It is no secret that obesity — the condition of being seriously overweight — is associated with a range of physical health problems, from heart disease to cancer. However a new study from Ronan et al. suggests something rather less obvious: obesity may be bad for your brain. Researchers looked at 473 people between the ages of 20 and 87, comparing the brains of lean and obese individuals in each age group. It was found that obese people had significantly smaller brains.
Brains decline in size with age because we lose a certain amount of white matter, the connective tissue that allows the transmission of information from one brain region to another. In this study the difference in brain volume between lean and obese people was accounted for by a faster decline in the volume of white matter. By the age of 50 a typical obese person was found to have the white matter volume of a 60-year-old lean person. In other words they had an older brain.
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