Photo: Sonika Agarwal, Unsplash
Evolutionary Drives Amok. Too Much Of A Good Thing Can Be Deadly:
The modern marvel of mass production is a funny thing.
Henry Ford and Samuel Colt basically created the entire middle-class of the world, starting with the US.
But that manufacturing miracle also started killing us, because survival can sometimes get weird.
It’s almost the same reason why it’s easy to get fat. Because we’re engineered to survive a famine.
And part of that engineering involved eating some things that we now get way too much of,
But a Japanese University thinks they might just be able to save us from ourselves…
The Short Answer:
- Humans evolved to survive a famine.
- Because of that, we crave fat, salt, and sugar.
- But what happens when we have more of that than we need?
- A Japanese team studied the effects of a dangerous type called Saturated Fat.
- With a 20% coconut oil diet, the fruit fly subjects started losing their memory in 7 days.
- This loss in intermediate memory would happen in 3 hours after that day.
- It also started ruining new long-term memories.
- The team found that saturated fat stops one half of the brain’s waste cleanup routine.
- But they also fixed it with a prescription drug for the immune-system.
- Even better ways to avoid the problem are to get as much saturated fat out of your diet as you can.
- And Cardio has a great reputation for cleaning your brain out, so that might help, too.
- Having a great sleep schedule and getting naps can help as well.
- You may not get as much sat-fat as in the study, but you could be hurting your brain slowly over time.
- The article has a list of foods high in saturated fat that you can avoid in Section 7, “The Takeaway?…”.
Read on to find out the details…
> Show/Hide Table Of Contents <
Mass-Production Pushes Evolutionary-Drives Into Dysfunction:
So what are the problems they’re trying to fix?
Mass production has made most things affordable and pervasive.
But what that means, is we end up getting way too much of them.
The scarce minerals & nutrients we focused on in ancient times that helped us survive,
Turn out to be too plentiful and too easy to overdose on now.
The Japanese Study That Should REALLY Make You Rethink Fatty-Food!:
So a team from Chiba University in Japan set out to study the problem of fatty food.
They recruited a squadron of fruit flies to help and gave them a diet with 20% coconut oil.
-Which we’ll get back to later.
But they respond similarly to us in some ways, so the results were helpful.
By the seventh day, the fruit flies were having problems remembering a task they’d been trained to do.
-Which they forgot just three hours after learning it!
And what that looks like for non-fruit-fly Humans is: correlation to problems like Alzheimer’s or Dementia.
It Wrecks The Brain’s Own Cleanup Routine; In The Worst Possible Place:
The way this occurred is almost as crazy as the result.
What happens is that when certain types of fats or their by-products make their way into the brain,
They actually stop the brain’s cleanup routine from working.
It has two parts, and the breakdown phase after initial waste-collection is the bit that stops functioning.
Weirder still, was that all the junk that seem to accumulate from this problem showed up mostly in the brains memory centers!
But wait, it gets worse.
Because what happened next is, the flies stopped storing intermediate-term memories,
And then that cascaded to impair new long-term memories as they went on.
But Wait! The Freaky Chemistry Has A Batman To Its Joker!:
The next amazing part is that the researchers were actually able to repair the problems.
They used three methods, two of them by turning off biological switches.
But the third turned out to be using an already existing prescription medication.
It’s a weird one that’s normally used to modulate the immune system.
And the miracle of miracles is that it works even when the flies were on the high-fat diet!
Even better than that is the fact that they had to balance the amount of that medication because it turned out to be too powerful.
And If That Magic Fix Can Work, Maybe Some Others Can Too?:
The nice thing is that this suggests a human’s cleanup & memory ability can bounce back with the right interventions.
It also might fuel hope that diet-related memory issues could end up not being permanent.
Part of that bouncing-back right now could be:
1) Better nutrition habits
2) More & better sleep
3) Naps
4) Great exercise that helps clean the brain
More good news?
So Just Remember, Saturated Fat, Including Coconut Oil, Is Poison:
The coconut oil used in this study is up to 86% saturated fat,
So it’s like getting just over 17% of your daily intake from that type.
For the average person, that means about 344 calories, or about 38 grams/day.
This is equivalent to having about ~38 tablespoons of peanut butter in the same time.
But there’s also some stealthy bad news. Because most people don’t pay attention to saturated fat at all.
-Which is probably why the university guys didn’t mention the specific type of fat they were criticizing.
And also that it’s Really easy to get too much of this dietary poison.
The Takeaway? Don’t Just Reduce Fatty-Food. Reduce SATURATED Fat!:
Unfortunately, that missed-point is the single most important takeaway from the whole study.
Because it’s also a risk you can actually do something about, starting right now!
Here are just a few of the foods you may get regularly that have too much saturated fat!
1) Dairy
1a) Butter
1b) Higher fat yogurt, sour cream, cottage cheese, & cream cheese
1c) Cheese
1d) Especially hard cheeses
1e) Cream, half & half, and whole milk
2) Red meat
2a) Beef
2b) Lamb
2c) Pork
3) Skin-on Poultry
4) Ground meats
5) Spreads & dressings
6) Baked goods like cookies, cakes, pastries, & brownies
7) Almost all desserts, like ice cream
8) Processed foods
8a) Because they can be full of Coconut, Palm, & Palm-Kernel oils
9) Restaurant foods
9a) From fatty/ground meats
9b) Or using butter
10) Some spreads & dressings like Ranch & Caesar
The only good news?
Chocolate may not be as bad as all the others.
-If it’s only fat is Cocoa Butter, then 50% of it is non-harmful and doesn’t accelerate aging.
Nerd-Out On This To Transcend Your Own Evolution Gone Haywire:
So now you know, it’s not just “some fatty foods”.
And if you can, Yes, you should absolutely nerd-out and start looking at food labels to see how much sat-fat they have.
After that, you may never want to eat a burger again!
Even weirder-still, if you can get some organic, cold-pressed Canola oil in glass or metal containers that’s stored cool and not oxidized,
You might even be able to use something with less saturated fat than even Olive Oil in your salad dressings or cooking!
So stay on the lookout and reduce your consumption as much as you can, regardless of what your Evolutionary “fat is yummy” taste-circuits are telling you.
Because until the wonder-drugs for this stuff arrive, you won’t die in a famine. But you could end-up with Dementia!
And if Dr. Neal Barnard taught us anything, diet can fix a TON; even if you have bad genes.
References & Links:
• Source: Chiba U.
• Source Study: PLOS-Genetics – High-fat diet impairs intermediate-term memory by autophagic-lysosomal dysfunction in Drosophila
