5 Reasons to Eat Less Sugar (Besides Weight Loss)

The science: "Cognitive flexibility" is the ability to adapt and adjust on the fly. (e.g., the road you usually take to get home is closed so you have to think of an alternative route.) A study conducted on mice suggests that a high-sugar diet may lower cognitive flexibility—mice eating a lot of sugar performed worse on tests where they had to find their way through changing mazes. Ingesting a lot of sugar led to alterations in the mice's gut bacteria that the researchers believe are linked to these negative cognitive effects.

The takeaway: You might already know that added sugars are bad for your memory, but this study lends even more weight to the fact that the sweet stuff isn't a friend to your brain. In case you're inclined to continue downing candy bars because this research was done with mice, the study authors say their findings could definitely be applicable to humans, too.