December 15, 2008
If you’re on a low-carb diet and you’re having trouble with your memory or thinking in general, you may want to reintroduce some carbohydrates into your diet.
According to a new study from Tufts University, dieters do worse on memory-based tasks when they take carbohydrates out of their diets.
But put the carbohydrates back in and your thinking skills should return to normal.
The researchers believe this happens because your brain can’t store glucose. But glucose from carbohydrates is its main fuel, so the brain uses the energy from carbohydrates immediately.
If you don’t eat carbohydrates, then your brain loses a key source of energy.
The researchers studied 19 women from 22 to 55 years old. Ten women chose a low-calorie, balanced diet. Nine chose a low-carb diet.
Each woman was given 5 tests. They measured attention, short- and long-term memory, visual attention, and spatial memory.
The 1st test occurred before the women began dieting. The 2nd and 3rd tests happened during week 1 of the diets (which was also the week when the low-carb dieters eliminated all carbohydrates).
The 4th test and the 5th test happened in week 2 and week 3 of the diets, respectively. By that time, the low-carb dieters were eating some carbohydrates in their diets again.
The researchers found that low-carb diets harmed thinking, learning, and memory when carbohydrates were eliminated or severely restricted.
When compared to the low-calorie dieters, the women on the low-carb diet showed a decline on memory-related tasks, slower reaction time, and worse visuospatial skills.
Visuospatial skills are those skills that involve moving spatial information around in your brain. For example, they’re used when you read a map, do a jigsaw puzzle, play chess, or drive in traffic.
Surprisingly, low-carb dieters showed better attention skills than the low-calorie dieters. Prior research has shown that high-protein or high-fat diets can improve your attention in the short term.
Levels of hunger were the same between the 2 groups of dieters. But low-calorie dieters did show more confusion than the low-carb dieters during the middle of the study.
So this research suggests that your choice of diet can affect not only your weight, but also your thinking, your ability to learn, and your memory… especially if you deprive your brain of glucose with a low-carb diet.
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Filed under Dieting & Weight Loss