A new study by researchers at the University of Southern California (USC), which was conducted on rats, shows that teenagers who consume a lot of junk food show long-term brain damage, compromising their memory.
Memory problems in adulthood
“What we saw not only in this study but also in our other recent research work was that when rats were fed a diet of… junk foodshowed memory problems that were not reversed over time,” noted Dr. Scott Kanoski, professor of biological sciences at USC and lead author of the study, adding that “even if the test animals subsequently follow a healthy diet, unfortunately the effects of the earlier unhealthy diet their nutrition, they continue in their adult life”.
The role of acetylcholine
In the context of conducting their new study published in the scientific journal “Brain, Behavior and Immunity” Professor Kanoski together with postdoctoral researcher Anna Hayes “stepped” on their previous research which had shown a connection between poor nutrition and her Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s patients tend to have lower levels of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine in their brains, which is crucial for memory and for functions such as learning, attention, arousal and involuntary muscle movements.
The big “teenage” nutritional question
The researchers wondered exactly what the effect of a poor, high-fat, high-sugar Western diet would be on younger people, and especially on people in adolescence when the brain is going through major developmental changes. By monitoring the effect of an unhealthy diet on the rats’ acetylcholine levels and subjecting the experimental animals to memory tests, the scientists sought to learn more about the relationship between diet and memory.
The memory test
The memory test the rats were subjected to involved the researchers letting the animals locate new objects in different environments. After a few days, the animals returned to the same environments where the different objects were placed in exactly the same places – except that an extra object was added to each environment. As it turned out, the animals that had followed an unhealthy diet showed that they could not remember the objects they had seen the previous time. At the same time, age-matched rats that belonged to the control group that followed a healthy diet appeared to have the memory of an elephant.
No signal…
“The acetylcholine signaling pathway is a mechanism that helps encode and remember events in rats – it’s analogous to humans’ ‘episodic memory’ which allows us to remember past events,” explained Dr Hayes, adding: “In animals that raised on a high-fat, high-sugar diet, there appeared to be no signal in the acetylcholine pathway.”
Difficult to revert to childhood situations
Dr. Kanoski emphasized that adolescence is a very sensitive period for the brain during which significant changes take place. “I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a doomsayer, but unfortunately some conditions that are more easily reversible in adulthood are more difficult to reverse when they occur in childhood.”
The medicinal hope
Amidst these pessimistic and worrying findings there was, however, a hope. As Dr. Kanoski reported, his research team tested whether the rats’ memory impairments could be reversed through the use of drugs that cause the release of acetylcholine. The researchers tested two drugs, PNU-282987 and carbachol, and saw that administering them directly to the hippocampus – an area of the brain that controls memory and is damaged in Alzheimer’s patients – restored the rats’ memory.
Need for further studies
However, this type of pharmaceutical intervention is very specialized and obviously extremely difficult to implement. For this reason and, according to Dr. Kanoski, further studies are needed to find other ways of intervening to reverse the memory problems caused by poor nutrition in teenagers.
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