Certain things bear repeating, so how’s this for a new spin on my old cry?

How well you eat and how well you function are so inseparable it’s enough to make a social media hater like me create a hashtag: #GoodDietsMatter.

I once again remind you of the inexorable connection between food and function because yet another study attests to it: “Hippocampal-dependent appetitive control is impaired by experimental exposure to a Western-style diet” published in the February 2020 issue of Royal Society Open Science. While I’d never expect you to read this 32-page paper written for researchers by researchers, Ian Sample’s article about it at The Guardian.com., “Researchers find a western-style diet can impair brain function,” is reader friendly and worthy of your time.

This study merits special attention for it does more than confirm that a bad diet creates bad memory test scores. Or that it only took four days for the decline to reach the point of being statistically significant.

It demonstrated something that strikes me as far more important: Bad eating affects the brain in a way that encourages more bad eating.

Researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia came to this conclusion by dividing a group of 110 lean and healthy Macquarie undergrads and generally healthy eaters in two. For the eights days of testing, one half continued to eat normally while one half ate prepackaged “bad” breakfasts, high in sugar and saturated fat, on six days and their main meal from a popular fast-food chain on two others.

The second eating pattern created what Sample calls “a high energy western-style diet.”

A sidebar to his article defines that phrase as “the consumption of highly processed and refined foods, with high contents of sugars, salt, and fat and protein from red meat. Burgers, fast food, processed meat and ready meals are typical examples.”

On the first and last days of the study when all the undergrads breakfasted at the laboratory, the researchers determined that the extra calories in a high-energy western-style breakfast didn’t do a better job satiating appetite. To do so, they used what they dubbed a “wanting and liking test” where, after already consuming breakfast, the undergrads rated the degree to which they wanted to eat and liked eating an assorted group of high-sugar cereals.

The “wanting and liking test” also uncovered a correlation between the desire and enjoyment of the extra eating and the degree to which the “bad” breakfast affected each subject’s hippocampus, the region of the brain involved in memory and appetite control.

Stop the presses! This is big news - like Big Tobacco finally admitting to what why knew all along - that cigarette smoking harms your health.

You’ve read in this column time and time again how the excessive amount of simple carbohydrates in the typical American diet (what Sample calls a high-energy western style diet) adversely affects the physiological functioning of your body. The disruption occurs when the body releases too much insulin in response to the excessive carbs consumed.

The end result: About 90 minutes later, you’re just as hungry as before you ate because those excessive carbs have been stored as fat instead of used as immediate energy.

But the “wanting and liking test” shows that a bad diet does more than disrupt body processes; it also adversely affects brain function.

While prior studies found that junk food ingestion does this to animals, this study shows the same is true for people. According to Richard Stevenson, a professor of psychology at the Macquarie University, “when the hippocampus functions less efficiently, you do get this flood of memories, and so food is more appealing.”

This, he feels, is what “serve[d] to promote overeating in otherwise healthy young people [which] should be a worrying finding for everyone.”

In fact, it’s such a “worrying finding” that Stevenson foresees a time when governments will limit the use of added sugars in processed foods. While that might be accepted by repressed citizens in countries China and North Korea - or maybe even compliant compatriots in Stevenson’s homeland of Australia - Americans simply wouldn’t stand for it.

This belief, however, is not based on the fact that 70 percent of Americans currently eat more than the recommended amount of added sugars daily. Oh no, even the most ingrained habits can be changed if the stakes are high enough.

What will never change, though, is America’s sense of individualism.

It’s rooted in our history. Makes us who we are.

The world’s cowboys unwilling to cede control.

Whether it’s the British asking for taxes 250 years ago or our state governments asking us to wear masks four months ago, we bristle at being told what to do.

This is why the result of the “wanting and liking test” is really a big deal. When you consume the typical American diet, you’re no longer in control.

The food is.

While it’s odd to write, it’s accurate: It’s out-and-out un-American to eat like one.