Food For Thought

Researchers have made a mind-boggling discovery: the same junk-food diet that bulges your waistline and rots your teeth may be damaging your mind too. Women’s Health investigates an emerging theory: diabetes of the brain

- Gretchen Voss

It's no surprise that fat-laden foods and sugar spiked drinks can trigger such health derailers as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. The you-are-what-you-eat mantra has been drilled into us since we were kids. But it turns out that being a junk-food junkie may also damage your brain in some alarming ways – in fact, research showing the nutrition-cognition relationship is piling up faster than you can say “supersize it.”

A cross-cultural analysis found a link between high sugar consumption and depression; another study found that people who ate the most fast food had a 40 percent higher risk for depression than those who ate little of it. And Dr Suzanne Craft, a professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine who specialises in Alzheimer’s disease research, found that people who chowed down on meals high in sugar and saturated fat for as little as one month performed more poorly on memory tests.

Exactly why eating unhealthy food sets the stage for mental troubles is a complicated question that researchers are now trying to answer. Although no one knows exactly how much junk food it takes for the damage to begin, scientists agree that eating these foods over a long period of time isn’t just crushing our mood and wreaking havoc with our memory – it might also be shattering our ability to learn, reason and forge new memories.

Brain Damage