These days, we so often hear about how certain foods and drinks affect our weight. However, it’s also crucial to think about how the things we consume affect our brains.
As it turns out, there are certain foods and beverages with specific ingredients that can end up severely hurting your brain health when consumed frequently. While everything can be fine in moderation, eating processed foods with harmful, added ingredients or components often and as a part of your normal diet can end up damaging your brain or harming your cognitive function. We spoke with health experts, including Dr. Michael Lovich with Delta S and Registered Dietitian Helen Tieu with Diet Redefined, and Dr. David Ghozland, about three “toxic” foods and drinks that can cause damage to your brain over time. Read more about them below.
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1. Fried Foods
While fried foods like french fries, fried chicken, and more can be delicious, savory, and crunchy, they can also be quite harmful for your body and brain when consumed often. Fried foods can be a great treat from time to time, but certain reactions happen when the food is fried that create compounds that end up hurting your brain if you eat them often.
"Fried foods are often cooked in oils that are reused and heated repeatedly, which leads to inflammation and oxidative stress," says Tieu. "High intake of fried foods is linked to lower cognitive function and may impact learning and memory."
2. Foods & Sodas With Aspartame
Aspartame is a sugar-free sweetener commonly associated with certain low-calorie diet foods and diet sodas. Many people have come to rely on these items, needing their daily fix of a diet soda or looking forward to their aspartame-sweetened low-calorie sweets at the end of a day. However, you may want to pay close attention to just how much aspartame you consume.
"Aspartame is linked to headaches, migraines, mood disorders, memory loss, vision problems, learning deficits, and seizures because of how it creates cell dysfunction," says Dr. Lovich. "This is because the metabolism of this compound drives glutamate pathways to a toxic level. This is the same metabolic process as found in a concussion. Overstimulation of neuronal circuits from glutamate can create excitotoxic effects and put a large amount of stress on the brain, and over time, can change the development and processing via neuroplasticity."
3. Deli Meats
It may be surprising to hear that the meat you're using for your turkey, ham, or bologna sandwich several times a week could potentially be harming your brain, but unfortunately, it's the truth.
"Deli meats that are processed include sodium nitrates, which transform into nitrosamines, which attack through neural pathways and burn the blood-brain barrier of your body," says Dr. Ghozland. "These toxins cause a lapse in memory and mental blur that gradually gets worse with time in the patients."
