Test Shows Junk Food’s Alarming Impact on Human Cognition

Image by Getty / Futurism Studies 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 th ... Read full article.