When I had my first child, I tried to minimise his sugar consumption. I made him a zucchini puree for his first meal (not a major hit) and politely declined on his behalf when anyone offered him sweets. By the time I had my second and third children, however, I had largely given up.
I realised that trying to shield them from sugar was like trying to run through rain without getting wet, and I suspected I needed to chill out anyway. Do turmeric and curcumin have any actual health benefits? My interest was thus piqued by a recent study that used a neat natural experiment to investigate the long-term health effects of sugar exposure during our first 1000 days.
This was defined as the period from conception to age 2, a time that is increasingly understood to be a critical window in which dietary exposures have lasting repercussions. Jiazhen Zheng at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and his colleagues analysed the health of people whose first 1000 days coincided with post-war sugar rationing in the UK in the early 1950s and compared it with those who were conceived just after that period. During the rationing period, each person in the UK was only allowed around 40 grams of sugar per day, except for children under the age of 2, who were allocated none.
Presumably these infants would have shared some of their families’ rations, but their sugar intake would still have been low compared with today, when a child can consume 40 grams of sugar in just two glasses of juice. When sugar rationing ended in the UK in 1953, sugar was enthusiastically embraced again and average consumption doubled to 80 grams per day within a year. The researchers used data from the UK Biobank to compare 40,000 adults who spent some or all of their first 1000 days under sugar rationing with 23,000 whose first 1000 days came just afterwards, during the post-rationing sugar boom.
Astonishingly, the amount of sugar they were exposed to as babies 70 years ago seems to still be influencing their health today. The rationed individuals are more likely to still be alive, and markers of ageing in their cells suggest they are biologically “younger” than those who were never rationed. They also have lower organ ages, particularly for their hearts, lungs and livers.
This probably explains why they have been less likely to develop cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, rheumatoid arthritis, cataracts, dementia, liver failure, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and many other conditions. The longer they spent under rationing during their first 1000 days, the more protected they seem to be now. Zheng and his colleagues believe that sugar exposure in utero and during infancy shapes ageing processes in our cells, which are then programmed for life.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
