“Sugar in childhood linked with dementia in older age” screamed the headline. My children were eating ice cream at the time. It felt like a warning.
The headline was referring to a study comparing young children from conception until the age of two, born during rationing in England and those born just after it had stopped. When sugar rationing ended in England in September 1953, the average person’s sugar intake rose from an average 41g a day up to 80g, almost overnight. Now researchers have found that those who were babies and toddlers during rationing had a 23 per cent lower chance of developing dementia.
While the message about sugar is valid, the study itself is inherently flawed, says Dr Federica Amati, author and chief nutritionist for Zoe. “Nobody had their sugar intake measured. The comparison isn’t about diet; it’s about date of birth relative to a government policy. And this particular birth cohort is only in its early seventies now so the dementia cases captured so far are unusually young ones,” she explains. “Dementia isn’t one disease with one cause and changes in the brain start twenty to thirty years before anyone notices symptoms.”
However, it’s just one of a raft of studies pointing to a link between high sugar diets in childhood and health problems – from dental problems to obesity. Amati agrees that reducing sugar is important for children’s health. “It rests on teeth, on the taste preferences that get laid down in the first few years and on metabolic health. Those show up now, not in 2090.”
