Coffee and donuts: Breakfast of champions? It turns out caffeine and glucose could make you smarter

Breakfast of champions? It turns out a morning meal of java and a donut, a favorite of office workers everywhere, could actually make you smarter.

The combo of caffeine and glucose revs up the brain, according to a study published in the journal "Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental," reported by MSNBC.com.

Researchers found that pairing the two oft-maligned ingredients helps both attention and memory.

The study, conducted at the University of Barcelona in Spain, examined a group of 72 women and men between the ages of 18 and 25, who were given doses of either water, water with caffeine, water with glucose, or water with both caffeine and glucose.

The subjects then took a variety of tests on attention, memory and manual dexterity.

Some of the tests involved simple tasks such as remembering a list of 15 repeated words, or removing pegs from a cup and putting them quickly into a hole.

Others consisted of repeating back a batch of numbers both forward and backwards.

Participants who had been given water with caffeine or glucose had better reaction times than those who drank plain water.

And when the study subjects drank the water with both substances, they displayed impressive results on attention, learning, and consolidating verbal memory.

While the findings are noteworthy, researchers hope to perform more studies to investigate "the effects of caffeine and glucose, alone and in combination, with repeated doses."

In the meantime, hold the nutritious breakfast, please, and bring on the double mocha lattes and French crullers.

nydailynews.com