Mickey Mouse Research

To their credit, most major news organizations ignored a study out of Sweden last week linking Alzheimer's disease to "fast food."

But it wasn't ignored entirely. A Reuters account of the study was picked up by a number of newspapers (many of them in Canada, for some reason). Several blogs picked it up too.

"Junk food mars mouse minds, study finds," was the headline in the Victoria Times Colonist. At least in that case, the newspaper put a crucial fact front and center: Most headlines were more along the lines of "Fast Food Linked to Alzheimer's," which of course will make some people believe that eating a Big Mac will make Grandpa forget that Grandma is his wife.

But Grandpa is not a mouse, and that's just one problem with the research, which was conducted by the Karolinska Institutet.

Actually, the research itself isn't necessarily bad, though it seems potentially highly specious (the specifics of the methodology are unknown, but just for starters, was there a control group? None of the news accounts say). The researcher, Susanne Akterin (a Ph.d student), fed fast food to mice for nine months. Her findings, Reuters flatly stated, "show how a diet rich in fat, sugar and cholesterol could increase the risk of the most common type of dementia." A chemical change in the brains of the mice was "not unlike that found in the Alzheimer brain," Akterin said.

The essential problem here is in presentation. Was it really "fast food" that caused the chemical change? No. If anything (and it might be nothing: the study is far from definitive), it was the component parts of the food the mice ate. Akterin herself said that thanks to her research, she now suspects "that a high intake of fat and cholesterol in combination with genetic factors ... can adversely affect several brain substances, which can be a contributory factor in the development of Alzheimer's."

But fat and cholesterol aren't found only in fast food. A $300 meal at the famous French Laundry might be loaded with far more of both than the average fast-food meal is.

She also cited sugar. Last week's pumpkin pie might have taken hours to make, and it's loaded with sugar, too.

Of course, a lot of people eat a lot of fast food, and that's a big public-health problem for all kinds of reasons. But saying that fast food is "linked to" Alzheimer's is like saying that .38-caliber snub-nosed revolvers (as opposed to handguns in general) are "linked to" violent deaths.

Ken Kuhl of the blog Fast Food News wrote: "I think it is important for us to remember that there is no single, special ingredient in fast food that you couldn't find elsewhere in your diet of non-fast food. So, if it is the fat, sugar and cholesterol that are somehow 'causing' Alzheimer's in mice, they could have gotten it eating other foods high in fat, sugar and cholesterol, too.

And a further problem: Reuters simply rewrote a press release for this article, and didn't bother giving the results any kind of context (such as earlier, better studies of the link, or absence thereof, between diet and Alzheimer's) or even talking to anyone who might have pointed out the many flaws contained in the research.