Nov. 18, 2014 -- Men under 45 years old who eat lots of trans fats may be hurting their memory, according to a new study released Tuesday.
Researchers at UC San Francisco followed 1,000 healthy men who ate various amounts of trans fats, and they found that the men in that age range who ate the most did the worst on a word recall test.
“People were presented with a series of cards with words on them, and they had to decide if they were repeats, or newly-presented words,” says Beatrice Golomb, MD, PhD, the lead researcher. “Each additional gram of trans fat consumed per day was associated with .76 fewer words recalled.”
That might not sound like a lot, but the highest trans-fat eaters in the study took in about 15 grams per day, and that’s a sizeable drop in memory.