Do high-fat diets make people stupid and lazy?
Rats fed a high-fat diet show a stark reduction in their physical endurance and a decline in their cognitive ability after just nine days, a study by Oxford University researchers has shown. The research, funded by the British Heart Foundation and published in the FASEB Journal, may have implications not only for those eating lots of high-fat foods, but also athletes looking for the optimal diet for training and patients with metabolic disorders. “We found that rats, when switched to a high-fat diet from their standard low-fat feed, showed a surprisingly quick reduction in their physical performance,” says Dr Andrew Murray, who led the work at Oxford University and has now moved to the University of Cambridge. “After just nine days, they were only able to run 50 per cent as far on a treadmill as those that remained on the low-fat feed.” But little attention has been paid to the effect of high-fat diets in the short term… The Oxford team set out to investigate whether rats fed a high-fa
