Study reveals why belly fat is bad for brain functioning

Dec 21, 2019

New Delhi, Dec 21 (ANI): Making a New Year's resolution to work out more and eat healthier may be a good idea, not only for your overall health but also to maintain healthy brain function. Researchers have found for the first time that less muscle and more body fat may affect how flexible our thinking gets as we become older, and changes in parts of the immune system could be responsible.These findings could lead to new treatments that help maintain mental flexibility in ageing adults with obesity, sedentary lifestyles, or muscle loss that naturally happens with ageing. The study was published in the journal of Brain, Behaviour, and Immunity. The researchers examined direct measurements of lean muscle mass, abdominal fat, and subcutaneous fat, and how they were related to changes in fluid intelligence over six years. Greater muscle mass, by contrast, appeared to be a protective factor. These relationships stayed the same even after taking into account chronological age, level of education, and socioeconomic status. Generally, people begin to gain fat and lose lean muscle once they hit middle age, a trend that continues as they get older. To overcome this, implementing exercise routines to maintain lean muscle becomes more important. In this study, in women, the entire link between more abdominal fat and worse fluid intelligence was explained by changes in two types of white blood cells: lymphocytes and eosinophils. In men, a completely different type of white blood cell, basophils, explained roughly half of the fat and fluid intelligence link.