Obesity linked to stupidity, brain scans show
by Kate Melville

A person’s risk of cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes and hypertension is known to be linked to obesity, and now researchers have established that being overweight can also affect a person’s brain.

In the journal Human Brain Mapping, Paul Thompson, a UCLA professor of neurology, and colleagues compared the brains of people who were obese, overweight, and of normal weight, to see if they had differences in brain structure. They found that obese people had 8 percent less brain tissue than people with normal weight, while overweight people had 4 percent less tissue. (more…)