Less sugar from pregnancy to age 2 may reduce dementia risk, study finds Research shows that people who went through sugar rationing had less chance of developing the disease Updated Everyone knows that too much sugar in childhood is bad — especially for parents who don't want a hyperactive child at…
Less sugar from pregnancy to age 2 may reduce dementia risk, study finds
Research shows that people who went through sugar rationing had less chance of developing the disease
Updated
Everyone knows that too much sugar in childhood is bad — especially for parents who don't want a hyperactive child at home! But a new joint research project from the universities of Hong Kong and Liverpool has discovered that the benefits of keeping children away from sugar may be even greater.
The study, published on Tuesday in the Neurology journal, found that consuming too much sugar in the first 1,000 days of life may be associated with a higher risk of developing dementia.
For epidemiologist Jiazhen Zheng, from the University of Science and Technology of Hong Kong in Guangzhou, China, this period is the most critical for brain development
The researchers, to discover the association, analyzed health records of nearly 65,000 people in the UK who were in the womb or in early childhood between July 1942 and June 1954, when the British government set a daily sugar limit that could be bought by each person.
The limit at the time was 41 grams per person, equivalent to a 350ml soda can.
Among children who went through the two-year sugar rationing period, the risk of dementia was 23% lower and 28% for Alzheimer's. The same happened to those who went through at least one year of sugar restriction, developing dementia, on average, three months later than those who consumed sugar freely.
For Zheng, however, other factors may have contributed to the delay in the development of these diseases, so it is not possible to prove a 'cause and effect' situation, only an association.
