Polysaccharide diet is not good for children's brain development

Sugar Image source: schankz / stock.

Grocery store shelves are wrapped in a variety of "coats" candies that seem to "scream" at customers, stimulating people's desire to buy, especially those products aimed at children.

Children are the largest consumers of sugar additives, but high-sugar diets are associated with health effects such as obesity, heart disease, and even impaired memory function.

Recently, a new study led by researchers at the University of Georgia and the University of Southern California showed through rodent models that daily consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages during adolescence can impair learning and memory in adulthood.

In a recent study published in Translational Psychiatry, the author also found that even in the intestines of animals that have never ingested sugar, if the experiment is enriched with a kind of bacteria called Parabacteroides, Similar memory deficits will be observed.

"Sugar in early life will increase the level of Parabacter, and the higher the level of Parabacter, the worse the animal will perform in the task.

However, data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that Americans between the ages of 9 and 18 have sugary diets that exceed this recommendation, and most of their calories come from sugary drinks.

Considering the role of the hippocampus in various cognitive functions, and the brain area that is still developing in the later stages of adolescence, researchers are trying to learn more about its vulnerability to high-sugar diets through the gut microbiota.

They fed the pups with normal food and a solution containing 11% sugar, which was equivalent to sugary drinks on the market.

Then, the researchers asked the mice to perform a memory task that relied on the hippocampus.

"We found that mice that ingested sugar in the early stages were impaired in their ability to discern new things in a specific environment, while mice that did not ingest sugar were able to complete this task.

The second memory task tests basic recognition memory, which is a memory function independent of the hippocampus and involves the ability of animals to recognize what they have seen before.

In this task, sugar has no effect on the animal's recognition memory.

Noble said: "The sugar intake early in life seems to selectively impair their hippocampal learning and memory.

Further analysis showed that high sugar intake led to an increase in the level of parabacteria in the gut microbiota, and there are more than 100 trillion microbes in the gut microbiota, which play an important role in human health and disease.

In order to better determine the mechanism by which this bacterium affects memory and learning, the researchers experimented with increased levels of Parabacteroides in the microbiome of mice that had never ingested sugar.
These animals showed impairments in both hippocampus-dependent and hippocampal-independent memory tasks.

"(This bacteria) itself induces some cognitive deficits.
The question now is, how do these bacterial populations in the gut change brain development?" Noble said, determining how gut bacteria affect brain development helps Tell people what kind of internal environment the brain needs to grow healthily.
Therefore, future research needs to better determine the specific pathways of this visceral brain signal operation.
(Source: Feng Weiwei, China Science News)

Related paper information: org/10.
1038/s41398-021-01309-7" target="_blank">https://doi.
org/10.
1038/s41398-021-01309-7