Your Brain on a High Fat Diet

We have a good idea of how a high fat diet changes our bodies, and it’s not a change for the better. Now researchers at Yale have a good idea of how it changes our brain, triggering inflammation in the hypothalamus and literally making us want to eat more food. A Yale news release reports that researchers at the school observed hypothalamic inflammation in animals on a high fat diet. Looking harder, they discovered changes in physical structure were occurring among microglial cells –the first line of defense in the central nervous system that regulate inflammation. Those changes resulted from other changes in mitochondria, which happened to be much smaller in animals on a high-fat diet. Wait, there’s more: the microglia affected neurons stimulated the animals to eat more–lots more. The bottom line: high fat diets actually alter our food intake neurologically.