World War II Data Shows Impact of Sugar on Kids' Health

November 4, 2024
Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

The home front hardships of World War II illustrate how too much sugar is harming people’s health today, a new study shows.

British children who endured wartime rationing of sugar wound up with lifelong health benefits, researchers discovered.

Sugar restrictions during kids’ first 1,000 days after conception was associated with an up to 35% lower risk of type 2 diabetes and a 20% lower risk of high blood pressure as adults, researchers reported recently in the journal Science.

Sugar rationing in the United Kingdom started in 1942, at the height of World War II, researchers said.

During rationing, sugar intake was about 8 teaspoons a day, on average -- less than the 10 teaspoons typically found in a single can of soda.

After rationing ended in 1953, sugar consumption doubled to about 16 teaspoons per day, researchers said.

This provided a real-world test of sugar’s effects on long-term health, the researchers said.

“Studying the long-term effects of added sugar on health is challenging,” noted researcher Tadeja Gracner, a senior economist at the University of Southern California (USC) Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research.

“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,” Gracner said in a USC news release. “The end of rationing provided us with a novel natural experiment to overcome these problems.”

For the study, researchers drew data from the U.K. Biobank, a long-range research project capturing the medical histories, genetics and lifestyle habits of thousands of British residents.

The team looked specifically at children conceived or born prior to the end of rationing, and compared them to kids born into a more sugar-rich environment.

Exposure to sugar restriction in the womb was enough on its own to lower health risks, but protection increased after babies started eating solid food, results showed.

Along with lowering the risk of diabetes and high blood pressure, reduced sugar consumption also delayed the onset of these conditions, researchers found.

Kids who grew up during sugar rationing tended to develop type 2 diabetes four years later, and high blood pressure two years later, compared to children born after rationing ended.

Experts noted that it’s tough to limit sugar in a kid’s diet. Added sugars are everywhere, even in baby and toddler foods, and children are bombarded with video ads for sugary snacks.

“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,” said study co-author Claire Boone, a health economist with McGill University and the University of Chicago.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on the health effects of sugar.

SOURCE: University of Southern California, news release, Oct. 31, 2024

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