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High-Fat Diets You'll probably recognize Letitia's Chick-fil-A habit as having two major aspects of the Western diet we discussed in chapter 3--high fat and high- glycemic-index (high-GI) carbohydrates. The Western diet is particularly destructive to PTSD patients, so let's first consider the effects of the abundance of fat (as always, when I talk about high-fat diets, I mean diets high in unhealthy fats like saturated fat, trans fats, and fats used in fried food, rather than healthy fats such as omega-3s or those found in olive oil).When animals consume a typical Western high-fat diet, it makes them more susceptible to PTSD.

High-Fat Diets
You’ll probably recognize Letitia’s Chick-fil-A habit as having two major
aspects of the Western diet we discussed in chapter 3—high fat and high-
glycemic-index (high-GI) carbohydrates. The Western diet is particularly
destructive to PTSD patients, so let’s first consider the effects of the
abundance of fat (as always, when I talk about high-fat diets, I mean diets
high in unhealthy fats like saturated fat, trans fats, and fats used in fried
food, rather than healthy fats such as omega-3s or those found in olive oil).
When animals consume a typical Western high-fat diet, it makes them
more susceptible to PTSD. In 2016, Priya Kalyan-Masih and her colleagues
demonstrated this by first modeling “trauma” in mice by exposing them to
the odor of cats.14 They fed one group of mice a Western high-fat diet while
the control group was fed a lower-fat diet. One week later, the mice that
consumed the high-fat diet were much more anxious than the control group.
And the hippocampus was significantly smaller in the high-fat group. Since
research has shown that the hippocampus is already shrunken in brains
suffering from PTSD, this study shows that high-fat diets further complicate
symptoms.15 In its shrunken state, the hippocampus is less effective at
managing stress hormones and the brain’s response to fear. Similar
associations between high-fat diets and PTSD have been demonstrated in
other animal studies.16
In human studies, it is clear that PTSD affects metabolism in a way that
promotes overeating and obesity.
17 For instance, a whopping 84 percent of
US male Vietnam War veterans are overweight or obese, a much higher rate
than in the general population.18 I have seen this firsthand in my work with
veterans and their families. In 2017, I had the privilege of consulting with a
hospital program that works directly with veterans. I developed a culinary