Sugar is a product we all know we should be getting less of. The sweet product is built to take advantage of our innate preferences—in the distant past, when we were navigating desert plains and jungles, sweet things were difficult to come by, so we evolved a sweet tooth as a way to encourage us to find the food forms that contained it.

Nowadays we have absolutely no problem finding sweet food, but our brains are still designed in the same way, so that we crave sugar. There’s no innate off switch, and this is wreaking havoc on our bodies today. While sugar is a big proponent in obesity and heart related issues, it can also, as new research is suggesting, have a bad impact on our brain:

We found that chronic consumption of sugar in rats who were not stressed produced similar changes in the hippocampus as seen in the rats who were stressed but not drinking sugar. Early life stress exposure or sugar drinking led to lower expression of the receptor that binds the major stress hormone cortisol, which may affect the ability to recover from exposure to a stressful situation.

People who were exposed to early life trauma have changes in the structure of their hippocampus. In humans, those consuming the most “western” diet had smaller hippocampal volumes, in line with data from animal models.

The hippocampus is an essential brain area related to memory, in particular long-term memory, which would make for devastating effects especially in young people. Read more on the study over at Psy Post.

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