Sugar In Infancy Linked To Higher Diabetes, Blood Pressure Risks: Study

In this day of technology, where individuals are exercising less, consuming sugar has turned into a sweet risk to human health. In the modern diet, the top sources are soft drinks, fruit drinks, flavoured yoghurts, cereals, cookies, cakes, candy, and most processed foods, and all this has added sugar. But added sugar is also present in items that you may not think of as sweetened, like soups, bread, cured meats, and ketchup.The result: we consume way too much added sugar, which ultimately affects our body.

Recently, scientists have discovered new information about sugar intake during the human body's infancy stage. Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure in later life may be predicted by the amount of sugar in infants' and toddlers' diets.

A low-sugar diet in utero and in the first two years of life can meaningfully reduce the risk of chronic diseases in adulthood, according to a study published today in the journal Science. The researchers used contemporary data from the UK Biobank to study the effect of exposure to sugar restrictions early in life on health outcomes of adults conceived just before and after the end of wartime sugar rationing in the United Kingdom in September 1953.

As per a news release, the study, published on Halloween, finds that children exposed to sugar restrictions during their first 1,000 days-including in utero-had up to a 35% lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes and up to 20% lower risk of hypertension as adults. In-utero exposure alone was enough to lower risks, but disease protection increased with length of exposure after birth.

The study-a collaboration by researchers Tadeja Gracner from the University of Southern California, Claire Boone of McGill University, and Paul Gertler of the University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business-provides compelling new evidence of the lifelong health effects of early-life sugar exposure.

"Studying the long-term effects of added sugar on health is challenging because it is hard to find situations where people are as-if randomly exposed to different nutritional environments early in life and follow them for 50 to 60 years," said Gracner (PhD 15, Economics). "The end of rationing provided us with a novel natural experiment to overcome these problems."