Sugar Exposure in Early Development May Have Lifelong Health Implications: Study

Exposure to dietary sugar during the first 1,000 days of life may have a profound effect on health outcomes over one’s lifespan, according to new observational research conducted by University of Cambridge researchers. The findings were published in PNAS.

“This is not an easy question to study in real life. Researchers obviously can’t run that experiment on real babies – split them into groups, feed one group sugar, then wait 70 years to see what happens,” said Weilong Zhang, corresponding author of the study and associate professor of economics at the University of Cambridge, writing in The Conversation. “Britain’s postwar sugar rationing offered a rare alternative … children born just a few months apart had very different levels of sugar exposure both in the womb and during early childhood.”

After World War II, Britain had to ration sugar for several years, creating conditions for a large-scale study to take place in which researchers could observe health outcomes in a massive population of UK Biobank participants who were fed strictly limited amounts of sugar during the first 1,000 days of life, compared with a population of people who were born after the country’s sugar rationing ended and consumption skyrocketed.  

The researchers collected data from over 64,000 UK Biobank participants born between 1951 and 1956, tracking incidences of cancer, various biomarkers tied to healthy aging, and reported rates of sugar consumption as many as 50 years later.

People who experienced sugar rationing during their first 1,000 days, beginning at conception, had a lower incidence of breast, prostate, liver, rectal, and lung cancer, the authors reported. The effect was strongest for liver cancer (-69%) and weakest for breast cancer (-36%), Zhang reported.

Participants whose early development took place during sugar rationing also tended to have longer telomeres, the protective structures at the end of DNA strands, which tend to shorten with age. Compared to those born after rationing ended, those born during rationing had a telomere length that corresponded with about 2.2 years of biological aging, the authors concluded.

“We also found lower levels of a protein called granzyme B, which rises when the immune system has been working overtime for years, another sign of slower aging at a cellular level,” Zhang said.

The population that spent its first 1,000 days during the rationing period also tended to have a lower consumption rate of sugar in their adulthood, around age 50, and ate less overall; their diets were overall healthier and more diverse, suggesting that developmental nutrition has a role in taste preferences over a long time.

Zhang noted that recent studies have also evaluated the health differences of people born during and shortly after Britain’s postwar sugar rationing. For instance, one study found that sugar rationing in early life was linked to lower incidence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension, while another more recent study found lower risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.