High-Fat Diet May Make You Stupid and Lazy

[razgarcia]

I ran across this online article on FoxNews.com entitled High-Fat Diet May Make You Stupid and Lazy. You can access it the story @ http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,539158,00.html (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,539158,00.html).

The article is fairly short, so I will include it in its entirety below:
A new study on rats finds that 10 days of eating a high-fat diet caused short-term memory loss and made exercise difficult. While the finding may not seem a big surprise, the researcher say it might suggest that high-fat diets make humans lazy and stupid.

"Western diets are typically high in fat and are associated with long-term complications, such as obesity, diabetes, and heart failure, yet the short-term consequences of such diets have been given relatively little attention," said Andrew Murray, co-author of the study and currently at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. "We hope that the findings of our study will help people to think seriously about reducing the fat content of their daily food intake to the immediate benefit of their general health, well-being, and alertness."

The findings are detailed in the FASEB Journal.

Rodents are thought to be good analogues to humans for studies like this, but research in humans would be needed to confirm that the effects cross over. Also, because rats live much shorter lives, study effects may play out on significantly shorter time scales than in humans.

Murray and colleagues studied rats fed a low-fat diet (7.5 percent of calories as fat) and rats fed a high-fat diet (55 percent of calories as fat). Muscles of rats eating the high-fat diet for four days were less able to use oxygen to make the energy needed to exercise, causing their hearts to worker harder — and increase in size.

After nine days on a high-fat diet, the rats took longer to complete a maze and made more mistakes in the process than their low-fat-diet counterparts.

In the fat-laden rats the researchers found increased levels of a protein called uncoupling protein 3, which made them less efficient at using oxygen needed to make the energy required for running.

"It's nothing short of a high-fat hangover," said Dr. Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of journal. "A long weekend spent eating hotdogs, French fries, and pizza in Orlando might be a great treat for our taste buds, but they might send our muscles and brains out to lunch."
I don't belive this nonsense, of course. And interestingly enough, my diet is 55% fat, the same amount that's supposed to make me "fat and lazy" (I am neither--nor am I a rat).

It would be intersting to read Dr. Mike's take on this as well as a comparable study on humans.

[Frank Hagan]

Rats have a different metabolism, including much more "brown adipose fat" that allows them to burn off excess calories in the form of heat rather than storing it as excess fat like humans do. There's another story on the study at ScienceCentric (http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=09081233-high-fat-diet-affects-physical-memory-abilities-rats-after-9-days) that includes this statement:


'The high-fat diet, in which 55 per cent of the calories came from fat, sounds high but it's actually not extraordinarily high by human standards. A junk food diet would come close to that.

'Some high-fat, low-carb diets for weight loss can even have fat contents as high as 60 per cent. However, it's not clear how many direct conclusions can be drawn from our work for these diets, as the high-fat diet we used was not particularly low in carbs,' he adds.



So the only conclusion we can come to is that if you are a rat, and eat the SA(rat)D, and then add in more fat, you'll become lazy and sluggish. But we have no idea if the rats would have responded with faster maze performance and been less lazy with a high fat but low carb diet.



They are going to do some trials on humans using the same testing methodology, and I expect their results to be quite a bit different.

[razgarcia]

Yes, and I agree with you on all counts. I have numerous articles in my archives showing that a high-fat diet is not only "OK" but downright healthy, provided that carbohydrates are kept at low levels and that protein is adequate. And of course, the quality of the food plus the right kind of exercise is also essential. No new news there for who know better.

What concerns me most is that articles such as these are touted as "definitive proof" that fat is harmful. And now they're telling us that they'll even make us lazy and stupid. And those who do not know better continue to misinformed--and contine to pile on the pounds

Is there no end to this madness?

[maxlharris]

No mention of the carb content of the 55% fat rat diet. I would suspect they probably were rocking carb content in the 30% range. Which would indeed make me lazy. Stupid, maybe not, but definitely lazy.

[deirdra]

No mention of the carb content of the 55% fat rat diet. I would suspect they probably were rocking carb content in the 30% range.15% protein is typical in tests, so 55% fat & 30% carbs is probably what they'll do - 75g protein, 122g fat & 150g carbs and of course that will make the humans fat & lazy & they'll blame it on the fat even though they'll eat more carb grams than fat grams.

Blue M&Ms also mend spinal injuries in rats - will they be testing them on humans too?

[johankrava]

A new study on rats finds that 10 days of eating a high-fat diet caused short-term memory loss and made exercise difficult. While the finding may not seem a big surprise, the researcher say it might suggest that high-fat diets make humans lazy and stupid.

I can simply not agree with this conclusion. There are so many factors that contribute to laziness and stupidity. Pointing to high-fat diets doesn't make sense.