Mice fed fast food get noticeably stupider, scientists warn | Hacker News Reader

Mice fed fast food get noticeably stupider, scientists warn

futurism.com

> 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?

Yep. Of all chemicals, how did we evolve into dopamine?!

When calories were hard to come by, that pleasurable reward response was powerful enough to have an evolutionary advantage.

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.

If you feed a child mouse food, I am sure they will get stupider too.

There is no information here.

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.

I've noticed that when I feel like shit, I'm hard on myself over my diet.

> 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.

There was as documentary I watched years ago where they had a school for the problem kids, and the onsite cafeteria made healthy fresh vegetable rich foods. It would seem that the food quality affects so much and to such depth. Everyone should have easy access to vegetable rich, low-processed foods.

Mildly annoyed that they gloss over terms like high fat, high calorie, and sugary as one blob called the western diet.

This comment got me to look at the article - and at least they are specifying that this is what they are meaning by the term.

I'd like to see the term updated, and a new round of tests run, where they take into account packaging, preparation and other environment 'standards' to the western diet.

Add BPA from canned foods. Prep a percentage of the food with teflon or similar coated stuff that's damaged and leaching. Pull some of the coatings from french fries boxes and similar packaging that's to prevent sticking - yet as one disgruntled former dupont employee announced, causes cancer. Use some styrofoam that's been melted to show getting food made and put into styrofoam too hot - and also melted via microwave reheating. Make a ton of it in microwaved plastic - as a NY times article laid out years ago this disrupts hormone especially in young. Preservatives and plastic - might as well mix a chunk of that stuff in there as I'm pretty sure most in the west of ingesting good amounts of it.

The western diet includes dust, VOCs and other pollution depending on exact circumstances as well really.

I wonder how the levels of these things vary from state to state / city to county, etc. Sometimes I think fancy scientists have different grocery store options than the average western calorie consumer and don't take that into consideration.

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.

Caloric restriction makes you smarter for a day, caloric elimination makes you smarter for the rest of your life.

I'm a hangry bonehead if I skip breakfast and lunch, but feel free to experiment yourself

One day you'll have the realization that you're essentially experiencing "sugar withdrawal." Like an alcoholic or drug addict.

Sounds like the epiphany of a hypoglycemic teenager. I'm far too old for that particular brand of foolishness.

Rather disappointed with the low quality of comments on this thread. Is it because diet is something everyone has an opinion on?

Contradictory nutrition news creates consumer confusion

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140128153814.h...

Confusion and nutritional backlash from news media exposure to contradictory information about carbohydrates and dietary fats

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrit...

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.

That would only make sense if they compared fed mice to mice that had to scavenge for food

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence (Wikipedia: Diseases of affluence)

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.

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.

Rat food or slow food? If rats get dumber from eating any human food then this study hasn't said anything.

I am glad I am not a fast food eating mouse then. Seriously though: what is true for mice may or may not be true for humans.

I'm loving it

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.

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?

My brother in law eats nothing but fast food every day and he's a total moron, so this finding does not surprise me.

Maybe it's an opposite case of cause and effect.

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