Swedish Doctoral Thesis Links Fast Food Diet to Brain Abnormalities

A researcher at a Swedish medical university, Karolinska Institutet, has studied the effect of a high fat, sugar and cholesterol diet on the brains of mice. Susanne Akterin’s doctoral thesis, “From Cholesterol to Oxidative Stress in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Wide Perspective on a Multifactorial Disease,” shows that mice fed a diet equivalent to the nutritional content of most fast food developed brain abnormalities similar to those seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. While she finds the results promising by suggesting how Alzheimer’s could be prevented, Akterin also noted that “more research in this field needs to be done before proper advice can be passed on to the general
public.” Epidemiological studies have apparently shown that high cholesterol levels and lack of antioxidants may render people more susceptible to the development of the disease, so Akterin designed her research to find a mechanism that could explain these findings.