Diet could help explain why women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression.
The effects can be counteracted with the right nutrients.
The effects can be counteracted with the right nutrients.
A diet high in sugar slows down the brain, research finds.
Both memory and learning were weakened by a diet high in fructose (sugar).
However, omega-3 fatty acids can help fight the problem, the scientists also discovered.
Around 1g of DHA a day could be enough to help counteract the deleterious effects of sugar.
Professor Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, study co-author, said:
“Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think.
Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain’s ability to learn and remember information.
But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage.”
The study gave some rats a high fructose solution to drink for six weeks.
Another group were also fed omega-3 fatty acids.
Professor Gomez-Pinilla explained the results:
“The second group of rats navigated the maze much faster than the rats that did not receive omega-3 fatty acids.
The DHA-deprived animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity.
Their brain cells had trouble signaling each other, disrupting the rats’ ability to think clearly and recall the route they’d learned six weeks earlier.”
Professor Gomez-Pinilla advises that we should keep sugary food intake to a minimum:
“We’re less concerned about naturally occurring fructose in fruits, which also contain important antioxidants.
We’re more concerned about the fructose in high-fructose corn syrup, which is added to manufactured food products as a sweetener and preservative.”
Omega-3, though, can help protect the brain, Professor Gomez-Pinilla said:
“Our findings suggest that consuming DHA regularly protects the brain against fructose’s harmful effects.
It’s like saving money in the bank.
You want to build a reserve for your brain to tap when it requires extra fuel to fight off future diseases.”
The study was published in the journal Physiology (Agrawal & Gomez-Pinilla, 2012).
Manic episodes can lead to dangerous risk-taking and delusional thinking — it frequently requires hospitalisation.
The brain loses about half a teaspoon of cells each year.
The chocolate helped regulate neural signalling and improved the immune response.
Scans revealed that together they make the brain more efficient.
Scans revealed that together they make the brain more efficient.
Sugary drinks that also contain caffeine can supercharge memory and attention, according to a brain scanning study.
Together they make the brain more efficient, lowering the amount of processing it needs to perform the same task.
Brain scans showed that people given glucose and caffeine performed just as well on a task with less activation in their brains.
In other words, their brains did not have to work as hard to do the same task.
It is similar to the way a professional athlete can put in less effort to cover the same distance as a person of ordinary fitness.
Surprisingly, caffeine on its own had little effect.
Josep M. Serra Grabulosa, the study’s first author, explained:
“Our main finding is that the combination of the two substances improves cognitive performance in terms of sustained attention and working memory by increasing the efficiency of the areas of the brain responsible for these two functions.”
For the study 40 people were given either 75g of glucose, 75mg of caffeine, both, or a placebo.
They were given tests of memory and attention while their brains were scanned.
Only the combination of glucose (sugar) and caffeine caused the boost in performance.
The study was published in the journal Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental (Serra Grabulosa et al., 2010).
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