The Less Sugar We Get as Babies, the Better Our Health Is Decades Later

One of the many joys of Halloween is the ample sugary treats that flow into our hands. But new research published today suggests that staying away from sugar in our earliest years of life can have huge benefits down the road, such as reducing our risk of type 2 diabetes decades later.

Tasty as sugar is, it’s well known that too much of it added to our diets can negatively affect us, particularly our metabolic health. Some research has found that excessive added sugar might be especially harmful during our early development, including inside the womb and while we’re being breastfed by our mothers. But according to study researcher Tadeja Gracner, there hasn’t been much solid data on the long-term effects of these earliest exposures to added sugar in people—until now at least.

“This is not that surprising, because it is incredibly challenging to find situations where people are randomly exposed to differential nutritional environments. It is even more difficult when you think about that happening early in life and being followed long-term,” Gracner, a scientist and economist at the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation, told Gizmodo.

As luck would have it, though, Gracner and her colleagues were able to find such a situation that had occurred in the UK over 70 years ago, creating a sort of natural experiment. During World War II, sweet foods and treats were tightly rationed in the country, limiting how much sugar the average resident (including expectant or breastfeeding mothers and their children) could consume back then. This decade-long rationing ended in 1953, and with it, people’s sugar consumption soon after nearly doubled.

Gracner and her team analyzed data from the UK Biobank, a longstanding research project that has followed UK residents’ health for many years. They compared the health outcomes of people who were conceived just before and after the rationing era.

“The environment in which we studied these questions wasn’t one of extreme food deprivation, such as famine or severe calorie restriction,” Gracner noted. “Our data showed that rationed food restrictions instead allowed a diet within today’s nutritional guidelines.”

People born during rationing were significantly less likely to develop type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure than those born right after, the researchers found. And even if they did develop these conditions, it took longer for them to occur. All in all, the researchers calculated that early life sugar rationing reduced people’s risk of hypertension by 20% and their risk of diabetes by 35%. Rationing also appeared to delay the onset of these conditions by two and four years, respectively. Their findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.

While this is far from the first study to find that too much sugar is bad for us, the findings might help pin down exactly when sugar is most likely to be harmful. The researchers found that one-third of the risk reduction alone could be attributed to reduced sugar exposure in the womb, for instance. And the protective effects of rationing were strongest when children’s limited sugar exposure continued past the age of six months, right around the time that they would start eating solid foods. This indicates that restricting sugar during those specific periods of life is likely to provide the most benefit, Gracner says. But it’s a feat easier said than done.

“We all want to improve our health and give our children the best start in life, and reducing added sugar early is a powerful step in that direction. But it’s far from easy—added sugar is everywhere, even in baby and toddler foods, and children are bombarded with TV ads for sugary snacks. This makes sticking to recommended sugar guidelines incredibly difficult, starting from infancy,” she said.

Though it’s still important to educate families about the importance of reducing sugar in their children’s formative moments, Gracner and her colleagues say that more aggressive action needs to be taken to ease the hold that sugar has on us.

“We should also hold companies accountable to reformulate baby foods with healthier options and regulate the marketing and pricing of junk food targeted at kids. With better information, environment and the right incentives, parents can more easily reduce sugar exposure—for their kids and themselves,” she said.

At the same time, Gracner and her team aren’t looking to be grinches. “We certainly don’t want to take away the joy of Halloween or the upcoming holidays—a birthday cake, candy, or cookies in moderation are treats we all need to enjoy from time to time!” she added.