Food for thoughts

As we increasingly gain the capacity to dissect matter and reduce things to their elemental components it is tempting to begin to see things in isolation, as just an agglomeration of those component parts. Yet to do that is to miss reality because it is in the interface between things, in the communication of the components, in the whole that is greater than the sum of the parts, that the truth lies. You are an example of this interconnection in motion; each part of you is changed and determined by its relationship to the rest of you. Nothing happens in isolation, everything is connected. Consider, for instance, your food: while it obviously contributes to nutrition of your body and the health of your digestive tract it also influences every other part of you. For example, a new study has found that if you are choosing high fat foods those choices are impacting your brain and your behaviour.

In this study non-obese adult mice were fed a normal diet but were given the gut bacterial flora of mice that had been fed either a high fat diet or a control diet. The bacteria in your digestive tract are, of course, altered by your diet. The results showed that mice that received a microbiome (bacterial population) from the mice fed a high fat diet showed increases in anxiety, impaired memory and repetitive behaviours. On top of this, they showed increased permeability of the intestinal walls and generalised inflammation. There were also specific signs of inflammation in the brain.

The suggestion here is that when the synergy between your body and the bacteria in your gut is disrupted by a high fat diet then the effects are not restricted to things like weight gain but flow through to the brain and behaviour as well. This fits in with many other studies that have shown a link between psychiatric conditions and gastrointestinal symptoms.

Everything is connected to everything else and, when you choose a food, there are consequences for your whole being. In this case we have seen that a high fat diet alters the gut microbiome and alters behaviour at the same time. No wonder we sometimes call people a “fat-head”.