[HN Gopher] Mice fed fast food get noticeably stupider, scientis...
___________________________________________________________________
Mice fed fast food get noticeably stupider, scientists warn
Author : throwaway888abc
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-04-18 21:40 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (futurism.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (futurism.com)
| notRobot wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| Yep. Of all chemicals, how did we evolve into dopamine?!
| alistairSH wrote:
| Yes. 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]
| hogFeast wrote:
| If you feed a child mouse food, I am sure they will get
| stupider too.
|
| There is no information here.
| qwertox wrote:
| > 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.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Anecdotes 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 wrote:
| I've noticed that when I feel like shit, I'm hard on myself
| over my diet.
| nvr219 wrote:
| My brother in law eats nothing but fast food every day and he's a
| total moron, so this finding does not surprise me.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Maybe it's an opposite case of cause and effect.
| reactspa wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| That would only make sense if they compared fed mice to mice
| that had to scavenge for food
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence (Wikipedia:
| Diseases of affluence)
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Mildly annoyed that they gloss over terms like high fat, high
| calorie, and sugary as one blob called the western diet.
| mvzvm wrote:
| Rather disappointed with the low quality of comments on this
| thread. Is it because diet is something everyone has an opinion
| on?
| symlinkk wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| Studies 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 wrote:
| Caloric restriction makes you smarter for a day, caloric
| elimination makes you smarter for the rest of your life.
| dheera wrote:
| Feed 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| allears wrote:
| In a laboratory, rats don't have to work for food -- if the
| experiment is designed correctly. Hopefully, the only variable
| was fast food vs. "normal" rat food.
| rriepe wrote:
| Rat food or slow food? If rats get dumber from eating any
| human food then this study hasn't said anything.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| tl;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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-18 23:01 UTC)