14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new scientific study, people who are obese tend to have up to eight percent less brain tissue than others of average weight. The paper also reveals that the brains of obesity patients also seem to be more than 16 years older than those of leaner people the same age as theirs. The results have also maintained in the case of those who are not considered obese, but overweight. They show a four-percent brain tissue loss, and a premature aging level equivalent to eight years. The results are detailed in the latest online issue of the journal Human Brain Mapping.
The results were obtained after experts from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), led by Professor of Neurology and senior study author Paul Thompson, analyzed brain scans belonging to 94 people in their late 70s, LiveScience reports. “That's a big loss of tissue and it depletes your cognitive reserves, putting you at much greater risk of Alzheimer's and other diseases that attack the brain. But you can greatly reduce your risk for Alzheimer's, if you can eat healthily and keep your weight under control,” he explains.
The most affected brain areas, the experts say, were identified in the frontal and temporal lobes, which are areas regularly associated with memory and planning. Attention and executive functions, long-term memory and movement abilities are also adversely affected by the tissue loss. The findings have serious implications for a large number of people. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), some 300 million individuals are obese, with an additional one billion being overweight. The trend is largely due to the fact that more and more people consume highly processed foods.
The UCLA scientists used an advanced imaging technique for learning where all the major discrepancies in neuron numbers between normal and obese participants appeared. They learned that the basal ganglia, the corona radiata, the white matter comprised of axons, and the parietal lobe were most affected, each of them registering a considerable loss. However, some critics reveal that there is no way of saying for sure that the brain tissue indeed degenerated, mostly because the experts don't have brain scans belonging to the same patients from, say, two or three decades ago, for comparison.