Your High-Fat Diet May Be Making You Dumber by the Day

Does your long term memory seem to be diminishing? Is it becoming more difficult for you to do the same amount of exercise you did easily previously? If you answered yes to those two questions, you may want to evaluate your diet. Turns out a high-fat diet can make you stupid and lazy!

The Study

The FASEB Journal (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) published new research online that reveals that after less than 10 days, rats that ate a high-fat diet had a lower ability to exercise and showed a serious short-term memory loss.

Andrew Murray of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, co-author of the study, and colleagues studied both rats that were fed low-fat diets and those fed high-fat diets. The low-fat diet had 7.5 percent of calories as fat, while the high-fat diet had 55 percent as fat. The rats that ate a high-fat diet for four days were less able to use oxygen to make energy needed to exercise. This caused their hearts to work harder and increase in size. The rats took longer to finish a maze and made more mistakes after nine days on the high-fat diet than the rats on the low-fat diet.

Researchers then investigated the cellular causes of these problems. Particular attention was paid in the mitochondria of muscle cells. What they found was raised levels of uncoupling protein 3. This made the rats’ use of oxygen needed to make the energy required for running less efficient.

What Do the Researchers Glean From This Study?

Andrew Murray stated, “Western diets are typically high in fat and are associated with long-term complications, such as obesity, diabetes, and heart failure, yet the short-term consequences of such diets have been given relatively little attention.” He added, “We hope that the findings of our study will help people to think seriously about reducing the fat content of their daily food intake to the immediate benefit of their general health, well-being, and alertness.”

“It’s nothing short of a high-fat hangover,” said Dr. Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of The FASEB Journal. “A long weekend spent eating hot dogs, French fries, and pizza in Orlando might be a great treat for our taste buds, but they might send our muscles and brains out to lunch.”

Human Results of a High-Fat Diet

While human beings may be different than rats, the results of this study should cause you to examine the contents of your diet and what the results may be. The next time you go on a high-fat junk food binge, take note of how you feel and whether your mind seems to function as sharply as when you are not eating that type of food. Determine for yourself whether these foods have the same effects on you as they seemed to have on the rats in the study.

We’ve long been told of the negative long-term effects of this type of diet on our bodies. Now there is reason to consider short-term effects as well. Even the little junk food “vacations” may be affecting your muscles and mind rather quickly.