Not too long ago, I wrote about an op-ed in the New York Times by a Georgetown professor arguing that “junk food” (a term he used for the ultra-processed slop that is TikTok and the like) is eroding our attention spans. Now, just a couple of weeks later, researchers publishing in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring have found that actual junk food is doing the same.

The study followed 2,192 Australian adults and found a small but noticeable link between ultra-processed food consumption and declining attention. For every 10 percent bump in calories coming from things like frozen meals, soda, and packaged snacks, attention scores dipped slightly, while a separate score estimating dementia risk ticked up.

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Again, not a massive difference that’s signaling that your brain functions are falling off a cliff every time you bite into a Twinkie, but it is a definite difference from, say, much healthier diets like the Mediterranean diet, which is renowned for its…