'You are what you eat' has just gotten a new meaning, now that study has shown high-fructose diet could slow down brain functions. High-fructose corn syrup is typically added to soft drinks and most processed foods. Prior to this, studies on fructose have always focused on its effects to the body, but not so much on the brain.
The study led by neuroscientist Fernando Gomez-Pinillia first trained a group of rats for 5 days to successfully come out of a maze. During the training, they were fed with water and normal rat food. For the next 6 weeks, the water was changed with syrup water with 15% fructose. However, half of the rats' diet were added with Omega 3-rich food, flaxseed and fish oil. Omega-3 has been proven as an antioxidant that slows down brain deterioration.
After 6 weeks, all the rats were tested at the maze again, and all of them showed worse performances by taking longer than they did to come out of the maze. However, the rats that have consumed Omega-3 performed slightly better than their counterparts. The rat's brain dissection afterwards showed that high-fructose diet has damaged chemical connections in the brain – called synapses.
Whilst deterioration of synapses results in slower learning process, the research also found that sugary drinks are bad for the hippocampus, a sugar-regulation protein insulin in the brain. The disruption of which could cause memory loss in humans and animals.
After the study, scientists warn off excessive soft drinks and processed food consumption as they are responsible for dumbing people down. A can of soft drink is typically made out of 12% fructose. While complete isolation of fructose is not good for a balanced diet either, it would be best to get fructose dose from fruits and not processed food products.
On the other hand, do consume more Omega-3 rich foods, including salmon, tuna and olive oil to protect our intelligence from the guilty pleasures we gulp.
Extract from ... Venus.com
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