Category: Health and Wellness
Older people who consumed more than 2,143 calories a day had more than double the risk of a type of memory loss called mild cognitive impairment compared
to those who ate fewer than 1,500 calories a day, according to a study being released Sunday by the
American Academy of Neurology
on its website (aan.com).
The more calories older people consumed, the more likely they were to have mild cognitive impairment, says Yonas Geda, lead author of the study and a neuropsychiatrist
at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Other investigators from Australia have shown that excessive calorie intake is associated with a greater risk of mild cognitive impairment, he says.
MCI is the condition between normal forgetfulness due to aging and early Alzheimer's disease. People with MCI have problems with memory, language or thinking
severe enough to be noticeable to other people and to show up on tests, but not serious enough to interfere with daily life, according to the
Alzheimer's Association.
People are often aware of the forgetfulness.
Because the problems do not interfere with daily activities, the person does not meet criteria for being diagnosed with dementia. Not everyone diagnosed
with MCI goes on to develop Alzheimer's, the association says.
Geda and colleagues followed 1,233 people ages 70 to 90 in
Olmsted County,
Minn. The participants did not have dementia, but 163 had mild cognitive impairment. Researchers calculated their daily calorie intake based on food questionnaires.
The researchers then divided the participants into three equal groups. The first group consumed 600 to 1,526 calories daily; a second between 1,526 calories
and 2,142 calories and a third, more than 2,143.
The researchers did not control for diet quality in this analysis, but are looking at diet and exercise for future analysis.
Bottom line: The odds of having MCI more than doubled in the highest calorie group compared to the lowest calorie group, Geda says.
This is one study so "we have to be extremely careful about generalizations," he says. "The first step is that we have to confirm this finding in a bigger
study. Certainly, we are not recommending starvation or malnutrition."
Neurologist Neelum Aggarwal, a member of the American Academy of Neurology, says these findings should encourage physicians and health care providers to
start the discussion about the links between common healthy living practices, including eating a healthy diet, limiting sugar, to overall cognitive function,
with their patients.
Without accounting for the quality of the food being eaten, this is flawed. Lots of junk food is really high-calorie.
This is typical of the pseudo-science newage six-day-creation psychobabble type discussion that passes for dietary science most times.
A real study links the effect to the result, and explains the relationships with other factors.
None of you would believe, for instance, that carrots are bad for you. But we could do a study where people in one area who got in car accidents all had eaten carrots. That fact would of course be true, but then we could jump to the leap of conclusion that carrots must be bad for you. That wouldn't work, unless there were already an anti-carrot taboo in society, replete with the necessary psychobabble, to back it up.
Now, if the study linked a food to a particular problem which caused the cognitive impairment, that would make sense.
One interpretation of the small amount of data here could be that it is calories. Another could be that the high-calorie consumers had eaten a high amount of sugar or some other compound found in junk foods, and equally make a case.
But, boys and girls, do not kid yourselves. This is not science. This is not the way bridges and roads get built, or the way the human genome was mapped.
Instead, toss this one in for an ad for Weight Watchers or something similar, and we can probably see where this is going. Ghost Hunting, anyone? Think I'll go work out instead: not with a straw man, but with my trainer ball and weights.