Babies born under sugar rationing grew into adults with lower cancer risk | Hacker News Reader

Babies born under sugar rationing grew into adults with lower cancer risk

theconversation.com

299 pointszeristor59 comments

While I want to believe the result, it seems like the method is far too susceptible to confounding cohort effects. I'd be curious if a similar trend is seen in other countries that ended rationing at different times, and if any such change is seen in countries that didn't ration. The cancer rates may not be directly comparable due to other differences, but if the rate change is consistently centered around whenever sugar consumption changed, that would be much more compelling evidence; whereas if post-1953 children have higher cancer rates across the board it's probably something else.

I'd imagine alcohol & tobacco as well as other things were in short supply / coming back to normal supply around the same time period

tobacco was rationed during wwii, so less for the general populace but it was also included as part of military service. sounds like it would be really difficult to measure the effects of limiting it for one subset, subsidizing it for another and then trying to determine the effect on both as a set.

We can control for tobacco impact since we have tons of data on it. You can compare the people who went to war against the people who didn't, and since it was rationed in the military we know the upper bound of how much people consumed there.

how many babies are there smoking and drinking alcohol?

Babies are around second hand smoke and it was relatively common for very young children to be given cigarettes to curb appetite if no food was available.

I'm not sure if that happened here but these are a few reasons you might see an impact on children.

It was common to give young children cigarettes? Source?

second hand smoke

In the womb.

The cool ones? You ever see the old Joe Camel ads?

Prior to 1970? Almost all of them. Or enough to be statistically significant.

In many parts of Europe prior to 1970, it was very common for children to be given watered down wine.

It used to be common to give babies a tiny amount of brandy to sooth them. Second hand smoke is a thing.

Holy bad faith argument

The article mentions several times that early sugar exposure affects sugar craving for a lifetime. Did they correct for that? I.e. people born during sugar rationing who later developed normal sugar consumption patterns compared to people not born during rationing who consume similar amounts?

I was born into a traditional food culture without excessive sugar, but I sure as heck developed a sugar craving later, to the detriment of my diet. I'm guessing this cancels out the early healthy effect.

My thoughts exactly.

> Importantly, these differences only began to appear decades after sugar rationing had ended.

> What is most surprising, however, is not the cancer results or the biological markers of ageing. It’s how early-life sugar exposure continued to affect people’s diets even 50 years later.

As with most research, these findings represent a distribution of outcomes. Intuitively, early sugar rationing is likely, but not 100% effective, to discourage future diets which prominently feature sugary foods. And vice versa.

I grew up in a house with little to no sugar and never really developed a "craving" for sugar. I'll absolutely eat it if it's there, but really only consume it if it's zero effort, and generally in small amounts since many sweet things taste overly sweet to me.

Unclear whether this is due to environment (grew up with no sugar) or genetics (parent‘s genes induced no sugar craving -> you have no craving).

There is a genetic component to disinterest in sweet food. It quite evidently runs in some families. These are people who never eat any sugary food or often even fruit regardless of availability because they actively dislike things that taste sweet. It isn't a matter of environment or self-control. To them, a donut is about as enticing as a bowl of plain oatmeal.

Anecdotally, people that don't eat any sweet food always seem to gravitate toward salty/bitter flavors instead.

I've not got much of a sweat tooth, but love me some salty snacks and dark, bitter tea

People are always surprised that I don't put sugar in my coffee or my chocolate.

Don't get me wrong, I love sugary treats. But I like the bitterness in coffee and chocolate.

People who add sugar to coffee miss out on the sweetness of everything else by contrast.

The bitterness itself is enjoyable, but the natural sweetness of everyday foods is also magnified.

That's because the body can become desensitized by sugar the more it gets. Poeple often turn to processed food more and more as their tastebuds become more accustomed to tastier foods while natural foods start tasting more bland. It's the same way dopamine works.

Anywhere else we'd call that an addiction.

Adaption is just how the body works though. From the perspective of someone living in the mountains, descending to sea level is "addictive" in that they will get air withdrawals (altitude sickness) when coming back.

is that something that should be corrected for? That just sounds like the mechanism for action to me.

A mother’s sugar intake while pregnant also has quite an effect on long term health outcomes for a baby.

Our understanding of reproductive health is pretty frustratingly limited. Hopefully that changes soon

Must be almost impossible to determine it was from lack of sugars or something else correlated.

lack of leaded fuel?

Sugar is not a harmless substance but actively changes the brain with repeated exposure (that is, eating sugar regularly). Here's a few links from various venues which discuss the neurobiological effects of sugar:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/brb3.70338

https://www.texasinstituteforneurologicaldisorders.com/uncat...

https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/experts-is-...

https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/heres-what-happens-to-your...

I'll even throw in an AI-generated answer from the less-than-eloquent prompt "sugar addiction brain":

> Sugar addiction triggers neurobiological changes in the brain’s mesolimbic dopamine pathway, specifically affecting the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex. Consuming sugar causes a surge in dopamine and endorphins, creating a pleasurable "high" that reinforces consumption. Over time, this repeated stimulation leads to neuroadaptation, characterized by:

> Downregulation of D2 receptors: The brain reduces its dopamine receptors, requiring more sugar to achieve the same effect (tolerance).

> Altered gene expression: Changes in receptor availability in the midbrain and frontal cortex.

> Hippocampal damage: High sugar intake can reduce new neuron production, impairing memory and learning.

>These mechanisms drive compulsive intake, cravings, and withdrawal-like symptoms (such as anxiety and irritability) when sugar is removed. While not formally classified as a substance use disorder in humans, the behavioral and neurochemical parallels to drug addiction (such as bingeing and loss of control) are well-documented in preclinical models and supported by human neuroimaging studies.

I'm curious about if zero-sugar sweeteners have the same effect. From a cursory (AI-aided) query, it seems that there is much less long-term addiction compared to real sugar because the long-term effects are more coupled to the fact that real sugar decomposes to glucose and it's the glucose that causes those neuroadaptations. Artificial sweeteners have other side effects of course, but it seems like sugar has the worst long-term impact.

I think it’s gut biome problems. So you just trade one problem for another, while tasting bad? Pass.

Well not all artificial sweetener is the same. Some people get gut stuff from sugar alcohols, but I don’t believe that’s been observed in Aspartame. I drink a good amount of Diet Coke, because it’s delicious, and I never get any stomach pain or digestive issues from it. I get more digestive troubles from coffee.

IIRC, there's also some effect where if a brain registers sweetness, it causes the body to react the same as if it had received sugar (release insulin, maybe). Not going to bother to look for details, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some surprising effects.

Well sugar is the most immediate form of energy. Most high performance athletes eat a lot of sugar. Its also pretty clear we are evolved to consume it.

How does this play together with what you mentioned above?

Not him, but sugar, for most of human history, was in very short supply.

I generally believe that many (most?) self destructive human behaviors are a result of maladaptive evolution. For most of our history, I imagine gorging on sugar was the correct choice. If you find a high sugar food, you should eat as much as possible.

That worked for a long time, until sugar became in high supply. Now, we still have pathways to encourage that gorging, but it’s bad for us.

If you don't see the article's link to the research - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2610287123 (yes, paywalled):

"Sugar rationing" is far too simplistic a description of the historical situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...

Yeah the article doesn't mention how they account for all the other changes in people's diet, stress, environment and what not that happens during and after a war...

Plus, you might want to go back a year pre-conception, at least on the father's side. Sperm cell production is a fairly long process, definitely emphasizing quantity over quality, and thus easy for all sorts of environmental factors to affect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spermatogenesis#Duration through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spermatogenesis#Influencing_fa...

I became immediately suspicious due to how complex the rationing schemes were.

Even the labels put on food like "margarine" aren't composed of what you'd normally expect, as they shifted to fish/whale oils due to availability.

I first heard of the connection between breast cancer rates and performing use more than a decade ago, and it took a lot to convince me it was true, but a lot of it was seeing the connection the the insulin receptor protein. Here they find a list of cancer types that could seem connected to sugar, especially the liver, but it still leaves lots of questions for me.

The bookmakers measured here are quite different, like telomere length.

> We found that people who experienced sugar rationing early in life still consumed less sugar in adulthood, around age 50. They also ate less overall, and their diets were healthier and more diverse. This suggests that the level of sweetness people are exposed to very early in life may shape their taste preferences for a long time.

This life long behavior makes the connection far more plausible than an effect from just 1000 days at the beginning of life! But they can't lead with something so mundane, I guess..

This is science in formation, not established fact, so it's interesting to see an article about it aimed at a popular audience. Definitely something to keep an eye on, but the conclusions shouldn't be filed away as established facts quite yet.

> They also ate less overall,

I can't look it up right now, but calorie restriction also shows this correlation, so maybe it is not sugar at all.

> and performing use

Is that a typo? Otherwise, I don't understand it.

So were children who grew up under sugar rationing actually eating less sugar in the first 1000 days of life? As the article points out, I don't remember being 2 years old, but I have sisters young enough that I remember them being 2 years old. I also know I was weened maybe around 18 months, not leaving much space in the first 1000 days. From what I remember of the sisters, kids that young are still eating pureed peas and carrots and mashed potatoes and what not. Probably still a lot of milk. They're still teething. The candy bars, Lucky Charms, and Twinkies we worry about being marketed to kids are marketed to elementary school children, not kids who can still barely walk and are wearing diapers half the time.

Kids eat way more way earlier than you might think, as in they can start having prepared chicken bits/pieces now and then around 6 months old. At less than a year you can already just hand many babies a skinless drumstick and they'll take care of the rest. And yeah it's pretty much terrifying the first time.

Babies would be 100% capable of eating something like Twinkies very early on, and would probably love them. So I'm sure some parents are letting them have them.

Just look at how much sugar there is in "cereal"

I wonder about the IQ of those adults, and about the "dead by brain stroke" ratio of this group respect to the control.

Human brain dies in a few minutes without glucose. We burn it at full steam while browsing HN. Cutting out sugar can lead to depression, fog brain, headaches or anxiety.

We are smart and can live everywhere because animal fat in our diets provided the constant supply of sugar that we need. In summer and in winter. In a desert or in the pole.

I gave up sugar something like 8 years ago, accidentally, during an illness. Best thing I've ever done. The most noticeable benefits were: increased focus (by a startling amount), and absence of joint pain (I used to wake with aching knees, which nobody could explain). The pain thing I guess was inflammation, and it makes avoiding sugar such an easy decision. Of course, I don't think you can avoid it completely, but I'd say I have no more than a couple of grams a day? I don't eat fruit, cakes, chocolate, etc. When I go out for a meal and forget to check, or it's undisclosed, it's quite a wake up call because my body just can't cope: if I don't want to go to sleep immediately then I awake the next day with those aching knees and something like a hangover that lasts for several days.

Total slop.

I'm planning to take the cohort of people who lived under sugar rationing then find all of the population differences and publish how "people born under sugar rationing had x lower/higher y".

Seems lots of people are doing this with cancer, dementia, heart disease, etc, but I'm confident there's more to be milked from this trend with some AI-assisted research.

Time to dust off this oldie but goodie:

Correlation is not causation.

But causation requires correlation. In general, I think it's unhelpful to point out something so basic to or about professional research, researchers are well aware of it.

Researchers are aware of it, but the press and the general public don't appear to be. Studies showing some association or another are regularly reported, and the public eats it up.

Oh, pretty sure journalists and headline writers are also well aware of it, if for no other reason that every comment thread must be mentioning it. Their incentives are just to publish trash and generate engagement, that's all.

It's an experimental study. These designs attempt to create a treatment and control to account for this problem.

Others in the thread point out how it's not easy to implement, but there is a methodological attempt at casual inference in the design.

It is not an experimentally study. It's observational, e.g. from the paper: "we exploit the abrupt end of United Kingdom sugar rationing in September 1953 as a natural experiment."

They didn't perform an experiment, they took someone else's observational data from a real-world event, and attempted to interpret it as if it had been an experiment.

OK, quasi-experimental, a discontinuity design, surely? It's not purely observational, as you've got (albeit imperfect) treatment and control, built around (presumably very similar) people born on either side of a cut-off, simulating randomisation.

Observational would be simply looking at sugar consumption across a cohort and having that as a covariate.

The fact someone else gathered the data has nothing to do with it.

Edit: It's a widely-used research technique, which attempts to address this correlation-causation issue without having to do RCTs.

https://medium.com/@arun.subram456/causal-inference-regressi...

It’s really not experimental though.

Assuming their math and design are good, this is pretty strong, as these things go. But there were a lot of other things that were different between the groups that could reasonably be affecting results.

The article itself is careful to deny drawing any prescriptive conclusions from this research — a tacit acknowledgement that the causal connection isn’t entirely clear.

This is interesting and fairly strong, and potentially important, but definitely needs more work before we start acting on it.

*Quasi-experimental, see my comment below. Excuse the sloppy language, it's a while since I've done one.

It's not as good as an RCT, but lifetime sugar consumption, as the article points out, is not something you can randomise.

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