Diabetic from fatty food?
Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.
More posts by Christiane Fux All content is checked by medical journalists.It seems paradoxical: those who eat high-calorie food make their brains starve. This is at least true if the food eaten contains a lot of fat. In order to secure its supply, the brain then triggers mechanisms that could lead to diabetes.
Fatty food not only makes you fat, it also upsets your metabolism. "After just three days of a high-fat diet, the brain absorbs less sugar from the blood," says Alexander Jais from the Max Planck Institute for Metabolic Research in Cologne in an interview with
Together with his colleagues, he has found a possible explanation for the phenomenon: Saturated fatty acids in the blood may be toxic. They reduce the number of certain transport proteins (GLUT-1). These have the important task of shoveling sugar from the blood into the brain tissue. If there are not enough transporters available, the brain is not adequately supplied - even though more than enough fuel is circulating in the blood.
In particular, the hypothalamus, which controls the metabolism, and the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for learning and memory, lacked sugar in experiments with mice. "The brain reacts immediately to such an undersupply," says Jais.
Brain is an egoist
Because our central control body cannot afford to run on the back burner. And his appetite is enormous: "The brain alone consumes 25 to 35 percent of the energy we consume," says Jais. It therefore has various mechanisms that are intended to secure its supply. In this context, researchers also speak of the “selfish brain”, which is geared towards meeting its own needs first and foremost. The other organs are only in second place.
Jais and his colleagues have now discovered one of these regulatory mechanisms: the hungry brain activates certain immune cells, so-called macrophages, which then produce large quantities of the growth factor VEGF. This in turn promotes the formation of the sugar transporter GLUT-1. In mice that were fed high-fat diets, the researchers measured normal brain glucose levels again after four weeks, although the animals continued to consume a lot of fat.
Secure sugar supplies
In addition, the brain has other tricks up its sleeve to secure its energy supply: If there is a shortage, it stimulates the desire for sweets - even if there are actually enough calories available in the form of fat. At the same time, it reduces the ability of the rest of the body cells - especially the muscles - to absorb sugar. This leaves more for the thinking organ.
However, it is precisely this mechanism that could be the first step on the way to type 2 diabetes. This form of diabetes is characterized by an insensitivity of the body cells to insulin, the so-called insulin resistance. In a sense, the hormone is a colleague of GLUT-1. only it does not shovel glucose into the cells of the central nervous system, but into the rest of the body's cells. If these no longer respond adequately to insulin, the blood sugar levels rise.
First step to diabetes
It is precisely this unhealthy mechanism that the hungry brain triggers with a high-fat diet. The insulin resistance provoked in this way could originally be a protection of the brain from starvation. “In particular, if you eat too much fat very often, this could upset your metabolism in the long term,” says Jais. "In the worst case, diabetes will develop."
Source: Press release: High-fat diet makes the brain starve, Max Planck Society 04/26/2016
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