Eat Less Saturated Fat
Eat less saturated fat
Eating a high fat clean ketogenic diet has scientific leverage backing tremendous cognitive benefits, but if you’re choosing to blend the average Western diet and lifestyle, together with a large sudden influx of commercially farmed animal saturated fat products, it may be back firing against you - hindering your ability to think, and promoting anxiety.
I’ve been reading a few different studies done on the effects of high-fat diets on neurogenesis in rats that have shown that those fed a high-fat diet had a reduced instance of neural growth in the DG (Part of the hippocampal formation).
Seven weeks of a high-fat diet was enough to cause significant decreases in the amount of newly generated cells. Neurogenesis describes the creation (genesis) of new neurons, or the brain’s ability to generate new cells. Neurogenesis is a vital function for our mental health and it helps us retain our cognitive ability as we grow older!
For most of scientific history, we believed that brain cells could not be regenerated or created. Under that view, people who had damaged their brains with things like drugs and alcohol were unable to repair them to their prior state. We now know this isn’t true - the human brain has been shown to regenerate at least 700 neurons a day in the hippocampus alone.
Back to high fats and the abstracts of these studies; they suggest that all diets high in saturated fat also increase the concentration of malondialdehyde (MDA) which is a compound that is toxic to neural progenitor cells. And it is these cells that are necessary for the formation of new neurons.
As always we need to be vigilant when interpreting the suggestions put forth to the layman (and those that get sensationalised on social platforms). As the research has been performed on commercially farmed animal saturated fats not on free to roam, grass fed, bio-organically farmed animals. We need to account for the beneficial effects of DHA scores in grass-fed produce. Not to mention the negative effects of a combination of unhelpful stressors, excess sugars and increased saturated fats. It does seem that you cannot have your cake (to often) and eat it too.
Interest in neurogenesis for cognitive return? Here are are few science backed ways:
Get plenty of sleep
Reduce chronic stress
Reduce alcohol to one or two drinks per week
Make love regularly
Eat your flavonols - parsley, onions, berries, buckwheat, cocoa and citrus.
Eat your omega-3s
Get your resveratrol
Avoid over-eating
Eat less dirty saturated fat - discussed
Try intermittent fasting - get in touch and let’s work together on a form of IT that will work for you.
Keep on learning!
