A sugar-coated early childhood can affect health decades later

Sugar restricting intake at the very beginning of human life can have significant and really long-term health effects, says a study published in the prestigious journal Science on Thursday evening research.

Too much sugar is bad, and it’s especially bad to get little children used to sweets. This is what we have been warned about for decades. However, it is difficult to prove in human studies that eating sweets as an infant actually leads to health problems later in life.

A new study now fills this gap. US economists use semi-experimental real-life data to find out how the regulation of sugar during fetal and early childhood is reflected in people’s health decades later.

“We found that regularization early in life reduced the risk of diabetes and hypertension by about 35 percent and 20 percent,” University of Southern California health economist Tadeja Gracner and his colleagues write in Science.

In addition, the researchers calculated that sugar regulation postponed the onset of diabetes by four years and the onset of hypertension by two years.

Britannia began rationing sugar during World War II in 1942. Sugar rationing ended in the fall of 1953.

When regulation ended in Britain, the consumption of sweets and chocolate immediately almost doubled.

The trio that conducted a recent study examines how exposure to sugar during the first thousand days of human life is reflected in the health status of people in their 50s and 60s. The period of one thousand days begins with conception in triplets and lasts until the age of two.

The reason was more than 60,000 people born in Britain in the 1950s. The group was divided into those conceived shortly before the end of sugar regulation and those conceived soon after the end of regulation.

At the age of 51–66, the babies of the regulation period had clearly less type 2 diabetes and hypertension compared to those who were conceived immediately after the regulation.

The difference was also observed in those people who were not born when the sugar regulation ended, but were already growing in their mothers’ wombs while the regulation was still in effect.

Helsinki professor of nutrition at the university Mikael Fogelholm finds the research very interesting when hearing about it. The results also seem reasonable.

“In general, it can be said that during pregnancy and the first couple of years of life, any unhealthy lifestyle of the mother – and in some cases even the father – affects the children and increases the children’s susceptibility to chronic diseases. This is called an epigenetic effect, where different compounds change the function of genes,” says Fogelholm.

“It may be that sugar intake has affected the genes that regulate sugar metabolism in one way or another. I would hypothesize that what has happened is changes in insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance and these cellular mechanisms involved in regulating blood sugar balance.”

In Fogelholm’s opinion, it is also logical that the differences were more visible in the risk of diabetes than in the risk of high blood pressure.

“However, sugar is not the only cause of type 2 diabetes.”

Early sugar exposure can also affect health in such a way that it strengthens a lifelong sweet craving, US researchers speculate.

In Fogelholm’s opinion, this is an interesting hypothesis. However, he thinks it is more likely that the effects come through the regulation of sugar metabolism.