Sydney Australia: Improving diet quality can enhance memory, but high sugar consumption may cause lasting cognitive damage, an Australian study has revealed.
The study led by researchers at Australia's University of Technology Sydney (UTS) examined how changes in what we eat affect memory and brain function, said a UTS statement released Monday.
The findings, published in Nutritional Neuroscience, analyzed 27 preclinical studies to assess whether memory function can recover after switching from unhealthy to healthier diets.
"Our results show that improving diet quality does benefit memory. But those improvements were incomplete. Even after weeks on a healthy diet, memory did not return to the level seen in animals that had never eaten an unhealthy diet," said Simone Rehn, the study's lead author from UTS.
Researchers found that rodents moved to a healthy diet performed better on memory tasks than those that continued eating high-fat or high-sugar foods.
However, memory recovery depended on diet composition, with recovery seen in experiments that used high fat diets but not those using diets high in sugar or combined high fat and high sugar diets, the researchers said.
"This suggests sugar may be a key factor in limiting memory recovery," Rehn said, adding the memory tasks analyzed reflect function of the hippocampus, a brain region essential for learning and memory, and one that is also involved in regulating appetite and food intake.
The study found no consistent improvements in anxiety, activity levels or food motivation, indicating the effects were specific to memory.
