Scientists have long suspected that being overweight affects the brain. Now, a neuroimaging study from the University of Cambridge provides dramatic new evidence of how great the effects can be (Ronan et al., 2016).
The study, published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, compared a group of people with a normal Body Mass Index (BMI) of 19.5 to an overweight and obese group with a BMI averaging 43.4. It found that “cerebral white matter volume in overweight and obese individuals was associated with a greater degree of atrophy, with maximal effects in middle-age.”
The biggest changes were seen in the brain’s white matter, the tissue responsible for communicating information between regions of the brain. White matter makes up around half the volume of the brain, and it connects various regions of gray matter to coordinate their functions. It joins all four of the brain’s lobes (frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital) with each other, and with the emotional brain or limbic system in the center.
The researchers looked at the brains of 527 people aged 20 to 87. They found few differences in the brains of younger people. By age 50, however, the effects of obesity in the brain were dramatic, with the brain of an obese 50 year old, for instance, looking like the brain of a lean 60 year old.
Other studies have shown that obesity is associated with other diseases like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. An examination of the lifespan differences found that obesity cuts 8 years off your lifespan. But when the effects of obesity-related diseases are factored in, the difference rises to 30 years (Grover et al., 2015).
One of the brain study’s investigators, Professor Sadaf Farooqi of the Institute of Metabolic Science at Cambridge, says: “We don’t yet know the implications of these changes in brain structure. Clearly, this must be a starting point for us to explore in more depth the effects of weight, diet and exercise on the brain and memory.”
This raises the intriguing question of whether weight loss can reverse the brain atrophy found in overweight people. One of the study’s authors, professor Paul Fletcher of the Department of Psychiatry wonders “whether these changes could be reversible with weight loss, which may well be the case.”
While long term weight loss is elusive, with research showing that most dieters regain even more weight than they lost, there are several new studies demonstrating that it is possible. When emotional eating is successfully treated, not only do dieters maintain their new weight, they continue losing weight over time.
A study at Bond University found that using EFT or Emotional Freedom Techniques, a common treatment for psychological trauma, dieters lost an additional 11.1 lb over the course of the subsequent year (Stapleton, Sheldon et al., 2012; Stapleton, Bannatyne et al., 2016). Lead researcher, psychology professor Dr. Peta Stapleton, is now using neuroimaging to study the brains of these successful losers. This will provide clues as to whether the atrophy noted in the Cambridge study is reversible.
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