A study reports that children who consume few foods containing added sugars during uterine development and the first two years of life are less likely to develop type 2 diabetes and hypertension as adults.
The first 1000 days following the conception of the child, that is to say the period including the development of the fetus and its first two years of life, exert an enormous influence on its health, both during early childhood and once reaching adulthood1.
During this critical window, exposure to adverse conditions (poor diet, chronic stress, violence, drugs, etc.) affects the complex molecular mechanisms of epigenetics (DNA methylation and histone modifications) involved in control of the coordinated expression of several genes during development.
This “reprogramming” of gene expression can then negatively and lastingly influence the functioning of the human body and greatly influence the subsequent risk of several diseases.
Sweet tooth
Several studies have suggested that excessive sugar consumption during the first years of life could represent one of the factors that influence future disease risk.
Although the WHO recommends avoiding any consumption of added sugars during the first 1000 days of life, the majority of North American children are exposed very early, including during their uterine development, to excess sugar: pregnant women on average consume more than triple the recommended amount of added sugar, which equates to more than 80g per day, and most toddlers consume foods and drinks containing high amounts of added sugars daily.
War rationing
However, it is difficult to precisely establish a direct link between this high sugar consumption during early childhood and the incidence of chronic diseases in adulthood. Clinical studies that compare the development of these diseases between a group of children deprived of sugar and another group who consume it at will are obviously impossible to do (and unethical), while the use of questionnaires to document sugar intake remains an imprecise method which does not allow establishing a causal link between the two phenomena.
The drastic rationing of the consumption of sugary foods imposed on the British during the Second World War, however, offers a golden opportunity to better understand the impact of sugar on the risk of disease.
From 1940, the government imposed daily sugar limits on the population of around 40g per adult and 15g per child (which roughly corresponds to current WHO recommendations). The lifting of these restrictions in September 1953 triggered a real rush for sugar, so much so that consumption doubled in just a few months to reach 80g of sugar per day.
Given that the consumption of proteins and fats was not significantly modified by the end of rationing, this rapid and significant increase in sugar intake makes it possible to precisely study its impact on health.
Increase in metabolic diseases
Researchers therefore compared the incidence of chronic diseases in adults born between October 1951 and June 1954, therefore conceived during rationing, to that of those born between July 1954 and March 1956, therefore conceived after the end of rationing.2.
The results are unequivocal: compared to people conceived after the end of rationing, people exposed to a very low sugar intake during their uterine life as well as during the two years after their birth had a 35% reduction in the risk of developing a type 2 diabetes and 20% risk of hypertension in adulthood.
It is interesting to note that a third of this protection seems due to the low exposure to sugar during fetal development, which confirms the extreme sensitivity of metabolism to the nature of the diet from the earliest stages of development, and reaches its maximum when sugar restriction persists for at least six months after birth.
These results are not so surprising, given that sugar remains an extremely rare substance in nature. Our metabolism, which evolved over millions of years in an environment low in sugar, is therefore completely unadapted to the quantities that are present in many foods consumed daily, in particular ultra-processed industrial foods. Eating less sugar is therefore a guarantee of good health, for both adults and children.
(1) Gluckman PD et coll. Effect of in utero and early-life conditions on adult health and disease. N. Engl. J. Med. 2008; 359: 61–73.
(2) Gracner T et coll. Exposure to sugar rationing in the first 1000 days of life protected against chronic disease. Science, publié le 31 octobre 2024.
