hmm ... - Fructose makes rats dumber. What sugars should we avoid?

16th October 2012

Link reblogged from John's Links with 1 note

Fructose makes rats dumber. What sugars should we avoid? - latimes.com →

Rats fed fructose-laced drinking water for six weeks performed more slowly in a maze-navigating task, UCLA researchers have found. (Read this L.A. Times opinion article.) They think the effect is due to changes in the way the brain responds to insulin as a result of exposure to fructose.

“Our study shows that a high fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body,” study senior author and UCLA professor Fernando Gomez-Pinilla said in a release about the finding, which was published in the Journal of Physiology(postdoc Rahul Agrawal was first author). “We’re … concerned about high-fructose corn syrup, which is added to manufactured food products as a sweetener and preservative.” This is not the first time that fructose has been implicated in causing adverse health effects. Rodent studies have found that the sugar contributes to obesity, diabetes and blood-fat disturbances. Human studies suggest that when consumed in large amounts it raises blood triglycerides and cause the liver to become more sluggish in responding to insulin.

And now the brain.