According to the London Daily Mail, an Oxford University study found that after just nine days, rats fed a high-fat diet made errors on a maze test and could only run 50 percent as far as rodents that ate regular, low-fat food.
Professor Kieran Clarke, who headed up the research team, told the Daily Mail the short-term results of a high-fat diet were “startling.”
Fat has a far-reaching effect on performance.
Nutritionist Elizabeth Somer, author of “Eat Your Way to Happiness,” says eating high-fat snacks and meals means that your system has to divert blood away from the brain and toward the tummy to digest it all.
“It makes a person dumb since it reduces the amount of oxygen that can get to the brain tissues,” Somer says.
If it takes only days for fat to make you dumber, experts say it would take about a month for a switch to a lower-fat diet to get you feeling sharper again.