Sugar rationing during World War II improved children’s health throughout their lives

Sugar rationing during World War II improved children’s health throughout their lives

By Saima S.Iqbal edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier

For several years after the end of World War II, the British government continued to ration certain foodstuffs, including eggs, dairy products and sugar. This not only popularized ingenious recipes such as vinegar-based “wacky cake”; he also kept the average diet within what we now recognize as modern guidelines for daily sugar consumption. Now a study shows that this restriction confers lifelong health benefits to people who were infants during rationing.

Scientists have long wondered how sugar affects body and brain development. But observational studies of families consuming less or more sugar may have difficulty disentangling the effects of diet from those of related factors such as income or geographic location. “This type of experiment helps eliminate some of that noise,” says Juliana Cohen, a nutrition researcher at Merrimack College and the Harvard School of Public Health who was not involved in the work.

The study authors used the UK BioBank medical database to compare the incidence of the disease in around 60,000 people born in the years before or after the end of sugar rationing in September 1953. The transition greatly changed sugar consumption without affecting other dietary factors – rationing of other ingredients ended at different levels. dates – allowing researchers to study the effects of reducing sugar during the first 1,000 days of life, crucial for development.

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Infants conceived in the years before sugar rationing ended had a 35 percent lower risk of diabetes and a 20 percent lower risk of hypertension in their 50s and 60s than those conceived afterward, the team reported in Science. For ration-era children who eventually developed these conditions, onset was four and two years later, respectively. The longer a person lived under rationing, the more benefits they saw, but the strongest effects occurred in utero and beyond the first six months of life, when babies start eating solid foods.

Many mechanisms could explain these results, says lead author Tadeja Graçonner, an economist at the University of Southern California. People who consume too much sugar can gain unhealthy weight or develop diabetes during pregnancy, putting their children at risk of obesity and insulin resistance. High sugar intake could also cause a growing fetus to express different genes with a similar effect. And children raised on a sugary diet may simply prefer sweeter foods; In a separate study, Graçerner’s team found that people exposed to rationing consumed less added sugar daily as adults than those who weren’t.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that children under age two avoid added sugar and that everyone else keep their daily intake to less than 10 percent of their total calories. But today’s American toddlers consume much more on average (nearly six teaspoons of added sugar per day), and many pregnant women consume triple the amount recommended for adults. Cohen notes that changing diet is difficult because our nutritional environment is not set up to support it. Still, any reduction helps, and there’s no need to avoid sugar completely.

“It’s all about moderation,” says Graçcaron;ner. “A birthday cake, some candy, a cookie here and there, those are all treats we need.”