Miami Living Magazine features the best Miami has to offer. Click on any magazine below and enjoy. You can download our free app on iTunes. Ideal for iPad and iPhone users.
Issue link: https://digital.miamilivingmagazine.com/i/1359088
To determine which areas of the brain are most vulnerable to the ill-effects of a leaky BBB, we infuse a small amount of dye into the bloodstream of a rat and measure areas of the brain where the dye accumulates. In overweight rats fed a western-style diet, the dye appears to collect preferentially in the hippocampus, a brain structure involved with important learning and memory functions. As an apparent response to the accumulation of such intruding substances, the hippocampus becomes inflamed and its electrochemical activity changes. Rats that suffer these consequences also show deficits in their ability to use certain types of information processed by the hippocampus. A vicious cycle Do these deficits have anything to do with our ability to resist eating high-fat and sugary foods? We think they do. One type of information that is processed by the hippocampus takes the form of internal physiological signals about one’s need for food. Rats and people who have sustained damage to their hippocampus appear to have difficulty using those internal signals to tell whether or not they’ve had enough to eat or drink. In the presence of powerful cues in the environment that entice you to eat, a reduced ability to use information from your body that tells you that you don’t need food can lead to overeating. The result could be a vicious cycle in which eating a western diet produces hippocampal dysfunction which weakens the ability to use internal cues to counter eating elicited by cues in the environment. This could lead to progressively more eating of western diet based on progressively greater deterioration of hippocampal function. As the hippocampus becomes more and more impaired, the severity and scope of learning and memory deficits would also increase. The result could be not only obesity but also more serious cognitive decline. How to break this feedback loop is an important research question. Maybe the answer will be to find ways to protect and strengthen the BBB against the bad effects of western diet. Maybe it will be in finding ways to make the western diet less damaging. But until other answers are found, the only protection we have is knowing that an excessive intake of a western diet may harm both our physical and mental well-being. Terry Davidson: Director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology, American University. Camille Sample: PhD Student in Behavioral and Neural Homeostasis, American University. Special thanks for The Conversation. Image by Karsten Winegeart/Unsplash.