Limiting Baby's Sugar May Pay Off Later

A novel study that looked at sugar rationing in World War II has a health takeaway for today's new parents and parents-to-be: Cut down on your child's sugar. The study published in Science suggests that limiting sugar intake during pregnancy and through the first two years of a child's life pays big health dividends later, reports the BBC. Doing so cuts the risk of the child developing type 2 diabetes as an adult by 35% and of developing high blood pressure by 20%, say the researchers, per CNN.

The insight comes from researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley who examined data from the UK Biobank, which has medical data on a half-million people. As the New York Times reports, the researchers looked at the data from more than 60,000 people in the UK who were born from October 1951 through March 1956. By doing so, they could compare the health of those who were born during World War II sugar rationing (which extended into the 1950s), when average daily consumption was 41 grams (or 10 sugar cubes) per day, with those conceived and born after rationing, when daily sugar consumption doubled.

"Sugar rationing created an interesting natural experiment," says lead study Tadeja Gracner, a USC economist. The researchers concluded that limiting sugar from conception through age 2—roughly 1,000 days—brought the unintended health benefits. The CNN story notes that an additional challenge for today's parents is being aware of added, or hidden, sugars in baby food and snacks for older children. (More sugar stories.)