John Myers
Trans fats in food can damage memory and massively reduce memory performance. Hardened fats lead to oxidative stress in the body and thus increase the risk of various diseases, including Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
Trans fats: Responsible for poor memory
Trans fats (also called trans fats) can damage your memory. Trans fats are industrially hardened, i.e. chemically modified fats. One speaks of chemical hardening when actually liquid oils are modified in such a way that they have a solid consistency at room temperature.
Trans fats can be found in a wide variety of foods, e.g. B. in sweets, margarine, baked goods, spreads, frozen dough from the refrigerated shelf as well as in fast food and ready meals of all kinds.
In the ingredients list, they are often referred to as “hydrogenated vegetable oil” or “hydrogenated vegetable fat”. The consumer associates the term “plants…” with healthy food and often does not quietly think that behind this vegetable oil of all things there could be a harmful ingredient that even has a direct effect on memory.
Prof. Beatrice A. Golomb from the US University of California-San Diego warned in 2014 at a meeting of the American Heart Association:
“Trans fats make food last longer, but make people die sooner.”
Oxidative stress from trans fats irritates memory
Hardened fats cause oxidative stress in the human organism. You let u. free radicals are formed which lead to tissue damage in the body. In this way, trans fats increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, but also promote memory deterioration. Oxidative stress can also lead to dementia diseases such as Alzheimer’s or promote their development and progression. It is also known that trans fats can promote obesity, depression, and even aggression.
Bad memory – bad career prospects
Prof. Golomb and her team have now investigated the harmful effects of trans fats on the brain and memory in a study. About a thousand men (maximum age 45) participated in the study. It was found that men whose diets contained a lot of trans fats had significantly poorer memory and thus performed significantly worse than the participants who consumed fewer or no trans fats.
So the men were by no means of an age at which one could count on poor memory. On the contrary, they were still in the middle of their working lives.
Every gram of trans fat weakens memory
Each additional gram of trans fat per day reduced the number of correct answers on the memory test by 0.76. Compared to the men who consumed the least amount of trans fat, those who consumed the largest amounts of trans fat performed more than ten percent worse. This effect was independent of age, education, race, and mental health. Therefore protect your memory and avoid industrially processed products with high trans fat contents!
In the very first link at the top of the article (under trans fats), you will find all the information about trans fats, what foods they are in, and what amounts are problematic. There is also good news: the amount of trans fat in finished products is continuously decreasing. Precisely because it became known how harmful trans fats are, production methods have now been developed that reduce the trans fat content, e.g. B. in margarine. Nonetheless, foods that contain high amounts of trans fat are or were problematic not just because of the trans fats. Because sweets, baked goods, snacks, fried foods, and fast food, in particular, have many other disadvantages fewer trans fats from these foods still do not make recommendable products.
