Study Finds That Sugar Compromises Brain Developme

Study Finds That Sugar Compromises Brain Development in Children

A recent study conducted by a faculty member from the University of Georgia, in partnership with a team of researchers from the University of Southern California, has found that the daily consumption of beverages sweetened with sugar during adolescence damages performance on a memory and learning task during adulthood. The group of researchers demonstrated that changes in the bacteria found in the gut could be the key to the memory impairment caused by sugar.

High-sugar diets have also been associated with health effects such as heart disease and obesity as well as impaired memory function.

The research, published in “Translational Psychiatry,” has been released at a time when not much is known about how the excessive consumption of sugar during childhood influences brain development, particularly in a region that’s essential for memory and learning, known as the hippocampus. Given that children are the largest consumers of added sugar, the research couldn’t have come at a better time.

Using a rodent model, the researchers also discovered that when parabacteroides, which are bacteria, were enriched into the guts of animals that had never consumed sugar, similar memory deficits were observed. First author of the study and UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences assistant professor Emily Noble explained that early-life sugar increased the levels of bacteria, noting that the higher the levels of bacteria were the worse the animals performed on a task. Noble added that they also discovered that the bacteria was enough to damage memory in a way similar to sugar and noted that it also damaged other types of memory functions as well.

A joint publication of the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends that individuals should limit their intake of added sugars to less than 10% of calories daily.

However, data obtained from the CDC demonstrates that Americans aged between 9 and 18 years of age usually exceed the aforementioned limit, with the majority of the calories coming from beverages that have been sweetened by sugar.

The researchers fed young rats an 11% sugar solution, which is similar to the sugar-sweetened beverages that are commercially available. They then had the rats perform a memory task that was hippocampus dependent, which had been designed to measure episodic contextual memory. The researchers discovered that the rats that ingested sugar in their early life had an impaired ability to remember the context in which they’d seen a familiar object or differentiate whether an object was new to a particular context.

Noble noted that future research was required to better identify different pathways through which gut-brain signaling operates.

One technique that could possibly help researchers better understand how gut-brain signaling occurs, a technique that has been used extensively by Predictive Oncology (NASDAQ: POAI), is data analytics and using artificial intelligence. Predictive Oncology is leveraging this technique to increase the rate at which cancer treatments are personalized.

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