(NaturalNews) While the talking heads on TV frantically warn about the
so-called swine flu pandemic that is supposedly on the verge of causing
world-wide suffering and death, there's another world-wide health problem of
enormous proportions that's here, right now -- being overweight. The World
Health Organization (WHO) estimates more than 300 million people across the
planet are obese, and another billion more are overweight. Being too fat isn't a
cosmetic problem, it's a condition that kills people prematurely by leading to
cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, stroke and type 2 diabetes. And now
there's evidence that being too fat also causes brain degeneration and maybe
even Alzheimer's disease.
In a study just published in the current online edition of the journal Human
Brain Mapping, a research team headed by Paul Thompson, senior author and a
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) professor of neurology, and lead
author Cyrus A. Raji, a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh School
of Medicine, compared the brains of people who were obese, overweight, and of
normal weight. To define the weight categories, the scientists used the Body
Mass Index (BMI), to establish that normal weight people had a BMI between 18.5
and 25, overweight people had a BMI between 25 and 30, and obese people's BMI
was more than 30.
The scientists wanted to document whether the brains of those in each of the
three groups were equally normal and healthy. Surprisingly, they weren't. In
fact, the scientists discovered that obese people had eight percent less brain
tissue than people with normal weight. In addition, people who were only
overweight and not downright obese still showed a loss of about four percent of
brain tissue.
Thompson, who is a member of UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, said in a
statement to the media that this study marks the first time anyone has
established a link between being being overweight and having what Thompson
called in a statement to the media "severe brain degeneration." In fact, he
noted that "..the brains of obese people looked 16 years older than the brains
of those who were lean, and in overweight people looked eight years older."
"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," Thompson stated. "But you can greatly reduce your risk for Alzheimer's,
if you can eat healthily and keep your weight under control."
The researchers used brain images from the earlier Cardiovascular Health Study
Cognition Study. The researchers then transformed those scans into
three-dimensional images using a high tech neuroimaging method that produces
detailed resolution mapping of differences in brain anatomy.
When they compared both grey matter and white matter of the brain, the
scientists found that the people defined as obese had lost brain tissue in the
frontal and temporal lobes (parts of the brain critical for memory and
planning), the anterior cingulate gyrus (needed for attention and executive
functions), hippocampus (critical for long term memory) and the basal ganglia
(needed for movement). Overweight people showed less brain loss, but it was
brain loss, all the same -- mostly in the basal ganglia and the parietal lobe
(known as the sensory lobe).
"It seems that along with increased risk for health problems such as type 2
diabetes and heart disease, obesity is bad for your brain: we have linked it to
shrinkage of brain areas that are also targeted by Alzheimer's," Raji said in a
statement to the press. "But that could mean exercising, eating right and
keeping weight under control can maintain brain health with aging and
potentially lower the risk for Alzheimer's and other dementias."
Source : Natural News
