From Reuters News Service:
Research on mice links fast food to Alzheimer'sThe Institutes's home page is here but I do not see any papers online. I wonder if there have been any epidemiological studies done on diet and brain function.
Mice fed junk food for nine months showed signs of developing the abnormal brain tangles strongly associated with Alzheimer's disease, a Swedish researcher said on Friday.
The findings, which come from a series of published papers by a researcher at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, show how a diet rich in fat, sugar and cholesterol could increase the risk of the most common type of dementia.
"On examining the brains of these mice, we found a chemical change not unlike that found in the Alzheimer brain," Susanne Akterin, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, who led the study, said in a statement.
"We now suspect that a high intake of fat and cholesterol in combination with genetic factors ... can adversely affect several brain substances, which can be a contributory factor in the development of Alzheimer's."
All fats are not equal. It is a high carb diet low in omega-3 fatty acids - unbalanced cholesterol in other words, too much omega-6 - that has a suspected link to Alzheimer's. Omega-3 proponents have been trumpeting this for some time. Fat is really complex stuff - lots of different things in the soup - so it pays to be specific.