Research has already shown that adults who ate sugary foods in their childhood are at greater risk for tooth decay and its associated health impacts.
Now a study—based on an extraordinary cohort of people who were born during wartime sugar rationing—is showing that eating excess sugar in early childhood is associated with higher risks for diabetes and hypertension.
The study, published in Science by University of Southern California (USC) researchers, used data from UK Biobank—a large biomedical database with health statistics from half a million UK participants.
During World War II, the UK rationed sugar for its population from 1942 to 1953. The USC researchers used this data to study the impact of “early-life sugar restrictions on health outcomes of adults conceived in the UK just before and after the end of wartime sugar rationing.
The team found that a reduced sugar exposure during pregnancy and an infant's first two years of life could substantially reduce the risk of mid-life development of diabetes and hypertension.
Indeed, children who experienced sugar restrictions a full 1,000 days out from conception had a 35% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes and up to a 20% lower risk of developing hypertension in adulthood.
The team added that sugar-rationing in-utero accounted for about one third of the risk reduction.
"Studying the long-term effects of added sugar on health is challenging," the study’s corresponding author, Tadeja Gracner, said in a report on the study in Science Daily.
"It is hard to find situations where people are randomly exposed to different nutritional environments early in life and follow them for 50 to 60 years. The end of rationing provided us with a novel natural experiment to overcome these problems," said Gracner, senior economist at the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research.
Science Daily noted that UK diets during the rationing period “generally appear[ed]” to have fallen within today's US Department of Agriculture and World Health Organization guidelines of no added sugars for children under age 2 and not more than 12 teaspoons (50g) of added sugar daily for adults.
In the Science Daily report, study co-author Claire Boone, assistant professor at McGill University, noted the significance of the study’s findings: “Parents need information about what works, and this study provides some of the first causal evidence that reducing added sugar early in life is a powerful step towards improving children's health over their lifetimes.”
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