Carbs are like, good for your smartness!

Could a Low-Carb Diet Make You Ditzy? presents recent research from Tufts University about how low- to no-carb diets can affect cognition and memory.

Oh boy. Did you know that Glamour has a health blog? It's called Vitamin G (I already don't get it). Responding to mainstream crap like this is the reason I started this blog. So here we go!

The study consisted of 19 female participants who were allowed to choose between a low-carb diet and a low-calorie diet to adhere to for three weeks. The ScienceDaily press release explains how a lack of carbohydrates affects the body and brain:

While the brain uses glucose as its primary fuel, it has no way of storing it. Rather, the body breaks down carbohydrates into glucose, which is carried to the brain through the blood stream and used immediately by nerve cells for energy. Reduced carbohydrate intake should thus reduce the brain’s source of energy. Therefore, researchers hypothesized that diets low in carbohydrates would affect cognitive skills.

And the researchers were right. The participants' cognitive skills were impaired after just a three weeks on a low carb diet. On memory tasks, low-carb dieters had slower reaction time and their visuospatial memory was not as sharp and the low-calorie group. However, low-carb beat low-cal on attention vigilance tasks, which sounds fantastically primal, although I'm not entirely sure what it means.

But how does Vitamin G interpret this information? They dumb it down so that their non-carb eating readers can process it. There is no mention of the reason that carbs are essential for optimal brain performance--only that if you never eat any like, bread and stuff, your memory might not be great.

I hate the lack of information! By assuming that women won't care to know (or won't be able to understand) the scientific bodily processes involved, Glamour squashes curiosity and makes it easy for women to remain ignorant about their bodies. What if they just threw in a short sentence about how carbs turn into glucose, and glucose fuels your brain? That's not hard.

Bottom line reporting is informative to an extent, but ultimately it's irresponsible and promotes misinformation.

Exhibits A-G: Check out the reader comments. Yikes.