Our brains are compromised of a large amount of cholesterol. Granted, the cholesterol in our brains is made within the brain, and doesn't come from our diet.
But as we have moved away from saturated fats in our diet in favor of poly-unsaturated fats, we have reduced the proper building blocks available for our brains to use.
Plant fats don't contain cholesterol. Instead they contain phytosterols; and phytosterols can actually take the place of cholesterol in some parts of our cells - except they do not work the same as cholesterol. And they therefore inhibit cellular function.
Our brains have actually shrunk by a few percent over the past 30,000 years. Perhaps that is due to the die -off of mega-fauna (wherein we would have eaten the fat of those animals, as well as the bone marrow inside their larger bones), and to the rise of agriculture
Here is a study on rats that shows exposure do a high fat diet shortly after birth has negative effects on the cognition of those developing and adult rats.
(I should add that commercial rat diets used in these kinds of study are typically very high in poly-unsaturated fats - and are not a proper representation of the types of fats early humans were exposed to)
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u/BafangFan 2d ago
I'll posit this:
Our brains are compromised of a large amount of cholesterol. Granted, the cholesterol in our brains is made within the brain, and doesn't come from our diet.
But as we have moved away from saturated fats in our diet in favor of poly-unsaturated fats, we have reduced the proper building blocks available for our brains to use.
Plant fats don't contain cholesterol. Instead they contain phytosterols; and phytosterols can actually take the place of cholesterol in some parts of our cells - except they do not work the same as cholesterol. And they therefore inhibit cellular function.
Our brains have actually shrunk by a few percent over the past 30,000 years. Perhaps that is due to the die -off of mega-fauna (wherein we would have eaten the fat of those animals, as well as the bone marrow inside their larger bones), and to the rise of agriculture