Compelling new research shows that a typical “Western Diet” isn’t a very smart choice.
All that red meat, fried food and heavily processed prepared meals Americans eat aren’t doing our minds and bodies any favors.
A “Western diet” actually impairs crucial brain functions while stimulating us to over eat… And it happens at an alarming rate.
Researchers looking into typical American food choices found that slim and otherwise healthy folks who stuck to a Western diet for as little as one week had trouble regulating their appetite.
It turns out all of those fatty foods and sugary drinks are disrupting and shrinking the hippocampus[MM1]. This is the part of the brain that responsible for appetite control.
And when the belly is full, snacks and sweets become even more desirable.
When those munchies are even harder to resist, it leads to overeating… And the more of those sugary treats you eat, the more damage you do to the hippocampus.
It’s a vicious cycle that never reaches equilibrium… It’s a process that is constantly in motion and being strengthened by its own consequences.
All of this can play a very dangerous impact on our overall health.
But this feedback loop that’s created by an unhealthy diet isn’t just increasing our risk of obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
It’s also making us dumber.
As our diet wages a war on the hippocampus it’s also slashing away at another function of that part of the brain: our memory.
When the hippocampus is diminished and isn’t functioning at optimal levels, it’s unable to conduct certain activities we take for granted.
While this part of the brain plays a chief role in regulating our appetite, it’s other functions are to distill information from our short-term memory and turn them into long-term memories as well as provide us with our spatial memories that enable us to navigate to and from places.
The most straightforward way to break this cycle and restore the hippocampus to its natural size is by breaking the junk food cycle.
At the very least, people should have two to three days a week when the diet focuses on vegetables, fruit, fish, chicken and healthy oils.
This can make a huge difference in breaking the progression of an unhealthy diet.
And foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids like wild caught salmon, nuts and extra virgin olive oil nourish the neurons in the hippocampus and promote growth.
And research has proven that those with higher blood levels of these important fatty acids have a larger hippocampus [MM2] size, better memory, and a much lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease[MM3] .
The sooner we are able to break the Western diet cycle, the sooner we’ll be able to forget these bad habits and get our hearts and minds on a healthier track.
[MM1]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.191338