Hacker News Reader

Your last note about kids being wired on sugar, while pervasive and seemingly anecdotally supported, has not been proven out in the literature. Sugar has not been conclusively found to cause hyperactivity.

View on HN

My son goes nuts when he has sugar (like ice cream or a cupcake), full stop.

Has it not been shown in the literature because no one has tried an appropriately rigorous experiment, or because the appropriately rigorous experiment showed a different conclusion?

It's actually the example that Aaron Carroll (one of the co-authors of the article) used to explain what an RCT is, and why it's one of the strongest study designs possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkr9YsmrPAI

I believe you, and I've seen what appears to be the same effect first-hand, but it has not been replicated in controlled environments. Here's a non-scientific article which cites several studies which failed to find a correlation: https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/the-sugar-high-is-actually-ju...

Ignoring the lunacy of wasting decades of training to prove (I hope, to everyone) the blindingly obvious, this would potentially be a real fun experiment to design.

What do you think is blindingly obvious?

Except they did design the experiment multiple times, and found the opposite of the "obvious" result.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com