New research revels shocking evidence that restricting the sugar intake of moms-to-be, and their kids for the first 2 years of their lives, can dramatically reduce the risk of the children developing type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure in later life…
Could it really be that easy? Apparently so. According to a new study by a team at the University of Southern California (USC). And the findings were something of an accident, study corresponding author Dr.Tadeja Gracner admitted.
What they did
The American group analysed data from the UK Biobank, a database of medical histories and genetic, lifestyle and other disease risk factors, to study the effect of early-life sugar restrictions on health outcomes of adults conceived in the U.K. just before and after the end of wartime sugar rationing.
But what they found was potentially much more important – a medical game changer.
“It is hard to find situations where people are randomly exposed to different nutritional environ-ments early in life and follow them for 50 to 60 years,” Gracner explained. “The end of rationing provided us with a novel natural experiment to overcome these problems.”
An abstract of the study report records: “Sugar intake during rationing was about 8 teaspoons (40 grams) per day on average. When rationing ended, sugar and sweets consumption skyrocketed to about 16 teaspoons (80 grams) per day.”
What they found
Published in the journal Science, the study found that children who experienced sugar restrictions during their first 1,000 days after conception had up to 35 percent lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes and as much as 20 percent less risk of hypertension as adults.
Lowered sugar intake by the mother prior to birth was, by itself, enough to lower risks. But continued sugar restriction after birth increased the benefits significantly.
The takeaway
In the United States, people with diabetes incur annual medical expenditures of about (US)$12,000 on average. The survey numbers underscore the value of early interventions that could delay or pre-vent this disease, the researchers note.
“Parents need information about what works, and this study provides some of the first causal evi-dence that reducing added sugar early in life is a powerful step towards improving children’s health over their lifetimes,” says study co-author Claire Boone of McGill University (Montreal) and the Uni-versity of Chicago.
My take
Historians are fond of observing that some of the most important discoveries in recorded times have come by accident. Why should this almost miraculous revelation be any different?
More research is needed to confirm the results. But the USC ‘experiment’ should be easy to replicate. But that will just take a few years – a relatively short period of time in terms of most medical disco-veries. New drugs must be rigorously tested and receive a whole catalogue of official certifications before they can be used on humans.
In fact, parents-to-be can start restricting mom’s sugar intake TODAY to reap benefits for their as-yet-unborn children.
An idea ‘whose time had come’?
It’s almost as if this new protocol – which could have an immense global benefit in the fights against hypertension and type 2 diabetes – had found its natural time to emerge. Not unlike the world-changing discoveries of James Lister, Louis Pastuer, the Curies and Jonas Salk.
I might even go as far as to suggest that the USC team be nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine…
~ Maggie J.