Here are some weekend cheat meals and binge eating that affect your mind.
If you’re the kind of person who eats healthy throughout the weekend and think that at the weekend you want to give yourself a treat and eat all your favourite food. Think again.
Researches at the University of New South Wales, Australia found that rats that ate healthy diets most of the time but binged on saturated fat and high sugar food on the weekend performed much worse on spatial memory tests. Scarier still was the fact that the impairment got worse the longer they were fed such a diet.
Cheat Meals
Professor and Head of Pharmacology at UNSW Medicine & Heath, Margaret Morris said, “We wanted to know whether the same total amount of unhealthy food, but in different-sized chunks, would have the same impact.”
Apparently the cycling of food between healthy and unhealthy affected spatial memory as well as gut health. It also showed a correlation between cognitive function and gut health.
Research also shows that a high-fat, high-sugar diet may reduce the size and function of the brain’s hippocampus region, essential for learning and memory. So much for cheat meals.
“We know the gut is very connected to our brain. Changes to the micro biome in response to our diet might impact our brain and behaviour.”
Unhealthy eating also increase inflammation which affect cognitive function.
“In humans we know that a diet that increase inflammation appears to be less beneficial for our brain function. And in the past, we’ve shown in rats that these cognitive deficits actually correlate with inflammation in the brain.
“We think this sort of work is criticism to get us to think about maintaining the health of our brain into old age. If we can maintain a healthy diet – such as the Mediterranean type diet with high diversity, fruits, vegetables, low saturated fats, good proteins – we have a better chance of preserving our cognition.”
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