I'm not sure if that happened here but these are a few reasons you might see an impact on children.
I was born into a traditional food culture without excessive sugar, but I sure as heck developed a sugar craving later, to the detriment of my diet. I'm guessing this cancels out the early healthy effect.
Anecdotally, people that don't eat any sweet food always seem to gravitate toward salty/bitter flavors instead.
Don't get me wrong, I love sugary treats. But I like the bitterness in coffee and chocolate.
The bitterness itself is enjoyable, but the natural sweetness of everyday foods is also magnified.
> Importantly, these differences only began to appear decades after sugar rationing had ended.
> What is most surprising, however, is not the cancer results or the biological markers of ageing. It’s how early-life sugar exposure continued to affect people’s diets even 50 years later.
Our understanding of reproductive health is pretty frustratingly limited. Hopefully that changes soon
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/brb3.70338
https://www.texasinstituteforneurologicaldisorders.com/uncat...
https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/experts-is-...
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/heres-what-happens-to-your...
I'll even throw in an AI-generated answer from the less-than-eloquent prompt "sugar addiction brain":
> Sugar addiction triggers neurobiological changes in the brain’s mesolimbic dopamine pathway, specifically affecting the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex. Consuming sugar causes a surge in dopamine and endorphins, creating a pleasurable "high" that reinforces consumption. Over time, this repeated stimulation leads to neuroadaptation, characterized by:
> Downregulation of D2 receptors: The brain reduces its dopamine receptors, requiring more sugar to achieve the same effect (tolerance).
> Altered gene expression: Changes in receptor availability in the midbrain and frontal cortex.
> Hippocampal damage: High sugar intake can reduce new neuron production, impairing memory and learning.
>These mechanisms drive compulsive intake, cravings, and withdrawal-like symptoms (such as anxiety and irritability) when sugar is removed. While not formally classified as a substance use disorder in humans, the behavioral and neurochemical parallels to drug addiction (such as bingeing and loss of control) are well-documented in preclinical models and supported by human neuroimaging studies.
How does this play together with what you mentioned above?
I generally believe that many (most?) self destructive human behaviors are a result of maladaptive evolution. For most of our history, I imagine gorging on sugar was the correct choice. If you find a high sugar food, you should eat as much as possible.
That worked for a long time, until sugar became in high supply. Now, we still have pathways to encourage that gorging, but it’s bad for us.
"Sugar rationing" is far too simplistic a description of the historical situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...
Even the labels put on food like "margarine" aren't composed of what you'd normally expect, as they shifted to fish/whale oils due to availability.
The bookmakers measured here are quite different, like telomere length.
> We found that people who experienced sugar rationing early in life still consumed less sugar in adulthood, around age 50. They also ate less overall, and their diets were healthier and more diverse. This suggests that the level of sweetness people are exposed to very early in life may shape their taste preferences for a long time.
This life long behavior makes the connection far more plausible than an effect from just 1000 days at the beginning of life! But they can't lead with something so mundane, I guess..
This is science in formation, not established fact, so it's interesting to see an article about it aimed at a popular audience. Definitely something to keep an eye on, but the conclusions shouldn't be filed away as established facts quite yet.
I can't look it up right now, but calorie restriction also shows this correlation, so maybe it is not sugar at all.
Is that a typo? Otherwise, I don't understand it.
Babies would be 100% capable of eating something like Twinkies very early on, and would probably love them. So I'm sure some parents are letting them have them.
Human brain dies in a few minutes without glucose. We burn it at full steam while browsing HN. Cutting out sugar can lead to depression, fog brain, headaches or anxiety.
We are smart and can live everywhere because animal fat in our diets provided the constant supply of sugar that we need. In summer and in winter. In a desert or in the pole.
I'm planning to take the cohort of people who lived under sugar rationing then find all of the population differences and publish how "people born under sugar rationing had x lower/higher y".
Seems lots of people are doing this with cancer, dementia, heart disease, etc, but I'm confident there's more to be milked from this trend with some AI-assisted research.
Correlation is not causation.
Others in the thread point out how it's not easy to implement, but there is a methodological attempt at casual inference in the design.
Assuming their math and design are good, this is pretty strong, as these things go. But there were a lot of other things that were different between the groups that could reasonably be affecting results.
The article itself is careful to deny drawing any prescriptive conclusions from this research — a tacit acknowledgement that the causal connection isn’t entirely clear.
This is interesting and fairly strong, and potentially important, but definitely needs more work before we start acting on it.
It's not as good as an RCT, but lifetime sugar consumption, as the article points out, is not something you can randomise.
They didn't perform an experiment, they took someone else's observational data from a real-world event, and attempted to interpret it as if it had been an experiment.
Observational would be simply looking at sugar consumption across a cohort and having that as a covariate.
The fact someone else gathered the data has nothing to do with it.
Edit: It's a widely-used research technique, which attempts to address this correlation-causation issue without having to do RCTs.
https://medium.com/@arun.subram456/causal-inference-regressi...