According to new research, the unhealthy food typical of a fast food restaurant essentially makes the body's defenses so aggressive even in the long term.
Don't store avocado like this: it's dangerousFast food as an infection. Thus thunders a latest German research according to which the so-called junk food is capable of making the immune system more "aggressive" because it reacts to a diet with a lot of fat and calories as if it were responding to a bacterial infection.
According to the survey conducted by the University of Bonn, published in Cell, the unhealthy food typical of a fast food restaurant practically pays off so aggressive body defenses that, even long after switching to a healthy diet, traces remain. Long-term changes that can be involved in the development of atherosclerosis and diabetes.
A high-fat, high-sugar, and low-fiber diet causes one to develop strong inflammatory response throughout the body, almost like after infection with dangerous bacteria.
If you were to follow a different, healthier and more balanced diet, the inflammation would regress but, even after some time, many of the genes that were activated during the phase in which we were fed with unhealthy food were still active. .
"What did not go away was the genetic reprogramming of immune cells and their precursors: even after a few weeks of a cereal diet, many of the genes that were activated during the fast food phase were still active," explain the researchers. .
This means that, in the long run, fast food causes the body to quickly give out a huge and powerful army of extremely aggressive reactions of the immune system by increasing the number of certain cells in the blood responsible for particular defense mechanisms.
“It has only recently been discovered that the immune system has a form of memory - explains the co-author of the study, Eicke Latz. After an infection, the body's defenses remain in a kind of alarmed state, so they can respond more quickly to a new attack ”.
Fast food is therefore always harmful to the whole organism. In addition, the researchers identified the "fast food sensor" responsible for immune cells, namely that recognizes unhealthy food as "pathogenic" and "dangerous", finding genetic evidence of the involvement of the so-called inflammasome. Inflammasomes are intracellular signaling complexes that recognize infectious agents and other harmful substances and then release highly inflammatory messengers. In other words, “the inflammasome triggers epigenetic changes,” explains Dr. Latz. "The immune system reacts accordingly to even small stimuli with stronger inflammatory responses."
There remains, therefore, in any case the confirmation that with fast food food and junk food in general, you are full of questionable ingredients, calories and saturated fats. One more reason to stay away from this type of diet is to know that everything we put with it into our body can have devastating effects even in the long term.
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- Junk Food: The 10 worst foods to avoid in our diets
Germana Carillo
