Picture the scene: It's midnight. You're very hungry after studying for a long time. Then you see a nice pie in the fridge. Should you eat it? It seems that you shouldn't for many reasons, because it may be bad for your brains.
Scientists have long known that eating late at night can make us put on weight. But now a new study has shown that late-night eating may also be bad for our brains—it might hurt our ability to learn new things and store memories.
"We believe that late-night eating may affect our learning by affecting (影响) the parts of the brain that control learning and memory," Dawn Loh. PhD, a project scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said. "We believe the timing of when we eat is the main cause of the bad memory."
For the study, the researchers did an experiment (实验) on mice. The mice were either allowed to eat during the daytime or during the night. They had the same amount of sleep and food. Then the researchers tested the brains of the mice and noticed that the mice eating during the night were less able to remember things well.
So think twice before the midnight snack—it might be bad for more than your weight.
