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."
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