Leave the children without lunch more often: they will grow old – they will say thank you
A hungry childhood helps to keep the mind in old age
Kirill Stasevich, CompulentaIt is believed that a difficult childhood puts a seal on the rest of your life, and this applies not only to psychology, but also to physiology.
Stress, irregular and improper nutrition, diseases, an unhealthy environment in which a child grows up are fraught with heart problems, mental disorders and a weakening of cognitive functions, which will then begin earlier in an adult and will be more pronounced.
However, the results of a study by scientists from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago (USA) go against this point of view. Together with colleagues from other American universities, they analyzed how cognitive functions change in older people. The study involved over 6,000 Chicago residents, whose average age was about 75 years; 62% were African–Americans. For 16 years, they underwent cognitive function tests every three years. The results obtained were compared with the details of the subjects' biographies, and special attention was paid to childhood: what was the financial situation of the family, how often did they get sick as children, what was the psychological situation in the house, how often, for example, did they play with them and tell stories, etc.
The results were surprising: 5.8% of the participants in the experiment said that in childhood they often had to tighten their belts because there was not enough food, but at the same time, the brain functions deteriorated more slowly in the same 5.8% than in others. On average, their results were a third better than those who had no problems with nutrition in childhood. Another 8.4% in childhood simply weighed less than their peers – and they also had fewer problems with cognitive functions compared to subjects who had normal weight or even slightly more at an early age. It turned out that fasting helped to preserve brain function in old age.
There are different ways to explain this, as researchers write in the journal Neurology (Barnes et al., Effects of early-life adversity on cognitive decline in older African Americans and whites). On the one hand, everyone knows that calorie restrictions generally have a beneficial effect on health: if you want to live longer, eat less. Perhaps something similar happens in this case, when a lack of calories helps the brain to preserve itself. On the other hand, it can be assumed that those who starved in childhood and lived up to 75 years at the same time are generally more resistant to aging. Perhaps their less adapted peers, who starved in childhood with them, simply did not live to this age. Calorie restriction in this case has nothing to do with it, it's just that these people have a general high resistance to stress.
As for the Caucasians (after all, the remaining 38% belonged to the white race), the researchers could not draw certain conclusions about them. It was not possible to find such a pattern between fasting and the preservation of brain functions in whites, but there are obviously simply not enough statistics: among the white residents of Chicago who came to the attention of scientists, there were almost no such people who would have had to endure a lack of food in childhood.
Prepared based on the materials of the American Academy of Neurology: Can Going Hungry As a Child Slow Down Cognitive Decline in Later Years?Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru