Tasty, but bad for your brain. (Via Shutterstock)

A recent study by professors at American University suggests that not only will eating fatty foods make you a big, fat fatty, it will also make you a big, dumb dummy.

In more academic terms, the results of the study led by Terry Davidson, a professor of behavioral neuroscience, showed that lab rats that where fed high-fat, high-calorie diets suffered from deficiencies in the tight network of blood vessels in the brain, a symptom that can cause deficiencies in learning and memory. The results were published in the most recent issue of the journal Physiology & Behavior.

In Davidson’s experiments, the fattened rats were subjected to the same battery of mental and cognitive tests as skinnier specimens, but came away with dismal results. In each obese rat, the blood-brain barrier ceased to function properly, affecting the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for regulating memories and newly acquired facts.

“The idea is, you eat the high fat/high calorie diet and it causes you to overeat because this inhibitory system is progressively getting fouled up,” Davidson told Agence France-Presse. “And unfortunately, this inhibitory system is also for remembering things and suppressing other kinds of thought interference.”

In other words, that bacon cheeseburger with extra everything might seem like a tasty idea, but make it a regular habit, and you could be subjecting yourself to a nightmare of idiocy and foggy memories.

Correction: This post originally stated an excess of fatty foods caused a tightening of blood vessels around the hippocampus. In fact, it allows a substance that does not freely flow through the blood-brain barrier into the hippocampus.