‘Fast food brain’ endangers men but women get all-clear?

If you give in to fast food cravings for those oh-so-good, but oh-so-bad for you burgers, fries and thighs you could be putting your brain at perilous risk of memory-destroying inflammation.

And if you’re male, you’re most at risk. Does that mean women can jump to the front of the fried chicken buffet? Well, not so fast.

Lab tests at the Cedars-Sinai Diabetes and Obesity Research Institute in Los Angeles shows that greasy high fat meals are particularly dangerous for brains and hearts belonging to men. Women, for some reason, don’t seem as vulnerable.

“For the first time, we have identified remarkable differences in the sexes when it comes to how the body responds to high-fat diets,” says researcher Deborah Clegg. “In the study, the (lab animals) were given the equivalent of a steady diet of hamburgers and soda. The brains of the male (animals) became inflamed and their hearts were damaged. But the female(s)… showed no brain inflammation and had normal hearts during the diet.”

Cleggs says that the females in the research enjoyed potent physiological defenses against the negative effects of the high-fat, high sugar diet they were fed. They didn’t suffer the kind of heart disease and brain inflammation that the males did.

“It is as if the brains of females had a chemical force field that kept the dangers of fats and sugars from harming them,” Clegg says. “Our data in this study also adds to the growing body of evidence that brain inflammation may be a key factor in the obesity epidemic. These negative brain changes can occur even over a short period of eating fatty and sugary food and clearly affected males much more than females.”

But that doesn’t mean women get the “all you can eat” all-clear to enjoy as much fast food as they want? Not at all.

The danger women face from eating high-fat fast food, typical in the Western diet, is increased production of estrogen. Higher estrogen levels can stir up all kinds of trouble when it comes to breast cancer.

But if a woman cuts her fat consumption in half, her estrogen levels fall by 20 percent. And by eating a high-fiber diet of vegetables, beans, fruits and whole grains, more estrogen is effectively removed from the body allowing levels to drop more.

So it looks like the women don’t get an extra ‘cheat’ day at the fast-food joints, and both sexes would be better served avoiding them altogether.