A recent study published in Brain Behavior and Immunity found several detrimental effects of junk food diet on a person’s brain health, including long-term memory impairment.
The study conducted at the University of Southern California took into account a prior research which showed a link between poor diet and Alzheimer’s disease, finding that patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease tend to display lower levels of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine in their brains.
Acetylcholine is vital for memory as well as for functions such as learning, attention, arousal, and involuntary muscle movement.
Based on the prior research data, Prof. Scott Kanoski led a study to track the influence of healthy diet and fat-filled, sugary, junk food diet on rats’ acetylcholine level.
The researchers observed the brain responses to some memory tests, such as exploring new objects in different locations, where rats on junk food diet were unable to recognize objects they have seen earlier, whereas those in the control group showed signs of familiarity with the objects.
Later, they also did post-mortem of rodents’ brains to check for any signs of disrupted acetylcholine levels.
“Acetylcholine signaling is a mechanism to help them encode and remember those events, analogous to ‘episodic memory’ in humans that allows us to remember events from our past,” postdoctoral research fellow Anna Hayes explained. “That signal appears to not be happening in the animals that grew up eating the fatty, sugary diet.”
“What we see not just in this paper, but in some of our other recent work, is that if these rats grew up on this junk food diet, then they have these memory impairments that don’t go away,” warned Kanoski.
However, during another round of study the researchers noted that the lost memory in the rats was regained by introducing medications – PNU-282987 and carbachol directly to the brain’s hippocampus region.
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