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A Spoonful of Sugar — Destroys Memory?
Keeping your blood sugar under control is beneficial for far more than just waistlines and diabetes prevention, it is also important to help preserve your memory as you age. Yep, that’s right — spiked blood sugar levels actually cause your brain to age prematurely, resulting in more “senior moments” than you’d care to have.
There have been other studies indicating this in the past, but a new study led by Scott A. Small, M.D., associate professor of neurology from the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain was remarkable because it showed that the activity of an important part of the memory center of the brain (called the dentate gyrus) decreases with elevated blood glucose levels.
Dr. Small’s research looked at people with type 2 diabetes and found that they had this damage to their dentate gyrus. He then looked at factors such as a high body mass index, insulin resistance, high cholesterol, and elevated blood sugar that are seen in type 2 diabetes, and replicated them in animals to determine which ones were correlated with the brain damage. He found that rapid blood sugar increases ONLY, damaged the memory center.1
