How Just One Week On Fast Food Can Change The Brain

There is a serious reason to stick with fatty and sweet food, for example, fast food: this food is harmful not only for the figure, but also for the brain.

There is a serious reason to tie with fatty and sweet food.

A healthy diet means limiting sugar and saturated fats, avoiding fast food, sweets and junk food like chips and soda. But this does not prevent people from having waffles for breakfast, drinking tea with sweets, and buying hot dogs on the hunt and at the same time considering their diet to be quite healthy. As it turned out, this is not the best approach.

In 2020, a group of scientists from universities in Australia and the United States found that a week is enough for such a diet to disrupt appetite control and affect memory in a bad way.

How the effect of diet on the brain was tested

Scientists selected 110 young healthy people without excess weight and divided them into two groups. In one, the participants did not change their usual diet, in the other, once a day they received sweet and fatty foods with 806-985 kcal, for example, a sandwich and a milkshake or Belgian waffles.

Before and after the experiment, all the subjects passed the Hopkins learning test, with the help of which the scientists evaluated their verbal memory. In addition, students were given an appetite control test. They offered a choice of several delicious products and asked how much they liked the dishes and how much they wanted to try them.

First, this test was performed on an empty stomach, and then repeated after breakfast. Before the start of the experiment, satiety reduced the love for products and the desire to eat them in both groups. But then this picture changed.

How eating junk food changed the participants

Based on the results of the tests, the scientists concluded that just one week with sweet and fatty foods in the diet significantly weakened appetite control.

On an empty stomach, the participants loved and wanted the offered goodies just as much as they did before the start of the experiment. After breakfast, the attractiveness of dishes naturally decreased, but the desire to try them did not decrease so much.

Moreover, after such a diet, students' cognitive abilities worsened. Moreover, the worse their appetite control was, the less they could remember.

Based on these data, scientists assumed that such a diet affected the condition of the hippocampus, a brain structure responsible for both appetite control and memory.

How the effect of fast food on the hippocampus affects health

The hippocampus plays a major role in appetite control and diet selection. It is connected to the adjacent nucleus, part of the reward system responsible for the feeling of pleasure, as well as the prefrontal cortex, where conscious decisions and self-control are born.

At the same time, this structure is very sensitive to external factors, and constant inflammation, high blood glucose levels and increasing oxidative stress from an unhealthy diet can damage it.

Scientists hypothesized that if the hippocampus is suppressed by harmful foods, the entire responsibility for refusing tasty food in favor of healthy food falls on the prefrontal cortex. It is often an unequal battle.

A closed circle turns out. More fast food - worse condition of the hippocampus, less self-control, more fast food. But the memory is also worse.

What will help break out of the vicious circle

First of all, you need to exclude sugar, sweets and fatty meat from the diet. If you really love these products, even the thought of completely and unconditionally giving them up can seem terrifying. Therefore, do not promise yourself to get rid of them forever - just cut down the amount.

For example, try the rules of the Mediterranean diet: no more than 80 g of sweets, 120-200 g of red and 50 g of processed meat per week. If in the process you realize that you don't really need these products, refuse them altogether. You won't lose anything.

In addition, in the discussion, the scientists noted that not only diet can suppress the hippocampus, but also other factors, including stress and insomnia. Therefore, adjust the sleep mode and learn to relax and relieve tension. And it will be much easier to refrain from fast food and sweets.