Sweet Nothings? : Once again, science says sugar doesn’t affect children’s behavior. Try telling that to parents whose kids bounce off walls after eating candy.
There was some bad news from the laboratory last week. Bad news, that is, if you are the parent, teacher or baby-sitter of a child who loves sugar. (Good news, if you happen to be the child.)
Sugar, science now advises us, has nothing to do with how children behave.
Empty calories? Yes. Rotten for growing teeth? Absolutely. But sugar does not, never has and never will cause temper tantrums, wild outbursts, the climbing of or the bouncing off walls.
That’s what science says.
“Well, would you like to know what I say?” growls one harried mother of twins. “I say, they’re nuts ! I say, ‘Where were they last Christmas when my sons ate candy canes and green frosting for days and never slept?’ ”
Apparently, they were not at home with small children.
Those who were say they’re not sure they can swallow this latest report, published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. And that includes some parents whose children participated in what has been billed as the sugar study to end all sugar studies.
When asked about the outcome of the research on her son, Forrest, and 47 other kids, Linda Alexander of Iowa City, Iowa, is enthusiastic about the protocol: “It was so wonderful not to have to cook! They supplied all our meals for nine weeks. And we saved enough money on food to buy a play structure for the back yard.”
But Alexander, who says her 9-year-old son is so “sugar-sensitive” that for a time she was forced to padlock the family’s sweets, is more cautious in her assessment of the findings. “We believe that the results are accurate . . . as far as they go. We believe they need to continue looking at this question.”
Not likely, say researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of Iowa. “A dead issue,” says Dr. Judith Rapoport of the National Institute of Mental Health.
The study, conducted in 1989, is the latest of many to conclude that consuming large amounts of sugar does not make children hyperactive.
The research involved 25 children ages 3 to 5 and 23 children ages 6 to 10. The older children had been identified by their parents as sensitive to sugar. All food was removed from the families’ homes and replaced weekly with food prepared by the research team. The families spent three weeks on each of three diets--one with sugar, one with NutraSweet and one with saccharin sweetening. Neither the families nor the researchers knew which diets they were on.
At the end of each week, the children’s behavior was evaluated--and no evidence was found that eating sugar made any difference.
But mothers--especially those whose children were not part of the study--aren’t buying its conclusions. After all, haven’t they been hiding the Pop Tarts and rationing the Halloween candy for years?
“Well, just because they’ve said it again doesn’t make it any truer, does it?” pouts Mary Ellen Gardner, a San Fernando Valley mother of five--two of whom “don’t do well on sugar.”
If those behavioral aberrations aren’t coming from the sugar bowl, worries Gardner and others, then where do they come from? And, more importantly, what’s to be done to curb them?
“No such thing as a ‘sugar high,’ no ‘sugar rush’? Oh, right,” says Henriette Gratteau, mother of 2-year-old twins in suburban Chicago. “I know there is. When I want my boys to jump up and come to the store, I toss them a couple Oreos. They wake right up.”
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There is no question that sugar can be a metabolic energizer. But that does not normally produce a behavioral change, experts say.
The question is why parents’ anecdotal evaluations of their kids’ behavior are so different from that of unbiased researchers.
Dr. Mark Wolraich, director of the latest sugar study, says the answer lies somewhere in the void between what parents believe and what can be proven in the laboratory.
One respected body of research suggests that the extra attention given to children on sugar-restricted diets may do more to improve behavior than anything else. Other studies have ruled out such demons as red dye and food additives as contributors to less-than-optimal behavior.
As recently as 1992, Health magazine was defending sugar against its bad rap. “In study after study,” the magazine reported, “behavior researchers have failed to confirm that sugar is guilty of anything worse than making children happy.”
The conclusion came on the heels of research that at the time was considered the mother of all sugar studies. In that study, scientists equipped a group of preschool boys with “actometers,” little battery-powered belt packs to monitor their every jump, twitch and turn.
Whether the boys were fed refined white sugar, glucose, saccharin or aspartame, the actometers (as well as a team of observers) revealed that the boys’ physical activity was the same as always.
If there is a flaw in this latest study, parent-critics say, it may reside in the study’s exclusion of chocolate from both the sugared and sugar-free diets of the subject children.
“No chocolate? Are they serious?” asks Joe Garcia of Highland Park, a single parent of two boys. “That’s where my guys get most of their sweets from anyway. You can’t study how they act up until you see how they start carrying on after a whole load of chocolate.”
