Tom Corson-Knowles

New study shows high fat foods damage the area of your brain crucial for weight loss

A new study published on January 3rd, 2012 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that eating high fat foods can damage the hypothalamus and dramatically increase inflammation in this crucial part of the brain in rodents. The hypothalamus is a part of the brain responsible for maintaining homeostasis, your hunger, thirst and the body’s natural rhythms and cycles.

The researchers actually found that eating high fat foods (oxidized fats) cause gliosis (scarring) in the part of the brain that is crucial for maintaining a healthy weight! This scarring can be permanent if the poor diet is maintained over a long period of time.

The study really just backs up what we already knew and have been teaching for years about losing weight and eating a healthy diet:

1. Epigenetics and Diet

Bad diets mess up your genes. If you’re overweight, it’s most often not because you were born with bad genes – it’s often because your diet has turned on bad genes that increase inflammation and weight gain, and turned off good genes that are anti-inflammatory and help maintain a healthy weight.

This study showed that in just 3 days after eating a high fat meal, the rodents showed changes in their DNA, with over 50% more gene expression from pro inflammatory genes (the kind that increase inflammation) in the hypothalamus and liver.

Note: It’s important to realize that a high fat meal is not the problem here. The food in the study, like most food eaten by obese people, was highly processed and so the fats were oxidized before being consumed. The problem here is eating processed foods and fats that have been oxidized, especially without antioxidants from product to protect from free radical damage and oxidative stress.

What the changed gene expression means is that eating processed foods and oxidized fats can IMMEDIATELY (within 3 days) increase inflammatory genes in your hypothalamus and liver, wrecking havoc on the region of your brain that is crucial for maintaining normal hunger and thirst.

This is one of the reasons why when people eat fast food and processed foods all the time, they tend to overeat – because your body is no longer acting normal. The hypothalamus is out of balance, there’s inflammation throughout the body, and you are hungrier than you should be because of this damage.

So what can we learn from this new study?

Some old truths:

If you want to lose weight or stay at a healthy weight, you have to bring down inflammation. You can do this by eating lots of fresh fruits, vegetables, and berries and avoiding eating processed foods (like potato chips, cookies, crackers, etc.) and oxidized fats from fried foods and packaged high-heated foods.

2. Diet and Weight Loss

If the structure of your very brain that controls your hunger can be damaged by your diet, what do you think that means?

It means diet is a CRUCIAL part of weight loss.

This is why many people who exercise and then decide to indulge themselves with desserts, fast food, and processed foods all the time struggle to lose weight.

It doesn’t matter how many miles you run – if you feed your body oxidized fats and processed foods that damage your brain and cause inflammation, you will still have an abnormal hunger and tend to gain weight over time, not lose it.

This doesn’t mean exercise isn’t important for losing weight – it’s crucially important! But you have to have a healthy diet that protects your body from inflammation and damage – a diet rich in antioxidants from fresh fruits, vegetables, and berries and low in processed foods and oxidized fats.

3. Losing Weight and Keeping It Off

This study also helps explain why it’s so hard for obese people to lose weight and keep it off. If you’ve been obese for years, the structure of your hypothalamus and brain has been abnormal for years!

This means it’s not just about losing fat and losing weight – it’s about physically changing the structure of your brain and the expression of your genes. And this can only be done with a healthy, natural weight loss diet over time.

If you’ve been obese for 5 years, that’s at least 5 years of damage to your hypothalamus and chronic inflammation (note that in the study, eating the high fat foods caused damage to the hypothalamus and inflammation before weight gain was even observed!)

In the study with rodents, the researchers found that a prolonged bad diet caused permanent changes in the hypothalamus! (Although I’m confident that if a healthy diet was administered afterwards over a long period of time, the rats would have eventually recovered at least partially. The human body has an incredible ability to heal over time when fed a healthy diet).

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