Faced with the contemporary choice between healthy carbs or healthy fats, some take the road more-traveled: a diet high in fat and sugar. If we already know the most delicious strategy is a bad one, new research from the University of Sydney has found something else to think about beyond weight management and fitness problems: the double whammy impairs cognition too.
Specifically, it impairs spatial navigation abilities in humans, potentially indicating damage to the brain's hippocampus, a region critical for memory and learning. Published in the International Journal of Obesity, the study, titled Consumption of a diet high in fat and sugar is associated with worse spatial navigation ability in a virtual environment [Nature], is the first to directly test how high-fat, high-sugar (HFHS) diets affect first-person navigation in a virtual environment.
We found that young adults who frequently consumed foods high in fat and sugar were worse at remembering the location of a treasure chest in the virtual maze. Critically, this relationship remained after controlling for body mass index and performance on a non-spatial task.
Led by Dr Dominic Tran from the University of Sydney's School of Psychology, the study involved 55 university students aged 18–38. Participants completed dietary questionnaires, underwent working memory assessments, and had their body mass index recorded. They then navigated a virtual reality maze to locate a treasure chest across six trials, using environmental landmarks for orientation. In a seventh trial, the chest was removed, and participants had to recall its previous location.
Results showed that those who regularly consumed more fatty and sugary foods performed significantly worse in identifying the chest's former location, even when controlling for BMI and working memory.
The good news: research lead Dr Dominic Tran, from the Faculty of Science's School of Psychology, suggested the effects appear reversible with dietary changes, offering pizza- and Cheeto-addicted gamers some slim hope for cognitive recovery.
The results highlight the impact of diet beyond traditional indicators of physical health, and reveal the specificity of the association between diet and spatial ability. These findings are consistent with those from animal studies and are the first to reveal the adverse effect of diet on spatial learning and memory in a task that requires navigation in three-dimensional space. The results confirm the importance of making healthy dietary choices for cognitive health.
I had a nice idea to baitify the headline—"this popular snack makes you a bad gamer"—but to pick just one is unfair to the others and I have things to do, places to go, virtual environments to navigate…
Previously:
• Funny article about gamers enraged at everything except layoffs
• Elon again upset after gamers mock his lack of skill
