Obesity as a Brain Disease – A Public Wakeup Call

It’s a weird thought – an obese person being at the mercy of his or her brain – but recent research suggests this may be the case. According to a study done by Shefer et al., a diet high in calorie intake is linked to various negative neurological qualities such as a cognitive decline and reduced brain volume. This high calorie diet the researchers are attributing to these diminished qualities works via the blood brain barrier – they breakdown the proteins responsible for constructing the barrier, which then hinders the brain’s ability to protect from pathogens in    the blood. Furthermore, this destruction can lead to devastating inflammation in the brain, which leads to even further consequences for the high-calorie-consumer’s brain.
 
For example, the researchers showed that the resulting inflammation can damage various sensitive areas of the brain such as the hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. All of these areas are not only to crucial to everyday functioning, but they also contain signaling pathways important for learning and emotional processing. Because of this, behaviors like overeating can eventually transition into a learned behavior – a development very similar to that of addiction. In addition, the research showed that the chemical reward pathway in the brains of obese people is severely changed when exposed to food after fasting. These findings suggest that, maybe, obesity is actually a neurological disease. Is there merit to this claim? Or is it simply an opinionated, open-ended discussion topic that will be debated for a long time?

In my opinion, either way, this research should draw attention to a novel way to approach tackling obesity. And here in America, it seems that we should take any new approach we can get to make our nation healthier, right? In addition, these findings just further push me to believe how pertinent it is that our country becomes more educated on not only our brains, but what our lifestyles do to them. If we can actually understand what is happening when we eat a lot of calories instead of just knowing that eating unhealthy makes us fat, I firmly believe things may change. And in the case of this topic, the brain is a great place to start.
It’s time to educate the public on this topic – what we eat doesn’t just make our stomachs big and our bodies unhealthy, but it literally changes our brains. We begin to change the way we think about food and the decisions we make about our diets in response to overconsuming calories. It’s crazy. But it’s also reality.