When Mice Eat Fast Food

So I read this blog post from the Strong Athlete on what happens when mice eat fast food and why it is important for us to know. I hope you find this post just as interesting as I did and why it is so important to teach our kids, nieces, nephews, cousins whomever in your life that is young so that they grow up knowing the importance of whole food vs trying to change well inground bad habits when disease is at their doorstep.

I’d like to share with you the results of an interesting nutrition study that was recently conducted on mice. Scientists were curious to find out what happens to the immune function of mice when fed a diet high in sugar, high in fat and low in fibre. In other words, what happens when mice are fed a typical Western diet? The researchers put the mice on a Western diet for one month. According to the results, the mice “developed a strong inflammatory response throughout the body, almost like after infection with dangerous bacteria.” When the mice were taken off the fast food diet and put on their traditional diet for another four weeks, the strong inflammation response disappeared. This part of the study is not exactly earth shattering – science has long known that the food we eat directly affects inflammation. What was especially interesting was the fact that the immune cells in the mice appear to have been genetically reprogrammed to respond aggressively the next time the fast food was consumed. It’s almost as if the immune cells “remembered” the negative experience eating fast food and overreacted with a strong inflammatory response! Why Should This Matter to You? The food we eat can nourish and heal us; it can also ravage our bodies with inflammation and make us sick. The results of this study prove that the food we eat can negatively affect our immune system, like being infected with bacteria or a virus. The study also clearly shows that repeated exposure to unhealthy food can have long term consequences and potentially accelerate the development of cardiovascular diseases and/or Type 2 diabetes. Also, the risk of a stroke or heart attack is dramatically increased. I share these findings with you not to scare you; I just want you to be mindful of the food choices you make. Be aware that most of the foods so heavily marketed to us in this part of the world do not serve us well and can have dangerous long-term consequences. If you want to be a high-performing, athletic machine over the long-term, you need high-octane fuel the vast majority of the time. Be kind to your body and it will be kind to you.