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Claudia Hammond
Dread birthday parties because of the effect cakes and drinks will have on your
child? Evidence shows this actually affects parents behaviour, not the child
s.
Many of us have watched children arrive at a party as reasonable, polite human
beings, eat copious amounts of cakes and sweets and then transform into
over-excited, over-energetic little devils so how do we account for this?
If you ve ever been to a children s birthday party and noticed how they tear
around the room, getting more and more excited the longer the party goes on,
you ve probably also heard an adult remark that the increasingly rowdy
behaviour is due to the amount of sugar they ve consumed. In an attempt to hold
calmer, more relaxing parties, some parents hold sugar-free events, swapping
fairy cakes and fizzy drinks for hummus sandwiches and water.
The idea that sugar affects behaviour is widely believed and has even been used
in court. It s known in the United States as the Twinkie defense . There are
various hypotheses that attempt to explain how behaviour could be linked to
sugar consumption, including some children might have an allergic response to
refined sugar, or have abnormal patterns of blood glucose levels.
But the evidence for a link between sugar consumption and hyperactivity is
surprisingly slim. The most comprehensive study is a meta-analysis carried out
in 1995, where the authors searched for the best-designed studies on the
subject, combined the data and re-analysed it. There are two main types of
research: some studies gave children either sucrose or an artificial sweetener,
such as aspartame, and then monitored their subsequent behaviour without
children or parents knowing whether they ate real sugar; others focus on
children with a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),
or another condition to see whether sugar affects them particularly.
Between them, the studies covered age ranges from two to thirty, and were
well-designed though fairly small. All but one of the sixteen studies had fewer
than fifty participants and one had just five. But the results of the
meta-analysis were clear: sugar could not be shown to affect behaviour or
cognitive performance.
Yet so many of us have watched children arrive at a party as reasonable, polite
human beings, eat copious amounts of cakes and sweets and then transform into
over-excited, over-energetic little devils so how do we account for this? As
the party goes on children play more games, and inevitably get more excited and
then over-tired, when of course their behaviour deteriorates. We see kids get
more unruly, notice how much sugary food they ve had, and then assume there
must be a link.
One study set out to test the expectation of parents who believed that sugar
had a bad effect on their sons. In the experiment half the mothers were led to
believe their sons were drinking something sugary. The other half were told the
drinks really contained an artificial sweetner, not sugar. When the mothers
were then asked to observe and rate their children s behaviour, those who
thought their sons had been consuming sugar said they were more hyperactive
than the mothers who knew they had drank a placebo. But there was another twist
to the study. While the mothers were observing their children, the researchers
were observing them. They noticed that the mothers who thought their sons had
drunk too much sugar not only criticised them more, they also stayed closer to
them and watched them more. So the supposed sugar had not changed the boys
behaviour, but their mothers .
So, at the moment there isn t good evidence that the quantity of sugar consumed
at parties makes children more hyperactive. Far fewer studies are published on
this topic these days, but some researchers are still looking for a link
between high sugar consumption over a long period and ADHD. They point out that
sugar intake in the UK and the US has risen over the past two hundred years and
that more recently the diagnosis of ADHD has as well. But this is still only a
correlation, and the study authors do stress that far more research is needed
before any causal link can be proven. Despite their better efforts, the precise
causes of ADHD are still unknown.
There are, of course, plenty of other reasons for children not to consume too
much sugar, chief among them being rotten teeth and weight-gain. But it seems
that the risk of over-excitement isn t one of them. That will happen anyway.
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