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Does sugar make children hyperactive?

2013-07-23 09:18:33

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

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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