SunstarTV Bureau: According to a new research, high consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages during adolescence impairs performance on learning and memory tasks during adulthood.
The findings were published in the journal ‘Transitional Psychiatry’ where it had clearly mentioned about the cons of highly consumption sugar how damaged the memory of a child.
Sugar practically screams from the shelves of your grocery store, especially those products marketed to kids. Children are the highest consumers of added sugar, even as high-sugar diets have been linked to health effects like obesity and heart disease and even impaired memory function.
New research led by a University of Georgia faculty member in collaboration with a University of Southern California research group has shown in a rodent model that daily consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages during adolescence impairs performance on a learning and memory task during adulthood.
The group further showed that changes in the bacteria in the gut may be the key to sugar-induced memory impairment.
Supporting this possibility, they found that similar memory deficits were observed even when the bacteria, called Parabacteroides, were experimentally enriched in the guts of animals that had never consumed sugar.
Additional analyses determined that high sugar consumption led to elevated levels of Parabacteroides in the gut microbiome, the more than 100 trillion microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract that play a role in human health and disease.
“Early life sugar increased Parabacteroides levels, and the higher the levels of Parabacteroides, the worse the animals did in the task,” said Emily Noble, assistant professor in the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences who served as the first author on the paper.
Noble added, “We found that the bacteria alone was sufficient to impair memory in the same way as sugar, but it also impaired other types of memory functions as well.”
“Early life sugar consumption seems to selectively impair their hippocampal learning and memory,” Noble said.
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a joint publication of the US Departments of Agriculture and of Health and Human Services, recommends limiting added sugars to less than 10 per cent of calories per day.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show Americans between the ages 9-18 exceed that recommendation, the bulk of the calories coming from sugar-sweetened beverages.
Considering the role the hippocampus plays in a variety of cognitive functions and the fact the area is still developing into late adolescence, researchers sought to understand more about its vulnerability to a high-sugar diet via the gut microbiota.
(Sources: ANI)
