Big New Study On Sugar in Children...

The hot talk of the week is a new paper in Science that shows early life exposure to sugar can seriously impact a child’s risk of developing diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity decades later.

While my Newsletter subscribes got early access to my thoughts, there is now a video covering these data for those who prefer to watch. But even for those who watch rather than read, scroll to the end of this letter to see a special announcement!

The hot talk of the week is this new paper in the prestigious journal Science that shows early life exposure to sugar, including including in utero and in the first years of life, can seriously and causally impact a child’s risk of developing diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity later in life.

I’ll have a long-form YouTube video produced in this shortly. But in the meantime, I thought you deserved a breakdown.

First, let me explain what’s special about this study.

Usually, to demonstrate causality for effects that take decades to manifest you can’t do a randomized trial, so you need to rely on animal data and standard observational epidemiological studies, which are riddled with confounders.

However, now and again, real-world circumstances impose a natural experiment. And, in the United Kingdom rationing of Sugar continued post-World War II era, until September 1953.

And after Sugar rationing ended, sugar intake doubled almost immediately – and selectively, with intake of other food stuffs like fats, produce and proteins remaining rather constant.

This presents a natural quasi-experiment, because what you can do is follow cohorts of children – 60,183 children in this study – through their life course, comparing those born just before rationing ended – these are the “rationed babies” – to those conceived and born just after rationing ended – these are the “un-rationed babies” or “sugar babies,” because they were exposed to sugar.

That’s exactly what they did in this study. And it’s a cool design because it takes advantage of a historical event to control for variables through a sort of ‘randomization’ in time, in a way that would be impossible to control for otherwise.

Results

The researchers found a dose-dependent effect whereby less exposure to sugar during early life led to lower risk of type 2 diabetes, lower risk of hypertension, and lower risk of obesity later in life, particularly starting around age 50.

Black is un-rationed (Sugar Babies). Green is rationed in utero. Blue is fully rationed during early life.

When I say “dose-dependent,” in this case I mean in time, whereby there was a protective effect of not being exposure to as much sugar in utero for kids born just before the end of rationing (e.g. around New Years 1953), and an even stronger effect if the sugar ration included the first year of life because the kids were conceived one year earlier, and even stronger still if rationing included the first two years of life.

For fully rationed kids, risk of type 2 diabetes was reduced 35%, risk of high blood pressure was reduced 20%, and risk of obesity was reduced 30%, all as compared to the un-rationed “Sugar babies.”

Or another way to put it, is that the “Sugar Babies” are at much higher risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity than sugar-free babies.

And I’ll reinforce, for the vast majority of these humans’ lifespans, they likely had similar access to sugar. So, the effect appears to be cause, yes “caused” by early life exposure to sugar, including in utero.

Now, what this paper does not do is describe the causal mechanism. How does early life sugar exposure increase diabetes, hypertension, and obesity risk? It could be through increasing life-long sugar cravings, leading to more life-long sugar intake. It could be through changes cemented in the microbiome or epigenome. It’s not yet clear.

Sizing Up the Problem

Now, let’s size up the problem given modern statistics on sugar.

Even according to the CDC, children younger than 2 years should not be given ANY foods or beverages with added sugars.

Nevertheless, most young children do consume added sugar, starting before birth vis-à-vis their mothers. In fact, pregnant and lactating women consume more than triple the recommended amount of added sugar per day, over >80 grams of added sugars. That’s not including natural sugars and is equal to >5 Chocolate Frosted Donuts with Sprinkles from Dunkin Donuts.

These data on the serious harms of early life exposure to sugar, build upon a mountain of prior evidence and make the case that this is a major problem that needs to be addressed if we are to give our kids and grandkids the best possible chance at a healthy life.

Special Announcement

It’s not secret that conventional medicine overlooks and undervalues “Metabolic Medicine.” We need to change that!

I’m now teaming up with the Medical School MCAT prep company, ExamKrackers to help Put the Metabolism Back in Medicine! (See 8:53 in “Sugar Babies” Video. Click HERE.)

Specifically, ExamKrackers and I are teaming up to provide pre-med students preparing for the MCAT entrance exam to medical school with FREE MCAT-style passages based on papers covered in my videos.

This way, pre-med students can learn about nutrition and metabolism while preparing for their MCAT!

• Passages are written based on New Metabolism Research in Top Journals, like Cell Metabolism, Science and Nature.

• Every passage is accompanied by a video.

• The FREE MCAT passages are available to anyone, even those not applying to medical school. So, if you just want to test your “pre-med muscles” for fun, go for it!

• For those who find value in the passages, we will provide discount codes to more comprehensive preparatory materials.

• Our core team of two question writers both scored 524 (100th percentile) on their MCATs. We know what we’re doing!

Fact: Only 1 in 10 Americans is metabolically healthy and rates of chronic metabolic disease are increasing, despite our exorbitant healthcare costs ($4.5 Trillion/yr). We need another solution.

We need to make Metabolic Health Mainstream. Hopefully, the next generation of doctors can help!