OfSilvia Turin
The reduction of a protein that transports a neurotransmitter useful for remembering events was studied in mice. The damage done by unhealthy eating at a young age was irreversible
Foods high in saturated fat and sugar they compromise in an (apparently) irreversible way the transmission of the signals that build the memory. It is not damage that starts from the intestinal microbiota, which can instead be “repaired”, but from a neurotransmitter.
This was established by a new study published in the May issue of Brain Behavior and Immunity done on mice, which therefore cannot be applied directly to humans, but serves to clarify some physiological processes.
In particular, researchers from the Department of Biological Sciences ofUniversity of Southern California of Los Angeles tried to understand what the memory damage in mice fed a so-called “western” diet from an early age and subsequently analyzed the causes of this process.
I study
A group of mice were fed a diet that included unlimited access to various foods high in fat and sugar from 26 to 56 days of age (a period parallel toadolescence human), another group of mice of the same age ate healthy food.
The results showed that moles memory test rats on an “unhealthy” diet failed to identify new objects in a scene they had explored days earlier or if a familiar object had moved slightly, while the control group could.
These memory problems persisted in the “unhealthy” food group even when the mice were switched to a healthy diet for 30 days as adults.
The mechanisms explained
An interesting discovery regarding the mechanisms underlying this process: scientists highlighted, in mice that ate junk food, reduced levels of a protein that transports acetylcholine (a neurotransmitter) in the hippocampusa region of the brain that helps consolidate memories and spatial information.
«The signal mediated by acetylcholine is a mechanism that helps to encode and remember eventsanalogous to ‘episodic memory’ in humans that allows us to remember events from our past,” explains Anna Hayes, lead author and USC nutrition researcher.
Reducing the protein altered the neurotransmitter message causing poor performance on memory tasks.
The researchers did the opposite test: they gave mice drugs that push hippocampal cells to release acetylcholine and Animal memory abilities are back.
The microbiome improved with a healthy diet, memory did not
Memory performance, therefore, did not depend on other factors, such asobesity of the mice, or the altered microbiota from an unhealthy diet. Notably, altered neurotransmitter signaling occurred in the absence of effects on metabolic outcomes and body weight.
This means that diet in early life could have critical and long-lasting effects on neural function, independent of obesity. Not only that: although they were observed perturbations in the gut microbiome of mice in the Western diet group in early childhood, the healthy dietary intervention in adulthood it reversed microbiome changes, but failed to rescue memory impairments.
The study has limitations: The results of these animal studies simply cannot translate to humans; the modeled diet does not allow us to determine which specific dietary components or macronutrients may give rise to the observed effects; there are some gender differences that still need to be explained and resolved (a Western-style diet in early adolescence had long-term impacts on memory in male rats, but not in female rats) and it is certainly difficult to distinguish the influence of consumption of fatty and sugary foods in adolescence on brain function in adult life.
Nutrition and dementia
The information that emerges from this (and other) studies is that foods common in Western diets They often affect memory, even if eaten occasionally.
Recent research has also linked a diet consisting of unhealthy, processed foods to risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias in old age.
It is also now increasingly clear from scientific research that there is a precise relationship between some lifestyles and the risk of experiencing psychological deterioration with age. The good news is that usually the protective effect of correct lifestyles also extends to those who may have a genetic predisposition towards dementia (we talked about it HERE): nutrition turns out to be the most significant for the purposes of prevention of dementia (the one based on the principles of the Mediterranean diet) and the diet that helps the brain is the same that helps the heart, the prostate, the breasts, the intestines.
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