A study on people born during and just after wartime sugar rationing in the United Kingdom has found that rationing was linked to a significantly lower risk of type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure later in life.
Author of the study Tadeja Gracner, of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and his team found that the risk of developing type 2 diabetes was 35 percent lower among people who experienced rationed sugar and candy during the first 1,000 days of life—from gestation to age two—and the risk of developing high blood pressure was 20 percent lower, compared to those born after rationing.
"Concerns are rising about future children's health as they consume excessive amounts of added sugars during critical development periods—but we don't really have much evidence on long-term causal effects," Gracner told Newsweek.
"It is incredibly challenging to find situations where people are randomly exposed to different nutritional environments. It is even more difficult when you think about that happening early in life and being followed long-term.
"Sugar de-rationing in the U.K. allowed us to address some of these challenges by leveraging plausible quasi-experimental periods."
Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disease in which the body struggles to process sugar with the hormone insulin, leading to fluctuations in blood sugar levels. It affects approximately 11.6 percent of the U.S. population (38.4 million people), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
High blood pressure, more formally called hypertension, affects nearly half of the U.S. adult population (119.9 million people) and is a leading risk factor for heart disease and stroke. It was a primary or contributing cause of more than 685,000 deaths in 2022, according to the CDC.
The scientists also found that people who developed type 2 diabetes did so four years later if they were toddlers during sugar rationing and developed high blood pressure two years later, compared to those born afterward.
Both conditions are more common among people who eat a lot of sugar—but in the U.K., during World War II, sugar was limited as part of nationwide rationing.
Restrictions were put on various foods from July 1942 until July 1954, including meat, dairy, eggs, sugar and candy, to avoid food shortages and keep the population fed on a fair and healthy diet.
"Cane sugar imports were severely restricted due to shipping space and military action on the seas, while beet sugar couldn't fill the gaps—and sugar was a luxury, not a necessity," food historian Annie Gray told Newsweek. "The ration changed depending on supply, but was usually around 8oz per week.
"Biscuits, cakes and puddings were a mainstay of the population, and their lack was very much felt. Some people saved their ration, making a small cake once every couple of weeks; others tried various expedients, from substituting carrots and parsnips to just going cold turkey."
But in September 1953, the rationing of sugar and candy ended, and children's intake of them doubled almost immediately.
"The nation rushed to the sweetshops, and consumption of sugar per capita peaked within a decade," added Gray.
While rationing was similar to national sugar guidelines, post-rationing sugar consumption was closer to modern American children's diets, the scientists wrote, as children are exposed to high levels of sugar in the womb, through breastfeeding or formula milk, and in baby food.
"We all want to improve our health and give our children the best start in life, and reducing added sugar early is a powerful step in that direction," said Gracner. "But it's far from easy—added sugar is everywhere, even in baby and toddler foods, and children are bombarded with TV ads for sugary snacks.
"This makes sticking to recommended sugar guidelines incredibly difficult, starting from infancy." Gracner said that, while nutritional knowledge among parents was important, she hoped that companies and regulations would change to help parents reduce sugar exposure for their kids and themselves.
The scientists at universities in the United States and Canada based their analysis on data from the U.K. Biobank, which includes health information collected from more than 500,000 participants between 2006 and 2019.
A sample of more than 60,000 adults born between October 1951 and March 1956 was chosen. Thirty-eight thousand experienced rationing in their early lives, and 22,000 did not.
The scientists also used reports from the National Food Survey—a long-running dietary survey begun in 1940, in which ordinary people reported on what they ate each week—to assess the average diets of people during and after rationing.
They found that diets were roughly the same in both cohorts, except for sugar consumption, which was doubly high after rationing ended.
The scientists concluded that the significantly lower risk of type 2 diabetes and hypertension among people born during rationing was primarily due to their lower sugar intake in early life.
Previous research has already indicated that high levels of sugar from a mother's diet, in the womb and through breastmilk, are associated with an elevated risk of problems with insulin and sugar later in life: key risk factors for diabetes and high blood pressure.
Exposure to sugar in infancy and toddlerhood may lead children to develop a taste for—or addiction to—sugar that persists into later life, the scientists wrote.
This study was conducted by scientists at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; McGill University, Montreal, Canada; the University of Chicago; and the University of California, Berkeley.
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Reference
Gracner, T., Boone, C., Gertler, P. J. (2024). Exposure to sugar rationing in the first 1000 days of life protected against chronic disease, Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adn5421
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