Three children enjoy a portable, healthy snack – a carrot on a stick – amid wartime rationing in July 1941. Photograph: Ashwood/Getty Images From blood pressure to ageing, research suggests the first 1,000 days of sugar exposure could leave a decades-long mark on health
Prefer the Guardian on Google T hey were born into a Britain still recovering from the hardships of war. Though the air-raid sirens had fallen silent, many everyday foods remained rationed, including sugar. Adults were restricted to about 3 tablespoons (40g) a day to stretch between cups of tea, baking and desserts; children were limited to less than a tablespoon. Babies and very young children were expected to have little or no added sugar.
Then, in 1953, the brakes came off. Separate restrictions on sweets and chocolate were lifted in February, followed by sugar in September. By the second half of 1954, average sugar consumption had almost doubled.
View image in fullscreen A London shopkeeper puts up a sign announcing the new price of sugar, as announced in the budget in September 1939. The price has risen by a penny a pound. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images The lifting of postwar sugar rationing inadvertently created a natural experiment, whose consequences scientists are only beginning to unpick. A flurry of recent studies suggests that spending the first 1,000 days of life under sugar rationing may have left traces on people’s health more than seven decades later.
“What makes the end of sugar rationing particularly interesting is the nature of the exposure,” said Dr Jiazhen Zheng at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou, China, who worked on several of the recent studies. “In September 1953, sugar availability changed quite abruptly at the population level, largely because of policy rather than individual choice. In a sense, history created an experiment that we could never deliberately run over a human lifetime.”
The first of this recent wave of sugar rationing studies was published in the journal Science two years ago. Dr Tadeja Gračner at the University of Southern California and her colleagues used data from the UK Biobank to compare the health of people born shortly before and after sugar rationing ended in the UK. Some had been exposed to this low sugar environment only during their time in the womb; others remained exposed for months or years, while those conceived once rationing ended were not exposed at all.
Gračner found that the longer people had spent under rationing, the lower their risk of developing type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure in mid- to later life: those exposed throughout their first 1,000 days had a 35% lower risk of type 2 diabetes and a 20% lower risk of high blood pressure than those who had never experienced rationing.
The findings prompted Zheng and others to wonder whether these effects might extend to other organ systems. Over the past few months, further studies drawing on UK Biobank data by his group and others have linked reduced sugar exposure to lower risks of a growing list of health conditions.
View image in fullscreen Schoolboys clamber to enter a sweet shop in 1945. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis/Getty Images “I have been more struck by the consistency across different organ systems than by any single effect estimate,” Zheng said. “In our work, we have seen associations with cardiovascular disease, liver disease, respiratory health, dementia and, more recently, broader measures of agei…