A new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests that eating high saturated food can reduce the capacity to work. This is not good news for those who are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic as fatty food may feel like a companion during these grieved occasions.
The researchers performed a test on fifty-one women to check their work performance after eating high saturated fat food and high unsaturated fat food. The work performance was worse after eating high saturated fat food than after eating high unsaturated fat food.
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They were also looking to find any effect of a condition called leaky gut which permits intestinal microscopic organisms to enter the circulatory system. Participants with leakier guts performed worse on the work performance regardless of which food they had eaten.
Annelise Madison is the lead author of the study and a graduate student in clinical psychology at The Ohio State University. In this study, she noticed that the meal made with sunflower oil that is low in saturated fat still contained a great deal of dietary fat.
Because both meals, high in saturated fat and low in saturated fat were potentially risky. The high saturated fat food cognitive impact could be considerably more prominent if it were compared with a low saturated fat food.
Annelise Madison works in the lab of Janice Kiecolt-Glaser who is a professor of psychiatry and psychology and director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State. Madison also conducted a secondary analysis of the data from the study of Kiecolt-Glaser to know whether high saturated fat foods increase the risk of inflammation and fatigue in cancer survivors.
After eating high saturated fat food, eleven percent of women were less able to identify the target stimuli in the consideration assessment. Concentration lapses were also seeming in the participants with signs of leaky gut. Their reaction times were more erratic and they were less ready to continue their attention during the 10-minute test.
The high saturated fat foods included biscuits, eggs, turkey sausages, and gravy that contains sixty gram of fat either lower-saturated-fat sunflower oil or a palmitic acid-based oil high in saturated fat.
Madison tells that presence of high levels of endotoxemia affected their work performance regardless of what sort of food they ate.
Although the study didn’t figure out what was happening in the brain, Madison says that past studies have proposed that high saturated fat food can drive up inflammation all through the body, and the brain. Unsaturated fats can cross the blood-brain obstruction too.
She says, “It could be that fatty acids are interacting with the brain directly. What it does show is the power of gut-related dysregulation. “
Kiecolt-Glaser tells that the present study suggests that concentration could be considerably more impaired in the individuals worried by the pandemic, who are turning to high saturated fat foods for comfort and they are not aware that food rich in fats can affect their work performance.
She said that what they know is that when individuals are stressed or more anxious, a great subset of them will find high saturated fat food more tempting than broccoli. They came to know from another study that anxiety and depression can interfere with attention and concentration too. At the point when they included that top of the high saturated fat food, they could expect the real-world impacts to be significantly larger.