Why obese women do badly on memory tests....

Today's Post: Friday, 7-16-2010

There was a story online recently that found that obese women did more poorly on memory tests than women who were less fat.

The surprise was that the obese women who did not have type 2 diabetes, definite heart disease, or high blood pressure tested about as badly as those who did have.

So, having those things because of obesity wasn’t what caused the lower memory scores.

The article I read speculating on the explanation for this I thought missed the likely causes.

I think the following four will prove to be the main reasons for it.

1. The first one I believe is the likeliest and strongest cause. Two things are true. People who are active for more than half an hour a day and do several sessions of quite vigorous exercise every week are far less likely to get and stay obese. And, being obese makes doing such exercises MUCH harder – at least initially. The bottom line is that few obese women get such exercise.

Exercise has separately both been shown to prevent this effect and being sedentary, complete lack of exercise, to cause it. Exercise grows new brain cells and increases circulation. Sedentary people over time have measurable brain shrinkage that active exercisers do not or have far less of.

2. While obese women who do not have type 2 diabetes, definite heart disease, or high blood pressure, they often DO have similar conditions due to not exercising and the way they eat. And, they often are developing those health problems even though they haven’t arrived at the more severe range of them yet.

Eating and drinking a very large amount of sugars and high glycemic foods and very little foods with fiber almost every day is a direct cause of obesity. It also produces a roller coaster ride in the blood sugar and insulin that the brains of people who eat this way are exposed to.

Conversely, eating organically raised vegetables and protein foods from naturally fed animals such as grass fed beef and wild caught sardines and salmon, tends to produce a lower and much more stable and far less varied level of blood sugar and insulin. The studies I’ve read suggest that the brain functions far better if people eat this way. People who are obese tend NOT to eat this way.

This effect is understandable. For almost all the hundreds of thousands of years people have lived they ate the second way with natural foods. Only in the last 100 years have we changed where most people eat the first way.

To me it could not be simpler. Our brains have evolved to work well on what we ate for hundreds of thousands of years. When fed different and lower quality food that creates this roller coaster effect, they don’t work nearly as well. And, the more people eat the kinds of foods that cause this roller coaster effect, the fatter they become.

3. There is increasing evidence that in similar ways -- going from eating organically raised vegetables and protein foods from naturally fed animals such as grass fed beef and wild caught sardines and salmon to --
eating a lot of grains and the meat of animals fed grains instead of their natural diets has several dreadful health effects.

It boosts the level of the omega 6 oils found in grains and lowers the omega 3 oils found in the meat of naturally fed animals and fish.

I’ve read that people evolved to get a one to one ratio of omega 6 to omega 3. And, even getting five times as much omega 6 may still work.

But when you to the 10 to one to 40 to one ratio people have who eat in the way that produces obesity – and is increasingly what most people do today, unfortunately, people get high levels of chronic inflammation.

That is proven to cause heart disease and make getting most cancer far more likely. But there is increasing evidence that it also is a very powerful fattener.

Obese women ate that way to become obese; and their brains don’t work as well with this chronic inflammation. In addition, the flexibility of the cell walls of nerve cells is a key to them working well. But this flexibility depends on getting enough omega 3 oils.

4. Last but far from least, your score on a memory test depends on you being able to concentrate and focus your attention. If something is continuously distracting you, you are likely not to perform as well.

And, often being obese is uncomfortable enough from the extra weight and the lowered ability to cool off that this may be a factor.

The bottom line is whether you are a man or woman, if you don’t want to get or stay obese and you’d like your brain and memory to work well and keep doing it, stop: eating excessive sugars and foods made from refined grains, eating lots of oils high in omega 6 such as corn and soy oil, & stop drinking soft drinks and getting no exercise.

Instead eat mostly organically grown vegetables and natural sources of protein such as raw nuts, grass fed beef, pasture raised chickens where the pastureland isn’t itself polluted, and wild caught fish.

And, get abundant exercise each week including several sessions each week of vigorous exercise such as strength training with enough weight to cause you to work at lifting them and interval cardio.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit harder to eat this way now than it should be.
And, it CAN be challenging to fit in regular exercise. But you can do better than you might imagine if you begin anyway and keep finding ways to improve that you can do.

But it IS easily possible to stop ingesting the bad stuff totally. Even better, you then have all the money available you were spending on it to buy better quality if slightly more expensive foods instead.