brain is mostly made of fat and cholesterol. The writer must have not eaten any fat in a long long time.
I think it’s one more dumb study that’s not even worth reading.
Once again scientists are trying to sells us the ridiculous ideia that the diet mankind evolved on (high protein, moderate to high fat, low to lowish carb) for around 2 million years is unhealthy. Not even worth trying to refute his conclusions.
The bastards probably fed the rats a saturated fat only diet or something equaly stupid and use that to generalize that all fat diets are the same.
Sad thing is that all the sheeps out there buy into this kind of research.
I don’t know. I can’t help but keep coming back to the line “… researchers compared the cognitive function of rats on a high-fat diet (similar to what humans consume if they do not eat nutritiously).” That “…if they do not eat nutritiously” is what makes me wonder. It would be nice if they could do consecutive studies to explore a number of different diets: after this one, study a ketogenic diet, then a paleo diet, etc. That way they could actually compare results while still controlling all of the variables. I’d really like to know who funded this research.
there is another study done in my home base of canada of our inuit eskimos wo take in about 85% of fat mainly whale and seal blubber there is no heart disease in any of these subjects however they perish for obvious reasons from other nutritional inadequacies and deficiencies , it is the type of fat that they consume a lot of and this fat is the base constituent of cerebral molecular membranes
EPA is in high concentrations with inuit so yes your query is correct but u have to take it few steps deeper , Gordon Winocur is refering to saturated fat that coz of it’s balanced and equaled double bonds along the carbon chain these molecules stack very comfortable allowing molecular aggregation and hence cellular hypoxia , unlike the unsaturates that do not line up straight to attention and allow oxygen to penentrate and activate cellular respiration, saturated fats are required for our endogenous production of hormones by cholesterol however not at the levels that a lot of society consumes them and the trans fatty acids which are an alderated version of a polyunsaturated that has similar and beyond effects of cellular degradation to the point of apoptosis