Just one day on a high-fat diet may harm your memory

TOO much cheese and rich food could damage your memory after only one day, research suggests.

A high-fat diet can impair recall of daily events and experiences, but switching to a lowfat diet can repair the harm, a study found.

Obesity has been linked to early onset vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The experiment, carried out on laboratory mice, is believed to have implications for humans.

In the Aberdeen University study, groups of mice were fed low or high-fat diets and some were switched between the two. They were then set memory tasks to discover what effect their food had on them.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers said they had demonstrated ‘that in mice episodic memory, together with spatial and contextual associative memory, is compromised after only one day of high-fat diet’.

Episodic memory is made up of experiences and events in our lives, while contextual memory is a process in longterm memory – where and when it happened. Spatial memory helps with navigating.