Eating less could help you remember more, researchers have found.
Skipping dessert and having an after-dinner coffee instead could also be good for your brain, as well as your waistline.
The news comes from an Italian study into ?calorific restriction? ? the idea that near-starvation rations boost health and extend life.
Scientists have long known of the phenomenon, but have struggled to work out just what it is about severely cutting calories that improves health.
Researcher Giovambattista Pani decided to focus on a protein called CREB1 that is known to be important to memory and learning.
In experiments on mice, he showed that cutting calories boosted learning if the animals could still make CREB1.
He also showed that cutting calories boosts the amount of the protein made in the brain.
The animals? calorie count was only cut by 25 to 30 per cent. In human terms, this equates to about 600 calories a day.
Does that mean if I want to pass adult courses I should starve before exam?
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