Eating High Levels Of Fructose Impairs Memory In Rats

Rats can't get an even break from stupid researchers.

"Researchers at Georgia State University have found that diets high in fructose - a type of sugar found in most processed foods and beverages - impaired the spatial memory of adult rats. Amy Ross, a graduate student in the lab of Marise Parent, associate professor at Georgia State's Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, fed a group of Sprague-Dawley rats a diet where fructose represented 60 percent of calories ingested during the day. She placed the rats in a pool of water to test their ability to learn to find a submerged platform, which allowed them to get out of the water. She then returned them to the pool two days later with no platform present to see if the rats could remember to swim to the platform's location. 'What we discovered is that the fructose diet doesn't affect their ability to learn,' Parent said. 'But they can't seem to remember as well where the platform was when you take it away. They swam more randomly than rats fed a control diet.'"

The correct conclusion is that a high fructose diet makes you smarter.

Here you have rats that were smart enough to know that the platform was missing, apparently thanks to the high fructose diet.

Instead of falling for the ruse and swimming back to where there was no longer a platform, they knew to look elsewhere.

The rats without the benefit of a high fructose diet pursued a doomed to fail strategy of stupidly going to where there was no platform.

Clearly, this research proves the value of a high fructose diet in making good decisions.

The researchers need more fructose in their diets.