We all forget names, lose our keys and lose our cell phones. Occasional brain fog is so common and there are so many potential triggers (lack of sleep, stress, medications, or depression, etc.) that it is very difficult to tell whether your brain is aging faster than you expect or if your forgetfulness. Illness is just a temporary symptom of a crazy modern life.
One thing you’ll definitely want to remember to help you stay mentally sharp is that over time your eating habits can accelerate memory decline and other markers of cognitive function linked to an aging brain. can do.
We are still learning about the different forms of dementia and the causes and mechanics of the abnormalities that characterize Alzheimer’s disease, but more and more research suggests that our diets play an important role.
“What we eat affects more than our body, it affects our brain too,” says Uma Naidu, MDA nutritional psychiatrist, trained chef, and director of nutrition and lifestyle psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Eating an order of french fries isn’t going to blow your mind. It is the regular consumption of those unhealthy foods that can compromise your brain power such that it can increase your chances of experiencing other disorders associated with aging, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.
Let’s review the types of foods that negatively affect our health and the research behind their dangers.
One of the ways food influences cognitive function is through the brain-gut connection. Science suggests that the imbalanced mix of healthy and unhealthy bacteria in our microbiome can affect our brain chemistry, particularly neurochemicals like noradrenaline, serotonin and dopamine, which affect learning and memory.
a study published in European Heart Journal found that excess red meat consumption can increase levels of trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO), a byproduct of gut bacteria metabolism. High TMAO levels may be linked to a higher risk of heart attack and stroke.
An unhealthy microbiome is also associated with chronic inflammation, including brain inflammation, which can affect blood flow to the brain. “In addition, changes in gut bacteria can increase amyloid deposits, thereby contributing to Alzheimer’s disease,” Dr. Naidu has written in his book it’s your brain on food,
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Fructose is the sugar in healthy fruits, but it’s also in cane sugar and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the cheap liquid sweetener that food manufacturers add to processed foods to improve the taste and keep us eating them. Cane sugar and HFCS are so prevalent in our food supply (soft drinks, candy, condiments, salad dressings, canned soups, baked goods, bread loaves, and other processed foods) that it poses a significant risk to the brain in overdose over the years. It is possible ,
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that the average American ingests 47 pounds of cane sugar and 35 pounds of HFCS over the course of a year. It’s very cute. Rodent studies suggest that taking a large dose of fructose can alter the ability of brain cells to signal to each other and cause memory loss and learning disabilities. The results suggest that “eating a high-fructose diet over a long period of time alters your brain’s ability to learn and remember information,” UCLA researchers Fernando Gómez-Pinilla, PhDTold science daily,
Track how many times a day you open the box or can. This can be an eye opener. A recent study linked more than 20% of your daily calories from ultra-processed foods to multiple tasks at once, such as rapid cognitive decline, memory and executive functions.
The research determined that men and women who ate the most processed foods were 28% faster in memory, attention, verbal fluency, and visual/spatial ability and 25% faster in executive functions than those at least high. People who ate processed foods declined compared to those who ate. Food ingredient. Highly processed foods include prepackaged frozen foods, potato chips and pretzels, ice cream, store-bought breads, cookies, cake mixes, cereals, packaged snack foods, and more.
Fried foods — french fries, fried chicken, fried jalapeno poppers, batter-dipped deep-fried Oreo cookies, fried okra, and their ilk — are among the most ultra-processed foods on the planet. They’re among the most inflammatory foods you can possibly eat, which suggests a possible reason for the results of a large study of more than 18,000 people from a region of the Southeast known as the “stroke belt,” where “Southern -Fried” cooking is in vogue.
The association between fried foods and inflammation of blood vessels is well established by other studies. This one, published in Journal of Nutrition Sciencedemonstrated that participants whose diets included the most fried foods scored the lowest on tests of memory and cognition.
Jeff Setarik
Eat This, Not That! Jeff Cesari, the contributing author of Galvanized Media, is responsible for editing books and magazines and advising journalism students through the Zinczenko New Media Center at Moravian University in Bethlehem, PA. read more
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)