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How Kevin Spacey is Altering Our Genes:
Ridiculous headline? It’s just about as ridiculous as the one that circulated the Internet recently, parroting a genetically-ignorant news release from UCLA.
Here’s the headline, this one from Science Daily:“Fructose alters hundreds of brain genes, which can lead to a wide range of diseases.”
Imagine that. I can bite into a peach and jumpstart genetic chaos. I can give myself diseases with a frappuccino. Would a jolt of the high-fructose-corn-syrup variety kill me?
The good news is that apparently a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids can reverse the rampant brain damage wrought by the evil sugar. The bad news is that the study was performed on 24 rats, counting the controls. And, of course, the science isn’t at all what the news release says it is.
The study set-up is pretty simple. Eight rats drank water. Eight rats drank water spiked with 15% fructose. Eight more rats drank water with fructose and an extract of flaxseed oil, rich in omega 3 fatty acids.
The rats ran mazes, before and after the drinks. At 6 weeks, the poor beasts given the sugar water ran the mazes half as fast as either of the other groups. THAT’s the evidence that we should all worry about dastardly brain diseases.
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