Even though penicillin was discovered more than a decade before World War II, it took an intensive search by American and British scientists during that conflict to find a way to mass produce it. Both countries desperately needed a way to fight the bacterial infections resulting from war wounds, which led scientists to experiment with an industrial manufacturing process called deep-tank fermentation.

When they did, voilà.

It allowed the antibiotic to grow and multiply at such a rate, according to The World War II Museum: New Orleans, that 2.3 million doses of it were prepared in advance of the Normandy invasion. Its use there and following that saved the lives thousands of Allied soldiers wounded in battle.

After the war, penicillin continued to be mass produced to treat common bacterial infections like strep throat, ear infections, and urinary tract infections and a number of life-threatening ones, as well. All things considered, the National Museum of American History estimates its use has saved the lives of 500 million people worldwide.

While it may seem strange that something as life-taking as WWII lead to something as life-giving as penicillin, the fact of the matter is world war necessitates innovations that ultimately lead to advancements in transportation, technology, and medicine. What is indeed odd, however, is that a significant medical development resulting from WWII has occurred 81 years after the last bullet was fired, and that it’s as much a mind-saver as a life-saver.

What’s not unusual, though, is that this mind-saver is yet another reason why you should strive to subtract all added sugars from your diet.

If the idea of total added-sugar abstinence strikes you as too extreme, bear in mind what follows the “Did You Know?” subheading on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage titled “Get the Facts: Added Sugars.” “No amount of added sugars or non-nutritive sweeteners is recommended or considered part of a healthy or nutritious diet.”

Similarly, consider what two different sets of Chinese researchers learned from double-checking the health data of more than 60,000 Brits born between 1951 and 1956.

To do that, it helps to know food rationing was required in the United Kingdom after WWII and the restriction on sugar was only lifted in 1953. As a result, those born between 1951 and 1953 consumed far less sugar in the first 1,000 days of life than those born between 1954 and 1956.

While no amount of research will ever be able to ascertain just how much less, a BBC article about one of the two soon-to-be-mentioned studies estimates that sugar consumption doubled “almost immediately” after the rationing ended and that the average Brit then consumed about 320 calories’ worth of sugar a day.

So Bing Zhang, a geriatric medicine researcher at Guangzhou First People’s Hospital in Guangzhou, China, and colleagues took advantage of what he calls in a Medical News Today article a “unique natural experiment [that] allowed us to study the long-term cognitive effects of early sugar restriction.” Meanwhile, a group of researchers led by study author Jiazhen Zheng, PhD, at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou, China did essentially the same.

The first group, whose work was published by npj Aging in late July online, found that those who had been exposed to sugar restriction during the first 1000 days after conception showed a 46 percent lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and a 27 percent lower risk of all forms of dementia in older age when compared to older-aged adults born in the two years after the sugar rationing ended.

The second group, whose work was published by Neurology in late July online, compared individuals who experienced sugar rationing in utero and in the first year of life with those who had not and found a 21 percent reduced risk of all causes of dementia. When they included individuals who experienced sugar rationing in the first two years of life, the reduced risk of dementia increased to 23 percent.

When the second group of researchers considered all individuals eventually diagnosed with dementia, they found those who experienced sugar rationing developed the disease an average of 2.6 years later when compared to those who hadn’t.

So what are you to gain from all this — besides an abiding sense of indebtedness to those scientists who figured out a way to mass produce penicillin? That — along with a slew of prior studies that suggest you do the same — these two about what happened in the U.K. after the restriction on sugar consumption was lifted should lead you to impose your own sugar restriction just as severe, or close to it, to your own diet.

For it will not only decrease your risk, ameliorate, or possibly eliminate metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular, but also help maintain brain health as you age.