Can anyone give me a comprehensive look at the affects of fast food on the brain?

[Canaan The Tribeless]

I lust after sweet, salty, fatty and oily food.

However, I usually am able to fight the constant urge to stuff my face with Burger King and pizza. I make myself pretty balanced meals of chicken or salmon with veggies and the works when I can. I work-out pretty religiously so that addiction overpowers my yearning for junk food. Every time I see junk food I want to eat I think of it in terms of gym progress lost and it helps a lot.

However, I do still eat it occasionally. I'm not really worried about how it is going to affect my body because I maintain my physical health pretty well. I'm more curious about the effects it has on mental or cognitive ability. From what I understand, fast food and loads of junk food are more than capable of really tweaking the chemistry of the brain. It messes with the reward functions, dopamine, etc.

There is a ton of information out there. I've skimmed some of it but I was wondering if you good folks had any insight. What is the short-term affect on the brain of eating a bunch of McDonalds or Dominos? Does it have to be constant abuse of poison food to have a significant impact?

Also, what are some of your diet philosophies and rules? Any particularly noticeable affect a certain food has had on your life you'd like to share?

[HordOfTheFlies]

I've read a lot of information about this issue over the past couple of years and I'm of the opinion that fast food isn't necessarily inherently bad for you but a little knowledge is helpful.  I would certainly avoid foods that have added sugars and/or fats.  I think this is where the reports of dopamine regulation stem from.  The combination of sugar and fat together is a strong signal to the brain that the food is a rich source of easy nutrition and should be sought.  Companies can alter the natural balance of these to maximize the effect on your reward centers but theoretically farmers have been doing this to fruit as well.  Since the body is basically a giant averaging machine, singular instances shouldn't have a lasting impact if kept to a minimum.  Constant exposure to this type of food has given rise to some of the large health issues we face worldwide now however.

 

Another issue is the use of trans-fatty acids (trans-fats) and polyunsaturated vegetable oils in the cooking process.  A big attraction of fast food is the fried-ness of it.  The oils used to fry the foods are cheap but delicate in high temperature environments.  When heated they may break down and form chemicals that are harmful inside the body.  They also provide a poor source of fats that your body needs for essential functions like cholesterol and hormone regulation.  My rule here is to never get fried things like fries with a few exceptions for lightly battered meats.  I'm a big fan of double bacon cheeseburgers.  If you can get them wrapped in a leafy green instead of the bread bun then all the better.  I avoid unnecessary carbs when possible.

 

My personal philosophy on nutrition is to listen to your body by being extremely aware of what you put into it and how it affects you.  The phrase "you are what you eat" is literal all the way down to the atomic level.  If you look at it that way, then one extremely important facet of health is ensuring that the proper chemicals in the proper balance are present in your body when needed.  Your body has mechanisms to tell you how to achieve this but I don't think many people think in those terms.  Many just want quick solutions and a bottle of pills to make the "symptoms" go away.  These symptoms are their body crying out to heal.  That's how it was for me anyway.  Since I have connected my food choices to my physical well-being it has been incredibly easy to not only maintain my health but substantially increase it over the past couple of years.

[PGP]

Hordoftheflies, what is your view on fat in general. Currently, I am limiting carbs to 80% recommended, getting necessary protein and eating approx 1.3 times the recommended fat intake. I get the fats mainly from nuts, seeds, sardines, eggs and avocado aswell as greek yogurt. I feel alot better on this diet, training is better, digestion feels better. I am concerned about long term effects though. 

[HordOfTheFlies]

Hordoftheflies, what is your view on fat in general.

 

I eat absolutely illegal amounts of saturated fat in my diet.  For over a year now I have eaten ultra high fat foods like cheese-filled sausages, rib-eye steaks cooked in butter and BBQ by the pound.  Just the other day I ate melted cheese and 32oz of half and half for breakfast and I will drink pints of heavy whipping cream as a snack.  A fairly regular meal for me is 6 eggs cooked in a half stick of grass fed butter with 4 oz of cheese melted in it.  It's a quick and delicious meal with tons of nutrition and it'll keep you feeling full for forever.

 

As for health effects all I can say is that what I have seen in my own body has been a miracle to me.  In the time I have started this diet I have lost a total of 95 pounds of weight.  I started at 343 and spent several years torturing myself with calorie restriction and other diet methods.  When I started eating higher fat I weighed about 295 and lost 30 pounds pretty quickly but then got stuck at 265 for quite a while.  I gave up on exercise and then started losing weight non-stop.  This year I have lost 65 pounds since January.  Technically I'm 205 right now because I ate some ice cream recently but I've been down all the way to 196 and should be 200 or under by the end of the year.  I can shed 5 pounds of weight pretty easily eating this way as long as I stay disciplined although I have been slacking a lot lately.

 

Everything else in my body has seen improvement as well.  I'm sure some of it is due to the weight loss, but I've noticed I can move better with less joint pain or stiffness.  My hair, nails and skin all seem to be healthier in general as well.  I also have absolutely zero issues with digestion which was not the case with a higher carb diet.  I've been to the doctor twice for blood tests and while I did see an increase in my serum cholesterol this year the values are still well within the low category.  I'm going to continue to monitor these values over time but so far I haven't seen anything that would cause me concern.  My blood pressure at the dentist the other day was 103/67 so no worries there either.

 

So if you can't tell, I'm pretty pro fat.  I don't spend a lot of time differentiating between saturated and unsaturated fats because I feel like if you are eating unprocessed foods then you are probably getting what you need.  There are a few edge cases that I need to research more like the omega fatty acids.  The concern there is keeping the ratio of those in proper balance because they manage your body's inflammation response which is apparently a new and important area of disease research.  There's always so much to learn and I feel like we have only just opened up the table of contents.

[shirgall]

Less than 50g of carbs per day and more than 50g of protein per day was where I was doing pretty good. Pretty tough around the holidays... so much good stuff.

[st434u]

I tried just about every nutritional approach out there. First I tried low carb, low fat, high protein, which was ok but left me hungry all the time. Then I tried vegetarianism and eventually veganism, which also was ok but left me without much energy and unable to build much muscle. Then I tried paleo, which was ok but I didn't stick with it for too long, plus it made me gain weight. Then I tried high fat, low carb, moderate protein, which was great for losing weight and I could go days without eating if I wanted to, plus I had tons of energy for exercise as well as mentally, and would never get very tired. But eventually it gave me heart problems, so I had to stop. Interestingly enough, mosquitoes wouldn't touch me when I was on this diet, whereas before they always feasted on me before anybody else. I never figured out if it was that they didn't want my blood because it was so healthy and low in sugar, or because it was so sick it would kill them too like it was killing me.

 

Now I'm trying something different, it's a 100% raw food diet, including meats and animal products. It's too soon to tell how it will work out, and there's always fears that I will catch some infection and die, but if it does work out I think I should be healthier on this diet than on anything else I've done before. It just makes so much sense to me. Non-human animals eat everything raw and full of bacteria and they don't seem to get diseases in the wild like we do in modern life. But I don't know, I'm not an expert on this. I still have a lot to learn.

[NotDarkYet]

The only diet that worked for me was the low-carb, high-fat, diet.

 

I walk a few miles a week.  That's it.

[Tessa]

Russell L. Blaylock has a great book called Excitotoxins, which is entirely focused on the effects that MSG, aspartame and other similar food additives have on the brain and nervous system.  He discusses how both high and low doses of MSG cause your neurons to excite themselves to death through a mechanism that keeps the neurons essentially locked in an open position, biochemically.  Lots of prepared foods and fast foods have MSG and aspartame in them, although MSG can be named many things (like hydrolyzed vegetable protein or natural flavors). 

[PGP]

I eat absolutely illegal amounts of saturated fat in my diet.  For over a year now I have eaten ultra high fat foods like cheese-filled sausages, rib-eye steaks cooked in butter and BBQ by the pound.

Thanks for that. One thing that always puzzled me has been the serious rise in obesity. I've seen pictures from back when my old man was a youngster and they were all lean and ate more or less anything including massive amounts if red-meat and butter. Now, I see folks on "low-fat" foods and the appearance has changed somewhat. Also, I have avoided almost all starches cooked in high temp lately. Only boiled starches and I think this has been very beneficial. 

[shirgall]

At this point I'm lending a lot of credence to Gary Taubes and his premises from Why We Get Fat: we eat too many carbs, exercise only gives temporary results, reduced caloric intake increases cravings, certain diet substances like aspartame increase cravings because they emulate real sugars, stress increases cravings, etc.

[Canaan The Tribeless]

He discusses how both high and low doses of MSG cause your neurons to excite themselves to death through a mechanism that keeps the neurons essentially locked in an open position, biochemically.

What effect does this have? I understand that Asian buffets drown their foods in MSG.

 

As for health effects all I can say is that what I have seen in my own body has been a miracle to me.  In the time I have started this diet I have lost a total of 95 pounds of weight.  I started at 343 and spent several years torturing myself with calorie restriction and other diet methods.  When I started eating higher fat I weighed about 295 and lost 30 pounds pretty quickly but then got stuck at 265 for quite a while.  I gave up on exercise and then started losing weight non-stop.  This year I have lost 65 pounds since January.  Technically I'm 205 right now because I ate some ice cream recently but I've been down all the way to 196 and should be 200 or under by the end of the year.  I can shed 5 pounds of weight pretty easily eating this way as long as I stay disciplined although I have been slacking a lot lately.

 

I'm willing to bet you cut out soda. The main culprit behind obesity is sugars in the form of liquid.

[Tessa]

What effect does this have? I understand that Asian buffets drown their foods in MSG.

It's believed to be a mechanism for neurodegenerative diseases occurring later in life, like Alzheimers, Parkinson's, and ALS.  Especially with a deficit of supporting brain food (omega 3s and glutathione were a few of the things he highlighted).  At the time of it's writing (1997), Blaylock states that the available research doesn't fully understand how these diseases occur and that there are also cases of inherited sensitivity to MSG, so he's pointing out a correlation, not necessarily a direct influence.  There's a lot more current research on MSG toxicity that basically supports these claims though.  MSG is probably one of many causes, IMO.

 

 

So if you can't tell, I'm pretty pro fat.  I don't spend a lot of time differentiating between saturated and unsaturated fats because I feel like if you are eating unprocessed foods then you are probably getting what you need.  There are a few edge cases that I need to research more like the omega fatty acids.  The concern there is keeping the ratio of those in proper balance because they manage your body's inflammation response which is apparently a new and important area of disease research.  There's always so much to learn and I feel like we have only just opened up the table of contents.

 

 

 

I have also recently become a fan of going back to the fats I grew up with...butter and steak and all that other awesome good stuff that has been touted as bad for so long.  I still moderate it to a degree but I'm pretty sure it doesn't hinder my weight loss.  I got fat from eating processed crap, tons of simple carbs and very low fiber.  Changing that has made a big difference for me.  

[BD91]

I wouldn't take EVERYTHING cited word-for-word, but these two books have a good bit of backed research on why high GI (glycemic index) foods can be so troublesome:

 

http://www.amazon.com/The-UltraMind-Solution-Broken-Healing/dp/0743570480

 

http://www.amazon.com/Grain-Brain-Surprising-Sugar--Your-Killers/dp/031623480X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420820091&sr=1-1&keywords=grain+brain