7 ms·

Sugar not so nice for your child’s brain development

146 points by DocFeind 5y ago

tudorw 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOub_6Ph5S0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOub_6Ph5S0 Public Enemy, Food As Machine Gun Sugar, sugar, who you talkin' to? Dirty water who be lovin' you? Stroke, no joke, musta hit that salt Don't look at me, 'cause it ain't my fault
new_guy 5y ago
Worth reading on this is 'Pure, White, and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It' https://b-ok.cc/book/3383661/e3e6b4 https://b-ok.cc/book/3383661/e3e6b4
satya71 5y ago
In mice.
- SECProto 5y ago
  > In mice. Rats, actually. Here's[1] the study. Rodent models are widely used for studies. Do you have particular concerns about them being used in this study to gather implications on human diet and health? [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01309-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01309-7
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    The natural diet of the rat and the human are quite different. This alone would make me question any dietary studies using rats. Imagine if they used cats instead, which are almost wholly carnivorous. Or cattle, which live mostly on the foliage of plants. How applicable to humans could the results be?
  - satya71 5y ago
    Mice and rats are not humans. Sensational headlines with strong conclusions drawn from animal model studies is not good science.
- spicybright 5y ago
  And we inject deadly viruses into our bodies when administering vaccines. Yet they still work. Just because you haven't had experience in this field of study so it sounds weird doesn't mean it's somehow useless or doesn't work.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    So I guess the question is: What percentage of effects are observed in rodents and reproduce in humans?
    - spicybright 5y ago
      You'll have to do your own research on that if you want to know. I don't have any horse in this race, personally. I don't have kids and don't have plans to pop any out of me, so I don't feel the need to investigate further. But I still want to point out no one in this thread so far has any data or experience interpreting it to claim "my kid is not a rat, therefore the study means very little." I'm happy to be proven that rats aren't a good indicator for what the article claims though. There's a lot of bogus academic papers out there, especially within the past 10 years. But I'm also not going to interpret it with my "gut" feeling of rat != kid on this because it's way out of the scope of what I understand. There's better people outside of hacker news comments that can explain this stuff better.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Most vaccines don't contain live virus. Mrna vaccines don't contain virus full at all.
    - spicybright 5y ago
      Yeah, I used a little bit of hyperbole to make my point.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  If that’s how you view all studies then by all means let your kids drink coke and eat donuts all day. But as someone who consumes alot of sugar and actively tries to prevent my child from consuming sugar. I appreciate these studies that give us insight into the affects of sugar on children. Gives me more motivation to prevent my child from getting too much sugar.
softwarebeware 5y ago
..if your child is a rat
- omginternets 5y ago
  Ugh, this again. Animal models are excellent predictors of physiological responses in humans if they are used correctly. If you don't think this one is being used correctly, please tell us why. The "pple aren't rats" line is a knee-jerk response that adds nothing of value, save for revealing the ignorance of the person who utters it.
  - bmeski 5y ago
    I have a degree in the biomedical sciences and I often see CS majors/software/math folks insert clear cut divisions between terms and things than could possibly correlate. I feel like a lot of people don’t understand how continuous certain parts of biology are (and aren’t).
    - dundarious 5y ago
      Different human populations have different microbiomes. Different mouse strains do too (presumably rats as well). Never mind the other (significant) differences between mice/rats and humans, wrt nutrition. The fat and protein content of rat milk is quite different to that of human milk, for example (yes, early development in these animals is also quite different, so it's not a simple "they need high protein, we need low" story -- it's just an example of the kind of meaningful differences that exist). So I think it's pretty important to note "this is just in rats so far". It doesn't mean 0 predictive power. But it's far from solid that the effect transfers to your average US citizen, for example. IMO, these types of animal studies are useful guides for further (hopefully human) research, but shouldn't influence your day to day behavior, or the choices you make for your child. There's ample reason to avoid empty calories from sugar for pure nutritional reasons anyway, based on human studies.
      - halpert 5y ago
gnabgib 5y ago
It feels like the actual paper "Gut microbial taxa elevated by dietary sugar disrupt memory function"[0] is both a better headline, and a better link, than this inaccurate editorial post (playing on the "Sugar and spice and all things nice" song?). The paper is from March/2021, and there was discussion on HN then: 91pts, 27 comments [1] [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01309-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01309-7 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26667037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26667037
- nathias 5y ago
  the title is demonstrative
coldcode 5y ago
Funny, I drank a lot of sugary soda as a kid (real sugar, not HFCS) and ate lots of candy. I still managed a long career as a programmer until last year. I wonder if there is more to this study than simply sugar consumption; perhaps its in combination with other dietary factors, or even HFCS instead of plain sugar, or a different type of microbiome from back then compared to more recent times (different diet in general compared to 5o years ago). I also wonder if any developmental effect measured when a child is still young is eventually overcome over time.
- saurik 5y ago
  ...or, maybe, you would have been the next Einstein if only you hadn't eaten all that sugar!
- zyang 5y ago
  The study is around memory function development. You really don't need good memory to be a programmer. I have googled code questions and came across my own answers on SO. It happened more than once.
  - koolba 5y ago
    > You really don't need good memory to be a programmer. That’s not memory, that’s hard disk (or I guess SSD for you youngins’). You definitely need good memory to be a good programmer because large problems require a larger working set to efficiently reference whilst problem solving. While many problems in computer science that can theoretically be solved with a small amount of memory and a large amount of slower disk, many of them cannot be solved in what we’d consider a reasonable amount of time.
    - Zircom 5y ago
      You're being disingenuous, when people(including the comment you're replying to) say "memory" when they're talking about people they obviously don't mean the same thing as when you're talking about a computer. He's clearly referring to his longterm recall which is directly analogous to "hard disk" as you put it.
jimmar 5y ago
According to Google's scraping of the USADA data, 40% of the calories in human breast milk are from sugar. That alone makes me question if sugar is really terrible for brain development in children.
- brohoolio 5y ago
  Probably not the same sugar as a soda. The subtle differences can really make a big difference when it comes to biological processes.
  - jimmar 5y ago
    The sugar in milk is lactose (glucose + galactose). Soda is basically fructose and glucose. So the glucose if common between the two. I want recommendations of "don't eat sugar" to dig into the details, because sugar is everywhere. My mother-in-law "doesn't eat sugar" but constantly snacks on figs/dates, pours honey over everything, and drinks fruit smoothies daily. In my opinion, she has a very high sugar diet despite not adding any table sugar or corn syrup to anything. Many recommendations say to limit "added sugar" without explaining why naturally occurring sugar is okay.
    - 29athrowaway 5y ago
      But they do not have the same glycemic index or insulin index. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index
    - sul_tasto 5y ago
      Here’s the best explanation I’m aware of. It’s long but worth it. It changed how I think about food. I’ve been much more successful in eating healthily now that I understand how the body processes different types of sugar. Refined sugar (fructose) is poison. https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM
      - 5y ago
DavidPiper 5y ago
Because this has come up twice in the last few days, here's a quaint introduction to the different kinds of sugar (glucose, lactose, sucrose and fructose) from a movie called "That Sugar Film". https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=344221859759175 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=344221859759175 (Apologies for the FB Video link, the exact excerpt isn't on Youtube). tl;dr: - Glucose good in reasonable intake - Same for lactose (unless you're intolerant) - Sucrose (i.e. table sugar) is 50% Glucose and Fructose - Frutose is bad. Longer version: Fructose is naturally quite rare, and presumably we've adapted to that; our bodies can only process small quantities effectively. It's also the sweetest and (implied?) most addictive of the sugars. These days we can manufacture it though, so it turns up in just about every sweet processed food it can. EDIT: After watching the lecture linked by sul_tasto below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849184) it seems it's just a question of fructose quantity and prevalence rather than the body processing it differently from other sugars.
- hsn915 5y ago
  Fructos is plentiful in fruits which we must have been well adapted to consuming. I don't understand the argument against fructose. It seems to mainly "the liver has to work to digest it", but isn't that true of a lot of other nutrients as well? I mean, that's the main function of the liver, so the fact that fructose engages the liver should not by default imply that it's bad.
  - Ygg2 5y ago
    The claim is, fructose is processed by liver biochemically similar to ethanol. Except it affects insulin levels. Rather than the brain.
  - vkk8 5y ago
    My thoughts exactly. I remember reading about some indigenous tribes in Africa whose diet is mostly just fruits. You could maybe make an argument that the fruits we consume now are a result of hundreds of years of selective breeding and contain much more of it than indigenous plants.
bencollier49 5y ago
This is in rats. By way of perspective, a hamster can drink the equivalent of 21 bottles of wine in a single day with impunity. https://twitter.com/LawtonTri/status/1461456068857499652 https://twitter.com/LawtonTri/status/1461456068857499652 A rodent's sugar metabolism might just be different to a human's.
- amelius 5y ago
  Makes one wonder about all those diabetes drugs tested on mice.
  - andy_ppp 5y ago
    They do human trials that need to be successful for them to become approved.
RickJWagner 5y ago
Hmmm, this brings to mind some favorite breakfast cereals of my youth. 'Super Sugar Crisp', 'Sugar Smacks', and so on. I guess it's a wonder we accomplished anything at all.

146 points by DocFeind 5y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOub_6Ph5S0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOub_6Ph5S0 Public Enemy, Food As Machine Gun Sugar, sugar, who you talkin' to? Dirty water who be lovin' you? Stroke, no joke, musta hit that salt Don't look at me, 'cause it ain't my fault

new_guy 5y ago

Worth reading on this is 'Pure, White, and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It' https://b-ok.cc/book/3383661/e3e6b4 https://b-ok.cc/book/3383661/e3e6b4

satya71 5y ago

In mice.

SECProto 5y ago
> In mice. Rats, actually. Here's[1] the study. Rodent models are widely used for studies. Do you have particular concerns about them being used in this study to gather implications on human diet and health? [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01309-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01309-7
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  The natural diet of the rat and the human are quite different. This alone would make me question any dietary studies using rats. Imagine if they used cats instead, which are almost wholly carnivorous. Or cattle, which live mostly on the foliage of plants. How applicable to humans could the results be?
- satya71 5y ago
  Mice and rats are not humans. Sensational headlines with strong conclusions drawn from animal model studies is not good science.
spicybright 5y ago
And we inject deadly viruses into our bodies when administering vaccines. Yet they still work. Just because you haven't had experience in this field of study so it sounds weird doesn't mean it's somehow useless or doesn't work.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  So I guess the question is: What percentage of effects are observed in rodents and reproduce in humans?
  - spicybright 5y ago
    You'll have to do your own research on that if you want to know. I don't have any horse in this race, personally. I don't have kids and don't have plans to pop any out of me, so I don't feel the need to investigate further. But I still want to point out no one in this thread so far has any data or experience interpreting it to claim "my kid is not a rat, therefore the study means very little." I'm happy to be proven that rats aren't a good indicator for what the article claims though. There's a lot of bogus academic papers out there, especially within the past 10 years. But I'm also not going to interpret it with my "gut" feeling of rat != kid on this because it's way out of the scope of what I understand. There's better people outside of hacker news comments that can explain this stuff better.
- watwut 5y ago
  Most vaccines don't contain live virus. Mrna vaccines don't contain virus full at all.
  - spicybright 5y ago
    Yeah, I used a little bit of hyperbole to make my point.
philliphaydon 5y ago
If that’s how you view all studies then by all means let your kids drink coke and eat donuts all day. But as someone who consumes alot of sugar and actively tries to prevent my child from consuming sugar. I appreciate these studies that give us insight into the affects of sugar on children. Gives me more motivation to prevent my child from getting too much sugar.

softwarebeware 5y ago

..if your child is a rat

omginternets 5y ago
Ugh, this again. Animal models are excellent predictors of physiological responses in humans if they are used correctly. If you don't think this one is being used correctly, please tell us why. The "pple aren't rats" line is a knee-jerk response that adds nothing of value, save for revealing the ignorance of the person who utters it.
- bmeski 5y ago
  I have a degree in the biomedical sciences and I often see CS majors/software/math folks insert clear cut divisions between terms and things than could possibly correlate. I feel like a lot of people don’t understand how continuous certain parts of biology are (and aren’t).
  - dundarious 5y ago
    Different human populations have different microbiomes. Different mouse strains do too (presumably rats as well). Never mind the other (significant) differences between mice/rats and humans, wrt nutrition. The fat and protein content of rat milk is quite different to that of human milk, for example (yes, early development in these animals is also quite different, so it's not a simple "they need high protein, we need low" story -- it's just an example of the kind of meaningful differences that exist). So I think it's pretty important to note "this is just in rats so far". It doesn't mean 0 predictive power. But it's far from solid that the effect transfers to your average US citizen, for example. IMO, these types of animal studies are useful guides for further (hopefully human) research, but shouldn't influence your day to day behavior, or the choices you make for your child. There's ample reason to avoid empty calories from sugar for pure nutritional reasons anyway, based on human studies.
    - halpert 5y ago

gnabgib 5y ago

It feels like the actual paper "Gut microbial taxa elevated by dietary sugar disrupt memory function"[0] is both a better headline, and a better link, than this inaccurate editorial post (playing on the "Sugar and spice and all things nice" song?). The paper is from March/2021, and there was discussion on HN then: 91pts, 27 comments [1] [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01309-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01309-7 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26667037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26667037

nathias 5y ago
the title is demonstrative

coldcode 5y ago

Funny, I drank a lot of sugary soda as a kid (real sugar, not HFCS) and ate lots of candy. I still managed a long career as a programmer until last year. I wonder if there is more to this study than simply sugar consumption; perhaps its in combination with other dietary factors, or even HFCS instead of plain sugar, or a different type of microbiome from back then compared to more recent times (different diet in general compared to 5o years ago). I also wonder if any developmental effect measured when a child is still young is eventually overcome over time.

saurik 5y ago
...or, maybe, you would have been the next Einstein if only you hadn't eaten all that sugar!
zyang 5y ago
The study is around memory function development. You really don't need good memory to be a programmer. I have googled code questions and came across my own answers on SO. It happened more than once.
- koolba 5y ago
  > You really don't need good memory to be a programmer. That’s not memory, that’s hard disk (or I guess SSD for you youngins’). You definitely need good memory to be a good programmer because large problems require a larger working set to efficiently reference whilst problem solving. While many problems in computer science that can theoretically be solved with a small amount of memory and a large amount of slower disk, many of them cannot be solved in what we’d consider a reasonable amount of time.
  - Zircom 5y ago
    You're being disingenuous, when people(including the comment you're replying to) say "memory" when they're talking about people they obviously don't mean the same thing as when you're talking about a computer. He's clearly referring to his longterm recall which is directly analogous to "hard disk" as you put it.

jimmar 5y ago

According to Google's scraping of the USADA data, 40% of the calories in human breast milk are from sugar. That alone makes me question if sugar is really terrible for brain development in children.

brohoolio 5y ago
Probably not the same sugar as a soda. The subtle differences can really make a big difference when it comes to biological processes.
- jimmar 5y ago
  The sugar in milk is lactose (glucose + galactose). Soda is basically fructose and glucose. So the glucose if common between the two. I want recommendations of "don't eat sugar" to dig into the details, because sugar is everywhere. My mother-in-law "doesn't eat sugar" but constantly snacks on figs/dates, pours honey over everything, and drinks fruit smoothies daily. In my opinion, she has a very high sugar diet despite not adding any table sugar or corn syrup to anything. Many recommendations say to limit "added sugar" without explaining why naturally occurring sugar is okay.
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    But they do not have the same glycemic index or insulin index. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index
  - sul_tasto 5y ago
    Here’s the best explanation I’m aware of. It’s long but worth it. It changed how I think about food. I’ve been much more successful in eating healthily now that I understand how the body processes different types of sugar. Refined sugar (fructose) is poison. https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM
    - 5y ago

DavidPiper 5y ago

Because this has come up twice in the last few days, here's a quaint introduction to the different kinds of sugar (glucose, lactose, sucrose and fructose) from a movie called "That Sugar Film". https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=344221859759175 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=344221859759175 (Apologies for the FB Video link, the exact excerpt isn't on Youtube). tl;dr: - Glucose good in reasonable intake - Same for lactose (unless you're intolerant) - Sucrose (i.e. table sugar) is 50% Glucose and Fructose - Frutose is bad. Longer version: Fructose is naturally quite rare, and presumably we've adapted to that; our bodies can only process small quantities effectively. It's also the sweetest and (implied?) most addictive of the sugars. These days we can manufacture it though, so it turns up in just about every sweet processed food it can. EDIT: After watching the lecture linked by sul_tasto below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849184) it seems it's just a question of fructose quantity and prevalence rather than the body processing it differently from other sugars.

hsn915 5y ago
Fructos is plentiful in fruits which we must have been well adapted to consuming. I don't understand the argument against fructose. It seems to mainly "the liver has to work to digest it", but isn't that true of a lot of other nutrients as well? I mean, that's the main function of the liver, so the fact that fructose engages the liver should not by default imply that it's bad.
- Ygg2 5y ago
  The claim is, fructose is processed by liver biochemically similar to ethanol. Except it affects insulin levels. Rather than the brain.
- vkk8 5y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I remember reading about some indigenous tribes in Africa whose diet is mostly just fruits. You could maybe make an argument that the fruits we consume now are a result of hundreds of years of selective breeding and contain much more of it than indigenous plants.

bencollier49 5y ago

This is in rats. By way of perspective, a hamster can drink the equivalent of 21 bottles of wine in a single day with impunity. https://twitter.com/LawtonTri/status/1461456068857499652 https://twitter.com/LawtonTri/status/1461456068857499652 A rodent's sugar metabolism might just be different to a human's.

amelius 5y ago
Makes one wonder about all those diabetes drugs tested on mice.
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  They do human trials that need to be successful for them to become approved.

RickJWagner 5y ago

Hmmm, this brings to mind some favorite breakfast cereals of my youth. 'Super Sugar Crisp', 'Sugar Smacks', and so on. I guess it's a wonder we accomplished anything at all.