Another rat study found high fat diets are not just bad for the body. They may be bad for the mind as well impairing memory and concentration. Researchers in Britain and Canada put rats on a high-fat diet similar to an unhealthy human diet. They compared those rats to rats on lower fat food. After three months, the rats on the high-fat diet did much worse on a wide range of learning and memory tasks.
Researchers say fatty acids prevent glucose from metabolizing.
Glucose provides energy the brain needs to function. There's a mixed progress report for babies born in Illinois and the rest of the nation over the past decade. Babies born at the end of the 1990s got a healthier start than those who arrived at the beginning of the decade. Their pregnant mothers were more likely to have seen a doctor and less likely to have smoked. But babies lost ground in other respects.