Sugar will rot your brain, not save it.
Aside from eating raw sugar, the quickest way to fill your belly with this junk is juice — even the pricey "all- natural" garbage. So don’t buy into the latest study from the Department of Nonsense, which found that downing glass after glass of blueberry juice could protect your memory.
Researchers tracked 16 seniors with memory problems over 12 weeks, and gave nine of them 20 ounces of blueberry juice a day. By the end, the juice junkies did better on memory tests and learning exercises, according to the daffy new study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
But did it even matter? It was only nine people! That’s not a study, that’s a family project.
I’ve got nothing against blueberries — go eat a handful, they’re packed with antioxidants and are perfectly natural brain boosters. But do you know how many of them it takes to make 20 ounces of blueberry juice? That’s a pound and a half of blueberries.
Drink that every day and you might turn blue yourself. On the positive side, maybe you could join that Blue Man Group.
Even the healthiest fruits become little more than liquid sugar once you turn them into juice. Blueberry juice, for example, has roughly a teaspoon of sugar in every ounce.
That’s nearly 20 teaspoons a day for the sugared-up seniors in this study.
And no matter how much fruit they squish into it, juice will never give you the benefits of the real McCoy. Most juices — even the expensive stuff with fancy labels — are heated, treated and pasteurized, sucking the nutrients right out.
If you really want to drink your way to better memory, try a beer instead. You may joke that you drink to forget, but studies have shown that moderate alcohol consumption can actually boost memory.
Now that’s something worth remembering.
Always ready with food for thought,