Fatty food may feel like a friend during these troubled times, but new
research suggests that eating just one meal high in saturated fat can hinder
our ability to concentrate — not great news for people whose diets have gone
south while they’re working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study
compared how 51 women performed on a test of their attention after they ate
either a meal high in saturated fat or the same meal made with sunflower oil,
which is high in unsaturated fat.
Their
performance on the test was worse after eating the high-saturated-fat meal than
after they ate the meal containing a healthier fat, signaling a link between
that fatty food and the brain.
Researchers were
also looking at whether a condition called leaky gut, which allows intestinal
bacteria to enter the bloodstream, had any effect on concentration.
Participants with leakier guts performed worse on the attention assessment no
matter which meal they had eaten.
The loss of
focus after a single meal was eye-opening for the researchers.
“Most prior work
looking at the causative effect of the diet has looked over a period of time.
And this was just one meal — it’s pretty remarkable that we saw a difference,”
said Annelise Madison, lead author of the study and a graduate student in
clinical psychology at The Ohio State University.
Madison also
noted that the meal made with sunflower oil, while low in saturated fat, still
contained a lot of dietary fat.
“Because both
meals were high-fat and potentially problematic, the high-saturated-fat meal’s
cognitive effect could be even greater if it were compared to a lower-fat
meal,” she said.
The study is published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Madison works in
the lab of Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, professor of psychiatry and psychology and
director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State. For
this work, Madison conducted a secondary analysis of data from Kiecolt-Glaser’s
study assessing whether high-fat meals increased fatigue and inflammation among
cancer survivors.
Women in the
study completed a baseline assessment of their attention during a morning visit
to the lab. The tool, called a continuous performance test, is a measure of
sustained attention, concentration and reaction time based on 10 minutes of
computer-based activities.
The high-fat
meal followed: eggs, biscuits, turkey sausage and gravy containing 60 grams of
fat, either a palmitic acid-based oil high in saturated fat or the
lower-saturated-fat sunflower oil. Both meals totaled 930 calories and were
designed to mimic the contents of various fast-food meals such as a Burger King
double whopper with cheese or a McDonald’s Big Mac and medium fries.
Five hours
later, the women took the continuous performance test again. Between one and
four weeks later, they repeated these steps, eating the opposite meal of what
they had eaten on the first visit.
Researchers also
analyzed participants’ fasting baseline blood samples to determine whether they
contained an inflammatory molecule that signals the presence of endotoxemia —
the toxin that escapes from the intestines and enters the bloodstream when the
gut barrier is compromised.
After eating the
meal high in saturated fat, all of the participating women were, on average, 11
percent less able to detect target stimuli in the attention assessment.
Concentration lapses were also apparent in the women with signs of leaky gut:
Their response times were more erratic and they were less able to sustain their
attention during the 10-minute test.
“If the women
had high levels of endotoxemia, it also wiped out the between-meal differences.
They were performing poorly no matter what type of fat they ate,” Madison said.
Though the study
didn’t determine what was going on in the brain, Madison said previous research
has suggested that food high in saturated fat can drive up inflammation
throughout the body, and possibly the brain. Fatty acids also can cross the
blood-brain barrier.
“It could be
that fatty acids are interacting with the brain directly. What it does show is
the power of gut-related dysregulation,” she said.
The statistical
analysis accounted for other potential influences on cognition, including
depressive symptoms and the participants’ average dietary saturated fat
consumption. The women in the study ate three standardized meals and fasted for
12 hours before each lab visit to reduce diet variations that could affect
their physiological response to the high-fat meals.
The findings
suggest concentration could be even more impaired in people stressed by the
pandemic who are turning to fatty foods for comfort, Kiecolt-Glaser said.
“What we know is
that when people are more anxious, a good subset of us will find
high-saturated-fat food more enticing than broccoli,” she said. “We know from
other research that depression and anxiety can interfere with concentration and
attention as well. When we add that on top of the high-fat meal, we could
expect the real-world effects to be even larger.”
Source: https://news.osu.edu/our-ability-to-focus-may-falter-after-eating-one-meal-high-in-saturated-fat/
Journal article: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ajcn/nqaa085/5835679?redirectedFrom=fulltext
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