What's Put in Your Mouth Could Go to Your Head
What's Put in Your Mouth Could Go to Your Head
Nov. 8, 2000 -- There's good news and bad news when it comes to diet and memory. The bad news is that the artificial sweetener aspartame may make memory worse, but the good news is that eating breakfast, fruits, and vegetables may help make it better. That's according to research presented at a Society for Neuroscience meeting this week in New Orleans.
Since NutraSweet, or aspartame, became popular as a sugar substitute for the weight conscious, some users have complained of memory problems and headaches that disappear when they cut back on how much they use. Previous studies couldn't confirm this link, suggesting that the types of memory impairments studied were different from those reported by the patients, explains researcher Timothy M. Barth, PhD, chairman of psychology at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.
Or, aspartame users might be dieting because of low self-esteem and anxiety over their body image. If they also were anxious about their intellectual function, they might be more prone to report perceived memory problems.
To help sort out the possibilities, Barth's group gave 90 college students a nutrition survey and a memory questionnaire. Aspartame users reported more memory problems than nonusers, especially forgetting that a task was completed until it was started again, forgetting to perform a task at a certain time, or forgetting a regular routine.
Although these findings suggest that aspartame users as a whole believe they have memory problems, they performed about the same as nonusers on short-term memory tests, like remembering a word list, a phone number, or a series of faces. While these tests measure memory for something that just happened, they may not reflect memory problems these people have in their lives outside of the study.
"I always have problems with studies investigating the effects of diet on behavior in uncontrollable real-life situations," C.R. Markus, PhD, a neuroscientist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, tells WebMD. Markus, who was not involved in the study, recommends a study comparing behavior in subjects given varying amounts of aspartame.
Aspartame is broken down into substances that are unhealthy for the brain, but the body may be able to protect the brain from limited amounts. "Maybe the normal safeguards break down with time, with stress, and with heavy exposure," Barth says. People with brain injury may be especially vulnerable to the effects of aspartame, as are the elderly and young children. And future studies might need to look at long-term memory problems after years of heavy aspartame use.
What's Put in Your Mouth Could Go to Your Head
Nov. 8, 2000 -- There's good news and bad news when it comes to diet and memory. The bad news is that the artificial sweetener aspartame may make memory worse, but the good news is that eating breakfast, fruits, and vegetables may help make it better. That's according to research presented at a Society for Neuroscience meeting this week in New Orleans.
Since NutraSweet, or aspartame, became popular as a sugar substitute for the weight conscious, some users have complained of memory problems and headaches that disappear when they cut back on how much they use. Previous studies couldn't confirm this link, suggesting that the types of memory impairments studied were different from those reported by the patients, explains researcher Timothy M. Barth, PhD, chairman of psychology at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.
Or, aspartame users might be dieting because of low self-esteem and anxiety over their body image. If they also were anxious about their intellectual function, they might be more prone to report perceived memory problems.
To help sort out the possibilities, Barth's group gave 90 college students a nutrition survey and a memory questionnaire. Aspartame users reported more memory problems than nonusers, especially forgetting that a task was completed until it was started again, forgetting to perform a task at a certain time, or forgetting a regular routine.
Although these findings suggest that aspartame users as a whole believe they have memory problems, they performed about the same as nonusers on short-term memory tests, like remembering a word list, a phone number, or a series of faces. While these tests measure memory for something that just happened, they may not reflect memory problems these people have in their lives outside of the study.
"I always have problems with studies investigating the effects of diet on behavior in uncontrollable real-life situations," C.R. Markus, PhD, a neuroscientist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, tells WebMD. Markus, who was not involved in the study, recommends a study comparing behavior in subjects given varying amounts of aspartame.
Aspartame is broken down into substances that are unhealthy for the brain, but the body may be able to protect the brain from limited amounts. "Maybe the normal safeguards break down with time, with stress, and with heavy exposure," Barth says. People with brain injury may be especially vulnerable to the effects of aspartame, as are the elderly and young children. And future studies might need to look at long-term memory problems after years of heavy aspartame use.