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Being overweight makes the brain age faster
Last reviewed: 02.07.2025
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The youth of the brain depends on weight – this was stated by British specialists. Observations of volunteers (with normal and excess weight) showed that with obesity, brain tissue looks older by an average of 10 years.
With age, the brain "dries out", but in overweight people this process occurs somewhat faster than in thin people. Now scientists cannot say for sure whether excess weight causes accelerated aging of the brain and, accordingly, impairment of cognitive abilities, or, conversely, whether some processes in the brain that cause aging provoke obesity.
At Cambridge University, Professor Lisa Ronan and her colleagues studied the brains of more than 500 people aged 20 to 87 and found that there is a connection between a person’s weight and the rate of brain aging. When studying the condition of the participants in the experiment, the scientists paid attention to the state of metabolism, diet, and everything that could affect weight or the development of diabetes.
Using MRI, specialists determined not only the volume of white matter, but also the thickness of the cerebral cortex in volunteers. As it turned out, the structure in overweight and thin people has differences, which are especially different after 40 years.
In overweight people, active aging processes and a decrease in volume begin to occur in the brain after 40 years of age, and after 10 years it looks the same as the brain of a thin person at 60 years of age.
An interesting fact was that the changes affected mainly white matter, so IQ and cognitive abilities in obese and thin people were practically no different.
According to Professor Ronan, it is now very important to understand the causes and effects of accelerated brain aging processes in obese people, since in recent years the number of obese people on earth and the average life expectancy have been rapidly increasing.
By the way, similar studies were recently conducted by American specialists, who found that the brain of overweight people works differently than that of their thinner peers. According to scientists, the brain of overweight people sends signals to the body about receiving more pleasure from sweet or unhealthy food, and the reason for this may be a disrupted metabolism.
At the University of Washington, experts have found that as people get older, they like sweets less due to changes in the part of the brain responsible for rewards. The production of the "happiness hormone" is associated with external stimuli - food, various events, etc. But with obesity, the brain begins to work differently. In an experiment involving 44 people, 20 of whom had normal weight, the rest were obese, it was found that obese people do not have a connection between sweet food and the happiness hormone. The study participants had to drink a drink with different amounts of sugar and undergo magnetic resonance imaging. After analyzing the data, it was found that excess weight causes insulin resistance, which affects food preferences.
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