Children’s Sugar Consumption and Metabolic Disease: A Direct Link

Exploring the Sugar Rush…

Sugar rush in Britain. after World War II, confirms the harmful effects of sugary diets in the first years of life.

Sugar rationing, introduced after World War II and continuing into the early post-war years, led to increased rates of diabetes and hypertension in the population years later. as a team of researchers found after analyzing a large database from the UK.

In 1953, Britain became sweet again, ending the rationing of sweets and sugar that began during the Second World War.

Hordes of people poured into candy stores and began to sweeten their food more at home. In just 1 year, sugar consumption in the country has doubled.

Now a team of researchers has revealed how this dramatic change in the British diet is a stark demonstration of how a sugary diet in the early years of life affects long-term health.

Combining food research and sugar sales data from the 1950s with adult medical records from a database. UK Biobank, The team found that People conceived or born after 1953 had a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure decades later compared with those born during rationing.

The findings, published in the journal Science, highlight the negative impact of sweets in early childhood.

We already know that sugar affects the risk of developing diabetes. In this great “natural experiment” the consequences of subjugating the entire population were visible to dietary restrictions followed by drastic changes, and how all this had a big impact on the incidence of diabetes and high blood pressure.

Despite recommendations

Public health authorities recommend that infants avoid added sugars for the first 1,000 days after conception (i.e., this recommendation includes diet during pregnancy), a critical period for their development.

But the ubiquity of sweetened foods in many countries means that children are exposed to abnormally large amounts of sugar in the womb and after birth.

By some estimates, the average pregnant woman in the United States consumes more than 80 grams of added sugar per day. (about three times the recommended limit for adults), while more than 80% of infants and young children consume foods with added sugar.

Historical research

Sugar rationing provided a rare opportunity: children conceived before or after 1953 were exposed to very different amounts of sugar in their early years, but were identical in all other aspects of their diet and environment.

Although other foods, such as butter, were rationed in the mid-1950s, none saw such a large jump in consumption. The researchers analyzed dietary studies conducted in Britain in the 1950s, as well as annual sales of sugar and sweets.

Through the UK Biobank, data has been collected from participants since 2006, and medical information has also been collected on more than 60,000 people born between 1951 and 1956. Almost 4,000 of them developed diabetes, and almost 20,000 had high blood pressure.

The team found that among 60,000 children, the likelihood of a particular disease depended on how many of the first 1,000 days of life were during the rationing period.

A person conceived earlier but born after stopping sugar consumption in September 1953 had a 15% lower risk of diabetes than a person conceived after that date and a 5% lower risk of hypertension.

Infants who reached 1.5 years of age before rationing ended fared even better: the risk of diabetes was 40% lower and the risk of high blood pressure was 20% lower, compared with the group that never received rationing. The reduction in diabetes risk was greater in women than in men.

Conclusions: What does this study tell us?

In this study, we see how consuming sugar in the early years of life can cause various diseases later in life.

Exposure in utero can affect fetal development in ways that predispose someone to metabolic disease.

Children who eat a diet high in sugar may also develop a craving for sweet foods, causing them to eat more sugar as they grow up.

The researchers saw no effect of the diet reduction on diseases without a clear link to sugar, such as myopia or type 1 diabetes (which is less common and is determined largely by genes), suggesting that the results are not that people’s health declined after 1953 or the likelihood that they will be diagnosed.

Here, a “dose-response relationship” was found: as the time of sugar rationing increased, the risk of disease later in life decreased.