Cafeteria-diet effects on cognitive functions, anxiety, fear response and neurogenesis in the juvenile rat

Early life, covering childhood and adolescence in humans, is an important period of brain development and maturation. Experimental works in rodents have shown that high-caloric diets are particularly detrimental to young rats, affecting cognition. We studied the effects of two different high-caloric diets, prevalent in human adolescents, on male Wistar rats aged 4 weeks at the beginning of the experiment. Rats were randomly allocated to control...