Limiting the sweet white stuff in early life seems to reduce the risk of diabetes and hypertension in adults.
“Sugar in early life is the new tobacco.”
This declaration, from Professor Paul Gertler of UC Berkeley and the National Bureau of Economics Research, is not what any parent wants to read so soon after Halloween.
But this study he co-authored, published in Science on 31 October exactly, indeed found that exposure to sugar in the first 1000 days after conception appreciably raises the risk of diabetes and hypertension in adulthood.
The team, led by economist Dr Tadeja Gračner of the University of Southern California, explored the question using a neat natural experiment – sugar rationing in wartime and postwar Britain (1942-1953) – and data from the UK Biobank.
Dr Gračner told Nature she was pregnant and probably eating chocolate when she learned their results: “I was like, ‘No, no, no. This is the last thing I need.’”
Under sugar rationing, consumption was around 40g a day, within current dietary guidelines; but consumption doubled when rationing ended, providing a handy before and after. By the time sugar restrictions lifted, most other food was back to normal, creating a clear sugar signal.
Comparing adults conceived in the two years before and two years after rationing ended, the team found that early-life rationing reduced diabetes and hypertension risk by about 35% and 20%, and delayed disease onset by four and two years, respectively.
Sugar exposure in utero played a role in later disease development, but the biggest contributor was the sugar consumed after a child was six months old.
Dr Gračner told Nature parents did not need to eliminate sugar, but might consider cutting down, since pregnant and lactating people in the US typically eat more than three times the recommended amount of added sugar, according to Nature.
“Pregnant people already have so much to worry about,” she said. “If it’s just a little sugar here and there, everybody’s going to be fine.”
And just to dim any silver health lining around war, forced severe calorie restriction in pregnancy is not recommended for chronic disease avoidance either. Another natural experiment, the Holodomor famine in Ukraine about 90 years ago, showed that people who experienced extreme food shortages in early gestation had twice the risk of developing diabetes.
Send sweet story tips to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
