Attention fatties: If you value your brain, put down that Famous Bowl and step away from the combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell/KFC. A new UCLA study shows that obese people exhibit higher levels of brain degeneration than their svelte counterparts. On average, corpulent individuals have brains aged prematurely by as much as 8 years.

More than 300 million worldwide are now classified as obese, according to the World Health Organization. Another billion are overweight. The main cause, experts say: bad diet, including an increased reliance on highly processed foods.

Obese people had lost brain tissue in the frontal and temporal lobes, areas of the brain critical for planning and memory, and in the anterior cingulate gyrus (attention and executive functions), hippocampus (long-term memory) and basal ganglia (movement), the researchers said in a statement today. Overweight people showed brain loss in the basal ganglia, the corona radiata, white matter comprised of axons, and the parietal lobe (sensory lobe). [LiveScience.com]

Yet if this is true, why aren’t fat kids always smarter than their peers? For that matter, what does that portend for a state like ours, which consistently ranks among the fattest — and dumbest — in the nation? If we eschewed all of the calorie-intense processed foods that comprise the average Kentuckian’s diet, does it stand to reason that that Kentuckian would no longer love a rousing installment of “Jerry Springer” and pick up reading Schopenhauer instead?