Junk Food & Memory Loss: How Diet Affects Brain Health

If in the last few days you have pastened to hamburgers, chicken nuggets and chips, it is not so much about the weight that you should worry. Garbage food It has a much more immediate effect on the brainand in particular on the ability to store clear and coherent traces of what happened to us.

A study published on Neuron It shows that a few days of junk food are sufficient to alter the memory in the negative, because they send out a group of neurons of the hippocampus involved in the coding of memories. Fortunately, memory can be restored by returning to a healthy diet.

A group of scientists from the School of Medicine of the University of Carolina in the North (United States) discovered that a group of hippocampus neurons (the brain control unit in the brain) is sensitive much more than expected to fatty foods. The cells in question are the interneurons that express cholecistochinin (CCK)a hormone of satiety that responds to very fatty meals and stimulates the release of digestive hormones and insulin at the pancreas level.

Among the tasks of these interneurons there is that of make “time” work, with the correct rhythmthe pyramidal exciter neurons, cells of the hippocampus in charge of coding memories. When this process row, the memories are recorded and stored in an orderly way. But when the interneurons CCK are too stimulated, they can silence the activity of pyramid cells, with negative effects on the coding of memories and memory.

We have been knowing for some time that a diet too rich in fat interferes with the way the brain assimilates the glucose, its main “fuel”. In the studio on mice, Four days of garbage food have reduced the availability of glucose in the brain of rodents, sending the interneurons Cck into hyperactivity. All this has generated cascade memory problems, for the mechanism that is little explained.

The negative effects on memory came much before mice could experience metabolic diseases and weight gain. A protein has contributed to the hyperactivity in neurons, called PKM2, which regulates the reaction of the neurons to glucose, when this is scarce.

The proof of how much the diet can benefit or damage the memory came from the fact that, when the rich feeding of junk food was abandoned in favor of a healthy dietthe availability of glucose has returned to the norm, the interneurons CCK stopped activating themselves to the impazzate and the neurons that they control have started to organize the memories in an orderly way.

The difficulties of mice in memory tasks have returnedand the same beneficial effect was observed after an intermittent fasting period – a practice associated by some studies with a protective effect on dementia.

Given the speed of the effects of junk food on memory, a hypothesis is that long -term exposure to these recurring foods in the “deaths and run” diet of modern economic systems can contribute to the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer; Interventions to improve nutrition could act in a protective way on the brain, even before the conditions most directly associated with the increase in weight.