Avoiding sugar in the first 1000 days of life protects against diabetes and hypertension.

Limit sugar consumption in the first thousand days of life – from conception to the age of two years – reduces the risk of developing diabetes and hypertension in adulthoodaccording to a study based on food rationing used in the United Kingdom after World War II. The study, details of which were published in the journal Scienceconfirmed that early development is a critical period for long-term health of people and that poor nutrition during this period negative consequences in adulthood.

Although dietary guidelines recommend do not add sugar in the first years of lifein the United States are often exposed to high levels of sugar in the womb – through the mother’s diet – as well as during breastfeeding and special infant formulas.

Additionally, research shows that most infants and young children consume sweet foods and drinks.

To study the long-term effects of early sugar consumption. in health, Tadeya Gratznerfrom the University of Southern California, and a team of scientists from the universities of Berkeley, Chicago and McGill studied the effects of sugar and sweets rationing introduced in the United Kingdom at the end of World War II. This is a natural experiment that continued until 1953.

During this period of restrictions, the amount of sugar consumed by citizens was comparable to current dietary recommendations, including for pregnant women and young children, but when rationing ended, sugar consumption almost doubled overnight.

Using data from the UK Biobank, the researchers looked at the health of people who were and were not subject to sugar rationing in utero and during the first years of life. Thus they discovered that Sugar rationing early in life had noticeable long-term health benefits. According to the results, those who were born during this rationing and were exposed to low sugar levels in the early years of life had 35% lower risk of developing diabetes and 20% lower risk of developing hypertension.. Moreover, the age at which these diseases developed in adulthood was delayed by an average of 4 and 2 years, respectively.

The protective effect was most pronounced in people with limited exposure to sugar both in utero and after birth, with in utero exposure alone accounting for about a third of the risk reduction. Additionally, according to the study, the effect was further enhanced after 6 months of age, which likely coincided with the introduction of solid foods.

For CIBERobn researcher Jesus Francisco Garcia GavilanThe results of this study confirm the findings of previous studies and support dietary recommendations that aim to avoid or reduce consumption of simple sugars during pregnancy and delay their consumption as much as possible in early childhood. As for limitations, he cautioned that the study only included people born in the United Kingdom and was based on self-reported health data. It’s also limited to those born between 1951 and 1956, when “the type and availability of ultra-processed products may have been very different from today,” he said Scientific Media Center (SMC) Spain.

For my part, Rafael Urialde de AndresProfessor of the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid and member of the board of directors of the Spanish Society of Nutrition, believes that the work “confirms what other studies demonstrate: the importance of avoiding added sugar and avoiding excess free sugars from any food source in the first 1000 days of life “, he told SMC Spain.

“This limitation of not only added sugars, but also free sugars, has a positive effect on reducing overweight and obesity in children and adolescents and the subsequent emergence of some pathologies associated with both overweight and obesity,” he concluded.

Country (Uruguay)