High-Fat Diet May Make You Stupid and Lazy
A ten-day study...these must be conclusive findings, then!
http://www.livescience.com/health/090812-fat- lazy-stupid.html
High-Fat Diet May Make You Stupid and Lazy
By now, we've all heard that high-fat diets are bad for our health in the long run. But what about the short-term?
A new study on rats finds that 10 days of eating a high-fat diet caused short-term memory loss and made exercise difficult. While the finding may not seem a big surprise, the researcher say it might suggest that high-fat diets make humans lazy and stupid.
"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," said Andrew Murray, co-author of the study and currently at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. "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."
The findings are detailed in the FASEB Journal.
Rodents are thought to be good analogues to humans for studies like this, but research in humans would be needed to confirm that the effects cross over. Also, because rats live much shorter lives, study effects may play out on significantly shorter time scales than in humans.
Murray and colleagues studied rats fed a low-fat diet (7.5 percent of calories as fat) and rats fed a high-fat diet (55 percent of calories as fat). Muscles of rats eating the high-fat diet for four days were less able to use oxygen to make the energy needed to exercise, causing their hearts to worker harder — and increase in size.
After nine days on a high-fat diet, the rats took longer to complete a maze and made more mistakes in the process than their low-fat-diet counterparts.
In the fat-laden rats the researchers found increased levels of a protein called uncoupling protein 3, which made them less efficient at using oxygen needed to make the energy required for running.
"It's nothing short of a high-fat hangover," said Dr. Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of journal. "A long weekend spent eating hotdogs, 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."
Original Post by wildwildwes:
A ten-day study...these must be conclusive findings, then!
http://www.livescience.com/health/090812-fat- lazy-stupid.html
High-Fat Diet May Make You Stupid and Lazy
Well, they were looking for "short term effects", weren't they? I would be interested to know if the study were continued, and the populations were reversed (the high-fat rats started eating low-fat), if the effects were reversible?
My real problem with this kind of study is the "nutritionism" of separating food from its components. I mean, I would think it would be impossible for the only difference in these diets to be fat related. This is a real problem in science, changing a factor (the fat percentage) and assuming that it is only the change you impose that is causing the health problems. When in fact, a diet change from 7.5% fat to 55% fat will also have many other important differences. It will either be much higher calorie or much lower nutrition, but can't be identical. Either of those 2 factors could also be the culprit in the changes in rat behavior.
From an anecdotal standpoint, whenever I have a day (think Thanksgiving) when I overeat rich food, I certainly feel logy, stupid, and lazy afterward. I don't think it would be possible to eat like that for 10 straight days.
Without seeing the original study, I'd guess that dken is right - if other factors, such as total caloric intake weren't controlled for, the results are meaningless.
From floggingsully's journal:
I read a book not to long ago co-authored by Jeff Volek, who's a professor in the human performance lab at UConn which argued for the health benefits of higher fat diets. A quick search for Dr. Volek's work on pubmed turned up a bunch of studies backing this up including this one which found greater improvements to cardiovascular health for a group that ate a diet with Carb/fat/protein ratio of ~12/59/28 than a group who ate a diet of 56/24/20 (closer to the AHA's recommendations). There was also this one which found that a diet consisting of 65% fat lead to a decrease in LDL (bad cholesterol) of 9% (and a decrease in triglycerides of 38%) while HDL (good cholesterol) rose 12%. And last but not lease, this one, which found people on a high fat diet (63%) lost more weight, and more fat than those on a lower fat diet (22%) even when the high-fat diet group ate significantly (~300) more calories than the low fat group.
Plus, to lump all fats as "hotdogs, French fries, and pizza" is just unfair. A long weekend eating raw nuts, food cooked in olive oil, and avacado is not going to make you dumber.
I think the comment below the article sums it up:
I guess the author must have been snacking on Twinkies at the time.
they don't seem to give enough information about the study to take it into real consideration. for all we know they were force feeding them burger king -.-
Interesting, but I wouldn't take too much from it. Rats have a pretty different metabolism than humans. More brown fat, for example.
While I agree that high fat diets are not healthy, for the love of god, we are not rats! Different species handle different nutrients in different ways.
The original study seems reasonable to me.
If I ate an equi-caloric diet that was 55% fat for 100 days, I would be logy and uncommunicative...and NAUSEOUS.
A sickening thought...talk about empty calories!
I would think rats wouldn't have very good memories to begin with...
