If You Do This One Thing, You May Be Able To Eat All The Candy You Want

If you hit a pint of Ben & Jerry's a little too hard last night and still feel a little sluggish this morning, I have news for you: There's something you can do about it.

According to a new study conducted out of the University of California, Los Angeles, docosahexaenoic acid (otherwise known as DHA), an omega-3 fatty acid, is key in reducing the negative effects sugar has on our bodies.

In other words, eating foods like fish, eggs and peanut butter (all delicious options, if you ask me), will make your sugar binge a little less harmful.

To test this hypothesis, researchers taught three groups of rats how to escape from a maze. They then spent six weeks giving one group water packed with fructose (sugar). The second group got the same amount of fructose but also ate a diet high in DHA, and the third group was simply given plain water.

At the end of the six weeks, the group consuming only water and the group consuming the fructose water and DHA-high diet had no problem escaping from the maze. However, the rats that spent six weeks just drinking fructose water took twice as much time to escape.

So, without DHA to help them out, the rats' memories were being impaired by the sugar.

While encouraging, humans are not rats, so this topic needs to be studied more extensively before we declare omega-3s "sugar cures."

After all, sugar is pretty awful. Too much of it is linked with obesity, diabetes, cancer and early death.

And if you're thinking more short-term, be honest with yourself. Eating too much sugar makes you feel like absolute crap, right? You might get an initial rush from it, but that's generally followed by a crash and bad mood, which just makes you crave more sugar.

On top of that, you get something called "sugar face" when you overdo it, which is characterized by pimples, a grayish skin tone, lines and wrinkles.

Terrifying, I know.

My advice? Eat your sugar in moderation. And if you overdo it once in a while (we all do), eat wild salmon for dinner.

Citations: Fructose alters hundreds of brain genes, which can lead to a wide range of diseases (Science Daily), THE SURPRISING WAY YOU CAN OFFSET THE EFFECTS OF SUGAR (Well+Good)