6 ms·

Sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and executive function in children

86 points by lxm 5y ago

ObnoxiousProxy 5y ago
While the findings are quite believable and corroborates some other similar studies where increased sugar intake for kids may lower executive function/cognition, this study relies on executive function assessments reported by the parents which doesn't feel like it would be very reliable to me. Furthermore, while they account for diet in their covariate analysis, it's not very detailed or granuar so it doesn't account for other sources of sugar that these kids might be having (the authors acknowledge this). Based on this study it's hard to conclusively say whether it's the sugar that negatively impacts cognition or other ingredients, or vice versa whether kids with poor executive function prefer sweet drinks. Probably still a good idea to limit refined sugar intake for your own kids though.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "this study relies on executive function assessments reported by the parents which doesn't feel like it would be very reliable to me." Yep. I stopped reading as soon as it was clear the data would be biased.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Many of us had grandparents who told our parents not to give us sugar because it would make us rambunctious. The counterargument was that sugar intake often accompanies life events that are themselves overstimulating to kids, so it's more of a correlation than causal link. I was expecting this study proved the original assumption but your read suggests that it's more of the same. That said, I have discovered that there's a particular food coloring that does tend to make me irritable, and children's candy is usually loaded with it. Whenever I can find the 'naturally colored M&Ms' in the bulk foods aisle I usually grab a little of it.
  - ta988 5y ago
    Which colouring agent is doing that to you?
    - hinkley 5y ago
      Most people, if it's not an outright histamine reaction, seem to have trouble with Yellow #5 if they have trouble with anything.
    - spiffytech 5y ago
      My parents experimented extensively with my childhood diet's impact on my ADHD, and found that Red 40 made me bounce off the walls. The effect was dramatic, even compared with eating sugary non-Red-40 foods.
      - hinkley 5y ago
        I recall a friend was relieved when Red M&Ms went away, because she had an anaphylactic reaction to them. Though I guess the real reason was the old color turned out to be a carcinogenic. It was years before they added them back, with Red 40 instead.
bjornsing 5y ago
Reasonable explanation: Those with poor executive function consume more beverages that taste nice but are well known to negatively impact your health long term.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  They're kids, so parents make a lot of these choices for them, in which case it wouldn't be the kids' poor executive function causing them to drink more. Perhaps the general causal threads are overly indulgent parents, and SSB's are just one facet of that indulgence, which as a whole is what impacts executive function. A behavioral (instead of chemical) cause.
  - iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
    well, executive function issues are quiet heritable
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Heritable as in genetic, or heritable as in learned behavior? Edit: I love twin studies for exploring this sort of nature/nurture issue. Here's one for executive function that looks at both identical & fraternal twins, and their conclusion is a heavy genetic influence: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2762790/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2762790/
      - iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
        perhaps both! i'm currently exploring gabor maté's theory that it's a combination of genetically predisposed sensitivity and insecure modes of parental attachment
        ineedasername 5y ago
        I wonder if the two might combine in an epigenetic effect?
ineedasername 5y ago
It could simply be that parents who let their children have SSB's regularly also indulge them in general, and that indulgence is what leads to the change in executive function. Also this sounds like changing the goal posts a bit too much after the study protocol was already set: The distribution of SSB consumption status was highly skewed, and transformation of data was not feasible owing to the large number of people who reported never drinking SSB. Therefore, the frequency of SSB consumption was aggregated and then a new intake category was categorized in order to ensure an adequate number of participants in each group.
- mlyle 5y ago
  Yup, this is hopelessly confounded now. Soda and juice are "bad", and so letting your kids have a lot of soda shows that you don't really care about parenting norms or data about what's good for kids. And a lot of people who don't care about parenting norms at all are probably dubious parents in other ways... There's no attempt here to case control for other factors. Worse, the parents' own reported measures of children's executive function were used.
  - com2kid 5y ago
    > Yup, this is hopelessly confounded now. Soda and juice are "bad", 20 years ago juice was good. In the US (linked study was done in China), I saw older friends having kids bringing home pamphlets from the doctor's office extolling the virtues of 100% fruit juice. Juice being bad is a very recent thing, and it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that some parents didn't Get The Memo, but they are otherwise still "good parents". Or they may just have given up the fight over juice. Pick your battles and all that, and without any research showing juice was really "that" bad, parents may have figured it wasn't a battle worth fighting over.
    - wffurr 5y ago
      Or those juice pamphlets were planted by Big Juice in a psyops move to increase juice sales and juice being “good for you” is a semi-recent invention, only recently overturned in favor of “juice is not good for you”.
beebeepka 5y ago
This is nothing. Back in high school, I used to drink 100 cans of cola a week, right up until my third heart attack. Futurama quotes aside, I don't know what to make of adults doing this to themselves and their children. Water is fantastic. If taste is what one is after, one can easily drop a couple bags of chai/tea in a liquid vessel of choice. Don't even need to brew it. And if one really "needs" their instant sugar kick - use some actual honey. Cheaper, healthier, better. In every way.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Honey is more or less chemically identical to high fructose corn syrup unless there is some magic protective tiny component to honey or poison in HCFS.
  - oblak 5y ago
    Both are more or less sugar, obviously. Devil is in the details. No need to polarize things by introducing words such as magic or poison. Do you have any links to support the notion they are pretty much the same thing? Cause I just did some searching and literally all results (ddg, if that matters) are obviously politically motivated. To me, that means that no, they're not the same thing and there's been a lot of money spent on pushing that "agenda", if you will. Edit: Thanks for your input, guys. It would seem the problem with sugars is quantity, not quality. I am agreeing to that not so shocking fact.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Honey has only trace amounts of anything except sugar. In particular, it has no fiber. If you can find anything that shows an important difference from sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, report that.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Do you have any links to support the notion they are pretty much the same thing "The average ratio was 56% fructose to 44% glucose" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey >"HFCS 42" and "HFCS 55" refer to dry weight fructose compositions of 42% and 55% respectively, the rest being glucose.[5] HFCS 42 is mainly used for processed foods and breakfast cereals, whereas HFCS 55 is used mostly for production of soft drinks.[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
inglor_cz 5y ago
I find the idea that excessive sugar intake messes with all sorts of our systems entirely plausible - we definitely aren't designed to consume the quantities of sugar that we on average do consume; and especially not non-stop for years and decades. Teasing out all the causal chains will be hard work, though. Metabolism is really complicated. Sugar increases levels of insulin; fructose kicks liver into overdrive; how does that excessive metabolic activity work out in remote parts of the body such as the brain?
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Well we’re not designed. Plenty of our primate relatives eat mostly high sugar fruit based diets. More important than what we eat, we didn’t evolve in an environment where we had infinite easily available calories.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Everywhere sugar appears in nature (with the exception of beehives), it comes with fiber that slows its absorption. Uniquely (with the exception of bees) we separate it from the fiber and deliver the sugar without. The whole food-processing industry is largely devoted to removing and discarding the fiber we need to remain healthy.
    - erosenbe0 5y ago
      Just bees? What about maple syrup?
      - cdot2 5y ago
        I believe theres a lot of processing before you get the maple syrup that you find in stores so its not really found in nature
      - wfhpw 5y ago
        Making maple syrup from sap is an illuminating experience. You have to reduce something like 40x the volume of sap to create the desired quantity of syrup.
mrfusion 5y ago
It would be interesting to study the metabolisms of animals that live entirely on sugar. Hummingbirds, nectar eating insects, sugar cane weevil. How does insulin work for them? Do they get intense blood sugar spikes whenever they eat?
questiondev 5y ago
if you want to really know what types of hazards chemicals in your food check out the app yuka. i just started using it about 3 weeks ago, you’d be surprised what is in some food products. it gives you science data on the additives in a product. you just scan the upc code
- Jolter 5y ago
  Don’t products come with a declaration of contents printed on their packaging in your country? Where on earth are you?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
m1ckey 5y ago
Sugar: The Bitter Truth by Robert Lustig, MD https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM
iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
i wouldn't be surprised if causation were reversed and children who have slower executive function development drink more ssb's is caffeine controlled for?
jerkstate 5y ago
Sugar isn’t just a problem in drinks.. we thought our kids were lactose intolerant until we talked to our pediatrician, turns out diarrhea in kids is commonly caused by too much sugar and not enough fat in the diet, so we reviewed our common meals and snacks, and found a LOT more than the daily recommended sugar intake in the “healthy” snacks like granola and yogurt, and chewable vitamins we gave our kids every day.. made some changes and the kids are much healthier, and it certainly impacts behavior/compliance at meal time; kids who need calories are a lot more willing to eat something even if it isn’t their favorite treat.
- leobg 5y ago
  Reminds me of Jamie Oliver being baffled about schools that hand out sugared milk to kids, arguing that milk is healthy, and if they didn’t put sugar in it, the kids wouldn’t drink if. Same thing here with yogurt and granola. People want to believe these things are good for them. But instead of adapting their taste to healthy food, they adapt the food to their unhealthy taste, turning anything into a vehicle for sugar.
masonic 5y ago
Are sweetened drinks in China typically sweetened with actual sugar (sucrose)? In the USA, corn syrup / HFCS is generally used instead.

86 points by lxm 5y ago

While the findings are quite believable and corroborates some other similar studies where increased sugar intake for kids may lower executive function/cognition, this study relies on executive function assessments reported by the parents which doesn't feel like it would be very reliable to me. Furthermore, while they account for diet in their covariate analysis, it's not very detailed or granuar so it doesn't account for other sources of sugar that these kids might be having (the authors acknowledge this). Based on this study it's hard to conclusively say whether it's the sugar that negatively impacts cognition or other ingredients, or vice versa whether kids with poor executive function prefer sweet drinks. Probably still a good idea to limit refined sugar intake for your own kids though.

giantg2 5y ago
"this study relies on executive function assessments reported by the parents which doesn't feel like it would be very reliable to me." Yep. I stopped reading as soon as it was clear the data would be biased.
hinkley 5y ago
Many of us had grandparents who told our parents not to give us sugar because it would make us rambunctious. The counterargument was that sugar intake often accompanies life events that are themselves overstimulating to kids, so it's more of a correlation than causal link. I was expecting this study proved the original assumption but your read suggests that it's more of the same. That said, I have discovered that there's a particular food coloring that does tend to make me irritable, and children's candy is usually loaded with it. Whenever I can find the 'naturally colored M&Ms' in the bulk foods aisle I usually grab a little of it.
- ta988 5y ago
  Which colouring agent is doing that to you?
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Most people, if it's not an outright histamine reaction, seem to have trouble with Yellow #5 if they have trouble with anything.
  - spiffytech 5y ago
    My parents experimented extensively with my childhood diet's impact on my ADHD, and found that Red 40 made me bounce off the walls. The effect was dramatic, even compared with eating sugary non-Red-40 foods.
    - hinkley 5y ago
      I recall a friend was relieved when Red M&Ms went away, because she had an anaphylactic reaction to them. Though I guess the real reason was the old color turned out to be a carcinogenic. It was years before they added them back, with Red 40 instead.

bjornsing 5y ago

Reasonable explanation: Those with poor executive function consume more beverages that taste nice but are well known to negatively impact your health long term.

ineedasername 5y ago
They're kids, so parents make a lot of these choices for them, in which case it wouldn't be the kids' poor executive function causing them to drink more. Perhaps the general causal threads are overly indulgent parents, and SSB's are just one facet of that indulgence, which as a whole is what impacts executive function. A behavioral (instead of chemical) cause.
- iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
  well, executive function issues are quiet heritable
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Heritable as in genetic, or heritable as in learned behavior? Edit: I love twin studies for exploring this sort of nature/nurture issue. Here's one for executive function that looks at both identical & fraternal twins, and their conclusion is a heavy genetic influence: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2762790/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2762790/
    - iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
      perhaps both! i'm currently exploring gabor maté's theory that it's a combination of genetically predisposed sensitivity and insecure modes of parental attachment
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        I wonder if the two might combine in an epigenetic effect?

ineedasername 5y ago

It could simply be that parents who let their children have SSB's regularly also indulge them in general, and that indulgence is what leads to the change in executive function. Also this sounds like changing the goal posts a bit too much after the study protocol was already set: The distribution of SSB consumption status was highly skewed, and transformation of data was not feasible owing to the large number of people who reported never drinking SSB. Therefore, the frequency of SSB consumption was aggregated and then a new intake category was categorized in order to ensure an adequate number of participants in each group.

mlyle 5y ago
Yup, this is hopelessly confounded now. Soda and juice are "bad", and so letting your kids have a lot of soda shows that you don't really care about parenting norms or data about what's good for kids. And a lot of people who don't care about parenting norms at all are probably dubious parents in other ways... There's no attempt here to case control for other factors. Worse, the parents' own reported measures of children's executive function were used.
- com2kid 5y ago
  > Yup, this is hopelessly confounded now. Soda and juice are "bad", 20 years ago juice was good. In the US (linked study was done in China), I saw older friends having kids bringing home pamphlets from the doctor's office extolling the virtues of 100% fruit juice. Juice being bad is a very recent thing, and it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that some parents didn't Get The Memo, but they are otherwise still "good parents". Or they may just have given up the fight over juice. Pick your battles and all that, and without any research showing juice was really "that" bad, parents may have figured it wasn't a battle worth fighting over.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    Or those juice pamphlets were planted by Big Juice in a psyops move to increase juice sales and juice being “good for you” is a semi-recent invention, only recently overturned in favor of “juice is not good for you”.

beebeepka 5y ago

This is nothing. Back in high school, I used to drink 100 cans of cola a week, right up until my third heart attack. Futurama quotes aside, I don't know what to make of adults doing this to themselves and their children. Water is fantastic. If taste is what one is after, one can easily drop a couple bags of chai/tea in a liquid vessel of choice. Don't even need to brew it. And if one really "needs" their instant sugar kick - use some actual honey. Cheaper, healthier, better. In every way.

colechristensen 5y ago
Honey is more or less chemically identical to high fructose corn syrup unless there is some magic protective tiny component to honey or poison in HCFS.
- oblak 5y ago
  Both are more or less sugar, obviously. Devil is in the details. No need to polarize things by introducing words such as magic or poison. Do you have any links to support the notion they are pretty much the same thing? Cause I just did some searching and literally all results (ddg, if that matters) are obviously politically motivated. To me, that means that no, they're not the same thing and there's been a lot of money spent on pushing that "agenda", if you will. Edit: Thanks for your input, guys. It would seem the problem with sugars is quantity, not quality. I am agreeing to that not so shocking fact.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Honey has only trace amounts of anything except sugar. In particular, it has no fiber. If you can find anything that shows an important difference from sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, report that.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Do you have any links to support the notion they are pretty much the same thing "The average ratio was 56% fructose to 44% glucose" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey >"HFCS 42" and "HFCS 55" refer to dry weight fructose compositions of 42% and 55% respectively, the rest being glucose.[5] HFCS 42 is mainly used for processed foods and breakfast cereals, whereas HFCS 55 is used mostly for production of soft drinks.[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup

inglor_cz 5y ago

I find the idea that excessive sugar intake messes with all sorts of our systems entirely plausible - we definitely aren't designed to consume the quantities of sugar that we on average do consume; and especially not non-stop for years and decades. Teasing out all the causal chains will be hard work, though. Metabolism is really complicated. Sugar increases levels of insulin; fructose kicks liver into overdrive; how does that excessive metabolic activity work out in remote parts of the body such as the brain?

colechristensen 5y ago
Well we’re not designed. Plenty of our primate relatives eat mostly high sugar fruit based diets. More important than what we eat, we didn’t evolve in an environment where we had infinite easily available calories.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Everywhere sugar appears in nature (with the exception of beehives), it comes with fiber that slows its absorption. Uniquely (with the exception of bees) we separate it from the fiber and deliver the sugar without. The whole food-processing industry is largely devoted to removing and discarding the fiber we need to remain healthy.
  - erosenbe0 5y ago
    Just bees? What about maple syrup?
    - cdot2 5y ago
      I believe theres a lot of processing before you get the maple syrup that you find in stores so its not really found in nature
    - wfhpw 5y ago
      Making maple syrup from sap is an illuminating experience. You have to reduce something like 40x the volume of sap to create the desired quantity of syrup.

mrfusion 5y ago

It would be interesting to study the metabolisms of animals that live entirely on sugar. Hummingbirds, nectar eating insects, sugar cane weevil. How does insulin work for them? Do they get intense blood sugar spikes whenever they eat?

questiondev 5y ago

if you want to really know what types of hazards chemicals in your food check out the app yuka. i just started using it about 3 weeks ago, you’d be surprised what is in some food products. it gives you science data on the additives in a product. you just scan the upc code

Jolter 5y ago
Don’t products come with a declaration of contents printed on their packaging in your country? Where on earth are you?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

m1ckey 5y ago

Sugar: The Bitter Truth by Robert Lustig, MD https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM

iovrthoughtthis 5y ago

i wouldn't be surprised if causation were reversed and children who have slower executive function development drink more ssb's is caffeine controlled for?

jerkstate 5y ago

Sugar isn’t just a problem in drinks.. we thought our kids were lactose intolerant until we talked to our pediatrician, turns out diarrhea in kids is commonly caused by too much sugar and not enough fat in the diet, so we reviewed our common meals and snacks, and found a LOT more than the daily recommended sugar intake in the “healthy” snacks like granola and yogurt, and chewable vitamins we gave our kids every day.. made some changes and the kids are much healthier, and it certainly impacts behavior/compliance at meal time; kids who need calories are a lot more willing to eat something even if it isn’t their favorite treat.

leobg 5y ago
Reminds me of Jamie Oliver being baffled about schools that hand out sugared milk to kids, arguing that milk is healthy, and if they didn’t put sugar in it, the kids wouldn’t drink if. Same thing here with yogurt and granola. People want to believe these things are good for them. But instead of adapting their taste to healthy food, they adapt the food to their unhealthy taste, turning anything into a vehicle for sugar.

masonic 5y ago

Are sweetened drinks in China typically sweetened with actual sugar (sucrose)? In the USA, corn syrup / HFCS is generally used instead.