Sugar not good for a child’s brain | Health

The study, conducted on rats, shows that daily consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks during adolescence adversely affects performance on learning and memory tasks during adulthood.

Memory

Young rats were fed their normal food and an 11% sugar solution, comparable to commercially available sugar-sweetened drinks. The researchers then got the rats to perform a hippocampus-dependent memory task designed, among other things, to remember the context in which they had previously seen a known object.

“We found that rats who consumed sugar in their early life had a reduced ability to discern that an object was new to a specific context. The rats that were not given sugar could tell whether an object was new or not, ”assistant professor Emily Noble told sciencedaily.com.

Intestines

The research group further showed that changes in the bacteria in the gut may be the key to sugar-induced memory impairment. Noble argues that future research is needed to see how this gut-brain signaling works. “When we know how the bacteria in the gut influence brain development, we also know what kind of environment the brain needs to grow healthily.”

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