Avoid Memory Loss By Skipping These Foods

It is a known fact that trans fats can wreak havoc in your cholesterol levels. But a recent study by a team from the University of California have stated that it can also affect your brain, resulting to poor memory.

What are Trans Fats?

Small amount of naturally occurring trans fat can be found in some dairy products and meat. But mostly trans fat is formed, through a process that adds hydrogen to vegetable oil. This industrial process causes the oil to solidify at room temperature. The hydrogenated oil that results from this process, can make foods have a longer shelf life.

What are the Foods that Contain Trans Fat?

Fried foods: Foods that require deep frying, these include doughnuts, french fries and fried chicken.

Snacks: Includes corn, tortilla and potato chips.

Refrigerated dough: Includes canned biscuits, frozen pizza and cinnamon rolls.

Margarine and Creamer: Includes stick margarine and non-dairy coffee creamer.

Baked goods: Includes most cookies, cakes, pie crusts and crackers. These contain shortening, usually made from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.

How Do Trans Fats Affect Your Memory?

The study, was carried out by a research team led by Dr. Beatrice Golomb, from the University of California, and it involves an evaluation of data with just under 650 healthy men, whose age ranges from 45 and below. The participants were then asked to take a dietary survey and then participate in a memory examination.

The researchers discovered a link between memory and trans fat. That is for every gram of trans fats consumed daily, the memory performance of the men also decreased significantly. In fact, men whose diet included a lot of trans fats, approximately 16-grams or more, were able to recall 12 fewer words, compared to men who ate less trans fats.

The study focused on men, but the researchers saw no reason why trans fats would affect women differently than men.

More research are needed to focus on this finding. But the team leader for the research said that trans fats may cause inflammation in the body, therefore prevent the production of chemicals that play an important role in memory. This will affect the memory and result to affected brain function

From: 1mhealthtips