A study in rats released last week shows that eating a high-fat diet impairs memory and cognitive abilities.  The study was conducted in the UK, and published by The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

It’s an interesting test: scientists taught a group of 32 rats over several months to follow a complicated maze to receive a treat.  All the rats learned how to get the treat, without having to backtrack in the maze.  Then, half the rats were fed a very high-fat chow, which caused them to lose their ability to remember the maze paths to get the treats.  All of the rats began to fail the cognitive testing after eating the high-fat chow.

Also, test were conducted on the rat’s abilities to exercise while given a high-fat feed.  Trained to run on a treadmill, the fat-fed rats did 30% worse than a control group that was not fed the high-fat chow.

Conducted at Cambridge University by Andrew Murray, similar tests were concurrently performed on humans.  Those results, reported as similar to the rats, have not yet been published as they are still being analyzed.

So, that feeling of sluggishness and dim thinking after a fat-filled meal may be real after all.

FYI.

The Exercise Study Abstract from The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

A New York Times blog on the studies, by Tara Parker-Pope

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