Latest news with #DominicTran
The Star
15-05-2025
- Health
- The Star
Are you bad at directions and always getting lost? Blame junk food
Regularly eating foods high in fat and sugar makes you worse at navigating, new research suggests. — dpa Eating too much fatty and sugary food not only swells midriffs and expands waistlines, but also has the reverse effect on cognitive ability and navigation skills, which appear to be diminished by eating unhealthily. Following 'world-first research' involving tests on students, scientists at the University of Sydney in Australia have found high-fat and high-sugar food to have a 'detrimental effect on some aspects of cognitive function', and on spatial awareness and navigation skills in particular. '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,' the researchers said in a paper published in The International Journal of Obesity . The results highlight the 'adverse effect' of snacking on 'spatial learning and memory', while confirming 'the importance of making healthy dietary choices for cognitive health', the team contended. Previous research has found eating too much fats and sugars to not only be causes of diabetes, obesity and heart disease, but also to be 'associated with faster rates of age-related cognitive decline in middle age and older adults', as the team put it in their research paper. And while the researchers have found that young people are not exempt from the ill- effects of processed or junk food, the good news is that it is likely not the brain as a whole that is affected, but just the hippocampus – the part of the brain that helps manage spatial navigation and memory formation. In other words, should you find yourself unable to remember your way home or turn left a la Zoolander after bingeing on jelly babies and deep-fried Mars bars, there is hope. 'Dietary changes can improve the health of the hippocampus, and therefore, our ability to navigate our environment, such as when we're exploring a new city or learning a new route home,' said study lead author Dr Dominic Tran. – dpa
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Test Shows Junk Food's Alarming Impact on Human Cognition
In a new study, researchers have linked diets high in fat and sugar with lower cognitive skills — a grim sign that ubiquitous "junk food" could be bad for our brains as well as our bodies. As psychology researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia explain in a new paper published in the International Journal of Obesity, findings from a battery of virtual reality (VR) tests suggest that younger people who eat a lot of junk food exhibit poorer spatial navigation and memory skills than their healthier-eating counterparts. Led by psychology researcher Dominic Tran, the USydney team recruited 55 university students between the ages of 18 and 38 and asked them about how often they ate sugary or fatty foods for the year prior. The student participants were then given memory tests and had their body mass index (BMI) measured before undergoing the VR portion of the study. Outfitted with Oculus Rift headsets — for some reason a version so old that they predated Meta's acquisition of the company in 2014 — the student-subjects entered a VR maze and instructed to find a treasure chest. Those who got to the chest within four minutes were able to advance to the next level, but those who failed to do so were transported to the chest and given 10 seconds to memorize the landmarks surrounding it. The subjects went through the same landmark-laden maze a total of six times and tasked each time with finding the treasure chest, which didn't change location. On the seventh and final go, participants were asked to navigate back to where they remember the chest being based on landmarks they'd witnessed in prior rounds — but the chest itself was removed, requiring confident memory recall. As the researchers found, the cohort who ate less fat and sugar more accurately recalled the location of the chest than the others who ate more junk food. Though this finding didn't surprise Tran and his team, he did note that the psychology students recruited for the study may be somewhat healthier than the average person, so the effect could be greater among non-collegiate cohorts. These findings build on similar studies Tran and his colleagues did with rats, where the rodents were found to have issues with memory recall and spatial awareness after being fed diets high in sugar and fat. Uncovering similar findings in humans further demonstrates that junk food doesn't just add to the "risk of obesity, metabolic and cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers" and "hasten the onset of age-related cognitive decline in middle age and older adults," as the lead researcher put it, but also that it impacts our brains as well. "This research gives us evidence that diet is important for brain health in early adulthood," Tran said, "a period when cognitive function is usually intact." More on VR studies: New VR Program Gives Domestic Abusers a Taste of Their Own Medicine
