A Western-style diet stops critical memory functions from working properly, a new study finds. People who habitually eat unhealthy foods showed slower learning and poorer memory.
A Western-style diet typically involves eating more red meats, junk foods and saturated fats and less fresh vegetables, grains and seafood.
The damage caused to memory may also be a cause of obesity.
The hippocampus is an area of the brain critical to learning and memory. Studies on animals have now shown that a high-fat and high-sugar diet causes problems with memory inhibition in the hippocampus.
Memory inhibition is our ability to block out memories that are no longer useful. For example, when we are not hungry, it should be harder for us to think about food. But, the Western-style diet causes problems with this.
So that even when people have just eaten, they are still attracted to tempting foods. This creates a kind of vicious circle.
The study was recently presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB) (Attuquayefio et al., 2016).
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Source material from Psyblog