Brain Health Risk from Ultra Processed Food

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As many of you know, I’m solidly on the side of paying attention to how something (food, device, interactions, etc) makes you feel, what your body is telling you.

And I do stand by that, but I do need to address that there are those things we can’t feel when they go wonky.

Or at least, most people aren’t aware enough (we are trained from early on to ignore our bodies’ many different signals) to notice something is off.

Because, if we listen closely, we can often feel something is off, even if we don’t quite know why.

But what this is all leading me to is actually our food choices.

Many know that if you eat ultra-processed food, it’s obviously not good for you and that it’s also not even really food anymore.

Ultra-processed, packaged food isn’t food.

Yet there are some that hold to the misconception that just because the body allows you to eat it and you don’t drop dead, it must be fine.

There are those who’ll see someone else feel poorly after eating fast food, and not feeling it themselves then assuming they must be fine eating it, even if it’s not the best.

But food is meant to nourish us, as well as inform us of our environment, guiding our health, giving specific signals to our bodies to know what’s what.

(So with the scientists working on making our food out of plastic… no matter what they say, it’s not food, it’s not ok to try to make the public eat that.)

But back to the ultra-processed food…

… a study of 9,000 people showed that those who eat the most ultra-processed food had a 40% higher risk of hidden brain damage.

Brain damage in terms of looking at two types of damage to the tiny blood vessels in the brain.

One called silent infarcts, often described as silent strokes.

The other type is actual changes to the white matter, which means injury to communication pathways in the brain.

All of that means higher chances of stroke, dementia, memory loss…

… but in a way that the damage takes place without being immediately noticeable, with the above results showing up much later.

I know there are many people who eat junk and follow it up with “I feel fine.”

Right, but there are changes, damage, that takes place that most people are completely unaware of until it’s more advanced and difficult to backtrack.

My goal here is for people to understand just how damaging ultra-processed “food” is, that it goes far beyond how you’re feeling right now.

If we then consider the accumulation of damage from EMFs, environmental toxins, screen time, lack of sleep, lack of movement, and adding in ultra processed food…

… we need to do the things that decrease the stressors on our bodies, not actively, knowingly, add to them.

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