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Mice fed fast food get noticeably stupider, scientists warn
- notRobot 6y ago> Specifically, the review found that mice eating a Western diet during the early stages of life that are important for development worsened anxiety and memory function, regardless of weight gain. It also led to an increase in addiction-like behaviors, as the mice grew to crave the sugary and high-fat foods, alongside a decrease in social behaviors. Maybe it's just me, but it's always been really obvious to me that my diet has a pretty significant effect on ny mental health. I can't be the only one who feels like shit after mostly only eating fast/junk food for prolonged periods of time?
- Bancakes 6y agoYep. Of all chemicals, how did we evolve into dopamine?!
- ac29 6y agoWhen calories were hard to come by, that pleasurable reward response was powerful enough to have an evolutionary advantage.
- alistairSH 6y agoYes. But the key finding in this study seems to be that, when consumed early in life, the "western diet" makes the mice stupider throughout their lifespan, even if they are later fed normal diets.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hogFeast 6y agoIf you feed a child mouse food, I am sure they will get stupider too. There is no information here.
- TaupeRanger 6y agoAnecdotes are not informative here. This is likely just confirmation bias. The periods during which one tends to eat a lot of fast food are also those during which they have less time to prepare food themselves, often due to busy schedules or other stressful situations. Those likely contribute more to your mental state than having several cheeseburgers on successive nights. But we don't know, because, as the article says, nutrition epidemiology is notoriously difficult to the point of being impossibly useless.
- rriepe 6y agoI've noticed that when I feel like shit, I'm hard on myself over my diet.
- qwertox 6y ago> I can't be the only one who feels like shit after mostly only eating fast/junk food for prolonged periods of time? You kind of start to forget it that it's the food which is causing this, specially when there are other factors which also contribute to your negative feelings, like the problems poverty or mobbing cause if they are present for too long. Then the junk food begins to be something comforting, even though it really drags you down into a vicious circle. I really wish that added sugar would be taxed so heavily that people start to limit their intake, or seriously think about not feeding it to their kids since it's too expensive.
- sitkack 6y agoThere was as documentary I watched years ago where they had a school for the problem kids, and the onsite cafeteria made healthy fresh vegetable rich foods. It would seem that the food quality affects so much and to such depth. Everyone should have easy access to vegetable rich, low-processed foods.
- nvr219 6y agoMy brother in law eats nothing but fast food every day and he's a total moron, so this finding does not surprise me.
- throwawayboise 6y agoMaybe it's an opposite case of cause and effect.
- reactspa 6y agoA possible confounding factor: - it may be that not the availability of these specific foods, but the easy availability of food that makes the mice stupider. Mental acuity, I'd imagine, is related to one's need to find food in resource-constrained environments.
- klmadfejno 6y agoThat would only make sense if they compared fed mice to mice that had to scavenge for food
- dheera 6y agoFeed McDonald's to all the mice of the world so that they eventually get so stupid they can't figure out how to get inside houses?
- ars 6y agoI wonder if they get stupider, not because of the content of the food, but because they don't have to work for it - it's too easy to get calories, so they get mentally lazy. It the same theory I have about mice that exercise on a running wheel - it's not the exercise itself that makes them smarter, it's the need to balance on the wheel, and figure out how to use it.
- fuzzfactor 6y agotl;dr Established for decades using human volunteers, this effect has now been confirmed in the mouse. It remains to be seen what will be the outcome within the rodent social structure, or the so-called rat race.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence (Wikipedia: Diseases of affluence)
- klmadfejno 6y agoMildly annoyed that they gloss over terms like high fat, high calorie, and sugary as one blob called the western diet.
- stevenicr 6y agoThis comment got me to look at the article - and at least they are specifying that this is what they are meaning by the term. I'd like to see the term updated, and a new round of tests run, where they take into account packaging, preparation and other environment 'standards' to the western diet. Add BPA from canned foods. Prep a percentage of the food with teflon or similar coated stuff that's damaged and leaching. Pull some of the coatings from french fries boxes and similar packaging that's to prevent sticking - yet as one disgruntled former dupont employee announced, causes cancer. Use some styrofoam that's been melted to show getting food made and put into styrofoam too hot - and also melted via microwave reheating. Make a ton of it in microwaved plastic - as a NY times article laid out years ago this disrupts hormone especially in young. Preservatives and plastic - might as well mix a chunk of that stuff in there as I'm pretty sure most in the west of ingesting good amounts of it. The western diet includes dust, VOCs and other pollution depending on exact circumstances as well really. I wonder how the levels of these things vary from state to state / city to county, etc. Sometimes I think fancy scientists have different grocery store options than the average western calorie consumer and don't take that into consideration.
- symlinkk 6y agoI think it’s funny that we can communicate with each other across the world instantly via the Internet and put a man on the Moon but getting nutritious food - the most basic need of any human - is still difficult and time consuming. Do you want a PS4 controller? Press a button and Amazon will ship it to you in a day. Do you want healthy food? Oh sorry you need to go out, buy the ingredients yourself, prepare it yourself, and clean yourself. I know what you’re thinking, what about restaurants? They’re overly expensive and almost all of them are designed to maximize cheap and addicting ingredients like sugar and fat and minimize expensive and nutritious ingredients like meat. It’s just sad, we have the “bread and circus” stuff readily available but essentials like food, housing, and healthcare are unbelievably expensive and time consuming.
- theawless 6y agoAnd the alternatives that do exist are too damn expensive. Like celebrities hiring professional chefs for their ultra diet. Or healthy food subscription services that often have questionable quality. I was really hoping that with food home delivery startups this situation will be solved. But alas, most restaurants optimize for cost as you mentioned.
- tediousdemise 6y agoStudies have shown that caloric restriction has the opposite effects; increased longevity, cognitive improvement, etc. It seems like the solution to our problems is to just not eat.
- hyperpallium2 6y agoCaloric restriction makes you smarter for a day, caloric elimination makes you smarter for the rest of your life.
- klyrs 6y agoI'm a hangry bonehead if I skip breakfast and lunch, but feel free to experiment yourself
- mvzvm 6y agoRather disappointed with the low quality of comments on this thread. Is it because diet is something everyone has an opinion on?
- _rpd 6y agoContradictory nutrition news creates consumer confusion https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140128153814.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140128153814.h... Confusion and nutritional backlash from news media exposure to contradictory information about carbohydrates and dietary fats https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/confusion-and-nutritional-backlash-from-news-media-exposure-to-contradictory-information-about-carbohydrates-and-dietary-fats/AEB072E45E76EC13F1835A497AADA5AA https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrit...
- rsgrafx 6y agoI'm loving it
- mbrodersen 6y agoI am glad I am not a fast food eating mouse then. Seriously though: what is true for mice may or may not be true for humans.