Working On Me

The health complications associated with obesity, among them an increased risk of developing diabetes and heart disease, may now include what scientists are calling “severe brain degeneration.” In a new study out of UCLA, obese and overweight people were shown to have significantly less brain tissue than people classified as being a normal weight.

Scans showed that obese participants had 8 percent less brain tissue and overweight participants had 4 percent less brain tissue. This degree of tissue loss greatly increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases, the lead researcher said.  He also noted that this risk can be reduced by healthy eating and weight management.

Because I believe that our health is much more holistic than a bum knee or extra roll around the waistline, I am compelled by this study. Why wouldn’t our eating and activity habits impact our brain? It makes sense. Perhaps most the most fascinating part of this research is the brain mapping conducted on the participants that narrowed down exactly where the tissue loss took place.

Researchers observed that obese participants lost tissue in these areas of the brain:

• frontal and temporal lobes – controlling executive functions, judgment, memory, sense of self, language, auditory and visual perception

• anterior cingulate gyrus – controlling the function of attention

• hippocampus – controlling the functions of associative and episodic memories

• basal ganglia – controlling the functions of movement

Overweight people were shown to have tissue loss in these areas:

• basal ganglia – controlling the function of movement

• corona radiata – white matter that carries messages between neurons.

• parietal lobe – controlling the functions of processing sensory information, speech and language development, spatial orientation, and attention

What makes me skeptical about applying these findings to the masses is that the study measured tissue loss in the brains of 94 people aged in their 70s.

The researchers stated that the brains of obese participants looked 16 years older and the brains of overweight participants looked 8 years older than those who had lower BMIs, and this is clearly a concern. I am curious how the brains of obese and overweight people compare at the age of 50, 30, or even in teenagers. I also wonder if there is a certain age where this degeneration naturally speeds and if that means bigger people’s brains lose tissue more rapidly.

For now, though, this study seems to be an important step in connecting how we choose to move and fuel our bodies now with how we may live out the last decades of our life. It also affirms, at least for me, that the body-mind connection goes deeper and is more important than we may have even imagined.

Does the idea of losing brain tissue make you more concerned about being healthy?

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