‘Too much sugar makes you dull’
Love to have those sponge cakes and soft drinks in your daily diet? Beware, they may impair your thinking and learning capacity, scientists say.
In experiments on mice, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles found that eating high-fructose diets, such as cakes, cookies, jams, jellies, crackers and carbonated soft drinks, for as little as six weeks can make one stupid.
But, a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids can counteract this IQ loss, the researchers suggested. “Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think,” study researcher Fernando Gomez-Pinilla said.
“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 minimise the damage,” Gomez-Pinilla was quoted as saying by LiveScience. The study, published in Journal of Physiology, was done on rats, but the researchers believe their brain chemistry is similar enough to humans to extend the findings.
For the study, the researchers zeroed in on high-fructose corn syrup, an inexpensive liquid six times sweeter than cane sugar, that is commonly added to processed foods.
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