Sugar rationing in first 1000 days linked to lower adult anxiety and depression risk in UK cohort
A UK Biobank analysis of 66,223 people born around the end of sugar rationing found lower anxiety and depression risk after early-life restriction. The study is observational.
Researchers led by Xiuping Dou and colleagues reported in General Psychiatry that restricted sugar intake early in life was associated with a lower risk of anxiety and depression in adulthood. The analysis used data from 66,223 UK Biobank participants born around the end of sugar rationing in the United Kingdom doi.org
General Psychiatrydoi.orgOpen source ↗.
Rationing, introduced during World War II, ended in September 1953, and sugar consumption then rose sharply. The availability of other foods stayed relatively stable, so the change worked as a natural experiment. The authors compared people conceived just before and just after the end of rationing, and estimated exposure from birth dates, from before birth only to periods extending through about age two doi.org
General Psychiatrydoi.orgOpen source ↗.
Risk of anxiety and depression
Sugar restriction in early life was associated with a lower lifetime risk of anxiety (hazard ratio 0.765, 95% confidence interval 0.732-0.799) and of depression (hazard ratio 0.786, 95% confidence interval 0.749-0.824) doi.org
General Psychiatrydoi.orgOpen source ↗.
The association depended on duration. The greatest benefit was seen in people whose restriction covered the entire first 1000 days after conception, that is, pregnancy and roughly the first two years of life doi.org
General Psychiatrydoi.orgOpen source ↗.
For this group, the first recorded diagnosis came later: by about 2 years for anxiety and about 4 years for depression. These figures refer to when a diagnosis was first recorded, not necessarily to when symptoms began doi.org
General Psychiatrydoi.orgOpen source ↗.
Limits of the design
The study tracked exposure to a national policy rather than what individual mothers or children ate. The authors had no individual childhood food records, and unmeasured factors, including other aspects of maternal diet, may have affected the results. The data therefore do not establish that lower sugar intake caused the differences in mental health.
The authors point to possible routes through which early nutrition could influence later mental health: stress regulation, inflammation and brain development. These explanations come from earlier research and were not tested in the UK Biobank analysis.
In their conclusions, the authors say the findings highlight the importance of early-life dietary interventions for long-term mental health. They note that further studies measuring individual diets and examining other populations are needed to clarify how diet in pregnancy and infancy relates to mental health across the life course.
