A new study suggests that children who ate little to no sugar in their first two years of life — including while still in the womb — had a much lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease decades later.
Researchers took advantage of a real-world experiment: wartime sugar rationing in Britain. From 1940 to 1953, sugar was tightly controlled, and children under two got none at all. When rationing ended in 1953, sugar consumption nearly doubled almost overnight. That sharp before-and-after split gave scientists something they could never ethically create on purpose — a clear comparison group.
The team, whose findings appeared in «npj Aging,» studied health records for over 60,000 people born between 1951 and 1956 in the UK Biobank database. They split participants into three groups: those rationed only before birth, those rationed both before birth and in early childhood and those born after rationing ended.
People who avoided sugar for their first 1,000 days — from conception to age two — showed:
- 27% lower risk of dementia overall
- 46% lower risk of Alzheimer’s specifically
- 20% lower risk of anxiety
- 11% lower risk of depression
- No change in Parkinson’s risk
Brain scans of a subset of participants also showed a difference: after accounting for genetics and other factors, the brains of people who’d had less early-life sugar looked about 0.39 years «younger» than expected for their age.
However, the study’s authors describe their findings as «quasi-experimental» and stop short of claiming a causal relationship.
