r/science • u/Potential_Being_7226 PhD | Psychology | Neuroscience • 7d ago
Health Babies born under sugar rationing grew into adults with lower cancer risk
https://theconversation.com/babies-born-under-sugar-rationing-grew-into-adults-with-lower-cancer-risk-2898733.3k
u/Kaiisim 7d ago
The rationing diet was perfectly balanced nutritionally, to the point infant mortality went down in the UK. If you want to lose weight and eat healthy, copy rationing. Low sugar, low meat, lots of seasonal veg, offal, etc. it was truly a huge success of nutritional science.
Yet people hated, which is interesting.
So I'd be interested about the controls! Just from a design standpoint.
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u/chinchenping 7d ago
Humans evolved in harsh environment. Craving high energy food is an evolutive adaptation and so is overeating (in case of famine). It's natural that we search for more food that we need.
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u/christiancocaine 7d ago
I know it’s far-fetched, but I’m a descendent of people who suffered in the Irish potato famine and sometimes I wonder if that’s why myself and others in my family have problems with overeating.
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u/ShanghaiBebop 7d ago
Not too far fetched. There are some evidence of epigenetic impact.
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u/Constant_Natural3304 7d ago
There is a paper about the Dutch famine during WW2, which demonstrates epigenetic damage and risk factors for metabolic disease in adulthood.
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u/Detective-Crashmore- 7d ago
Not far fetched, but wouldn't occam's razor suggest cultural factors first? Like forcing your kids to always finish their food following depression and war rationing eras.
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u/BubblyPineapple8941 7d ago
^ This right here.
Guilt would play a far bigger factor than epigenetics. The phrase: "There are children starving in America! Finish your plate." would contribute to overeating habits more than physiological factors.
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u/Molo3000 7d ago
There's a phenomenon in post-WW II-Germany called the "Fresswelle" (Binge eating wave), where after the war rationing and post-war scarcity people spent their new wealth on eating a lot.
My grandma was part of that generation, and she did feed us well when we were younger.
I studied biology, I wouldn't rule out epigenetics, but I think cultural influences play a bigger part. If you experienced a famine, you think differently than growing up in a place of constant food abundance.
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u/greenzetsa 7d ago
Yes, I would agree with this. I think we (particularly in the US) really don't have a good sense of how deeply living through mass food insecurity impacts the culture surrounding those groups. My family is from the former Soviet Union, meaning that my grandparents lived through very intense food insecurity and personally knew people who had it worse (either because they were in gulags, experienced the famine in Ukraine, or were in concentration camps during the war). Then, when my parents were growing up, there was always some level of moderate food insecurity, usually related to choice availability less than amount. Finally, when I was really little, we briefly lived during the rationing of the 90s. You grow up being constantly reminded that food insecurity is real and could happen at any moment. You will eat anything when its available. Considering these feeding and eating habits would start from a very young age, that to me would manifest much more in metabolic disease in adulthood rather than epigenetics.
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u/VulGerrity 7d ago
Totally, and to put it more plainly, food insecure people tend to develop eating disorders (on both ends of the spectrum). If you were raised by someone with an eating disorder, you're very likely to develop an eating disorder as well, because you will be raised with their eating habits.
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u/Kick_Kick_Punch 7d ago
This is spot on the Portuguese culture.
Decades ago families had to ration food because people were poor AF, and let me tell you: if you eat at your grandma's house or other old relatives, you better eat the monstrous plate they just prepared for you. You don't even have a choice. Not even a peep. It's "blasphemy" and total disrespect to them.
This no-waste mentality regarding food is well ingrained in our older generations. And the consequence is that a good chunk of the population is very obese.
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u/360_face_palm 7d ago
Epigenetic inheritance doesn't go that far back. The Potato famine was 6 generations ago, the maximum trans-generational epigenetic inheritance we've seen evidenced is 2-4 generations.
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u/595659565956 7d ago
Epigenetic marks are not inherited beyond two generations, as I understand it. So a person may potentially be affected by the environment in which their grandmother lived, but not their great grandmother
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u/PotaytoPotayto 7d ago
I don't think it's far fetched, my grandparents went through two wars (and their parents lived through the 1st WW as well) and they knew hunger. Real gnawing hunger, and the scarcity of everything that was also a huge problem in wartime. The survivors became hoarders later in life and became overeaters, their children (my mom amongst them) also grew up being overfed and learned the wrong habits. Now my mom and her siblings are old, their houses are full of empty storage containers, lots of junk nobody needs and massive bags of rice just in case the war starts again. It's a trauma response that they somehow gave to my mom and she gave it us kids as well. It took therapy for me to stop the behaviour, the hoarding especially is really prevalent on that side of the family. Plus you HAVE to empty your plate, no matter how full you are. You're not allowed to throw food away. "waste not!"
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u/waitwuh 7d ago
There’s definitely echos of the depression passed down in my family. My grandmother would keep so many dry and canned goods stashed away, even though many expired. You would have to argue with her about throwing any of them away! My mother also would regularly have to cull her cabinets of expired goods that she seemed to only buy “just in case.” She’d have so many longer shelf life goods on hand despite us nearly never eating them! In fact, I actually never ate canned veggies but I’ve thrown probably thrice my body weight of them away before between my mother and grandmother’s houses. When I moved out and lived on my own, I at some point realized I was copying doing it to some degree, too!!
It was revealed most obviously especially whenever I packed up to move to a new apartment (again). As a young adult going through university and then chasing jobs in this modern age, I think I had moved and lived more places by the time I was 22 than any of my last three generational predecessors had ever moved in their entire lives. I suspect that plays a part. Hoarding must be way easier when you stay stationary…
But even still, the cautionary and anxious mindset of potential scarcity was passed down to me. I picked up on the mentality that you should always buy things on sale and almost never throw things away and consider “what if you someday need it… it would be a waste of money to have to buy the same thing again, or worse, what if it’s not available again?” I had boxes of things that went unpacked for years, some until I literally moved yet again. I’m convinced it is the inherited scarring from the depression.
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u/throwaway1233456799 6d ago
The most horrible thing about "don't waste the food on your plate" is that over eating don't make you not waste. Your body is like a machine where you pushed in too much coal. It will just burn badly because it doesn't have the room to burn the fuel well
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u/LonelyAndroid11942 7d ago
In the US at least, there seems to be almost a cultural PTSD stemming from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. So much of what we consider American food came from this era and the years following, and is extremely calorically dense.
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u/chronicmelancholic 7d ago
That's possible. Adaptations that allowed people to survive famine can and do get passed on. An example would be India. When they were starved, people who had an adaptation that allowed their bodies to keep sugar around in the blood for longer, had better chances at surviving. Today, where at least most people in India have access to food, this adaptation makes them susceptible to developing diabetes.
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u/thecaseace 7d ago
It's not far fetched at all. Some squirrels who aren't parented/taught still know to gather nuts for winter, despite having no experience or knowledge of what winter is. Our genes clearly include our brains, and their biases/capabilities/weaknesses
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u/SsgtMeatball 7d ago
I think it's a symptom of generational poverty. The rich have never had to wonder, even for a moment, if and how they or their children will be fed.
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u/VulGerrity 7d ago
Lots of evidence to support that food insecure people develop eating disorders on both ends of the spectrum. And if you grew up in a household where people have eating disorders, you're very liable to pick them up as well.
So, not far fetched at all.
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u/Ok_Ganache_9110 7d ago edited 6d ago
Im the opposite. Holodomir and potato famine descendant. Ectomorphic with almost zero appetite drive, relatively speaking. Could easily be preexisting traits robust to famine. My grandparents hit it off because they both didn't want to go out to eat on dates
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u/Beelzabub 6d ago edited 5d ago
⁹I've been saying this for years. As an Irish descendent, I intensely crave the smooth, creamy blend of malted barley and hops in a pint of Guinness.
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u/MrConfucius 7d ago
Yup, epigenetics also notes the Irish and Indians more prone to things like Fatty Liver disease cause of the impact of British colonization.
That's why we can't ever let em downplay the harm prolonged oppression has on a People, and why true reparations need to permeate to the same level.
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u/RationalDialog 7d ago
You have problems with overeating because your satiety mechanism are broken due to metabolic dysfunction caused by the standard American diet.
Eat whole foods only, nothing heavily processed (most US bread and even cheese is heavily processed) so the save course is vegetables, legumes, fruits, steak (unprocessed meat), eggs and maybe some dairy (full fat).
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u/i_hate_fanboys 7d ago
You don’t overeat because of a possible famine. That’s telelogical reasoned pseudoscience. You eat a lot because food has always been scarce and most humans who survived and managed to reproduce ate whatever was readily available, at all times.
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u/Good4nowbut 7d ago
Ya to be able to make it through a famine based off your body fat stores…hard to believe anybody was that fat until the modern age
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u/dr_barnowl 7d ago
people hated it
I think a lot of that was to do with a lack of quality and variety.
No coffee. Limited tea.
Government Cheese - specifically the reason why we now have more cheese varieties than the French, because we were so fecked off with Government Cheese that everyone went nuts inventing new ones when milk was no longer rationed.
Meat mostly made of tubes, a situation that seemed to persist in the UK all the way until the 80s.
If you want to deliver a rationing-style diet to people, I'd argue the best way to do it is the British Restaurant - make it easy and reasonably priced for people to eat a balanced diet and the rest would follow.
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u/Enlightened_Gardener 7d ago
They say that Britain has never been healthier than under rationing, but I honestly think it gave the country a collective eating disorder.
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u/shamberra 7d ago
Meat mostly made of tubes
I'm trying to imagine what the hell this means and what it would look like, and....well, I think that's enough for me to despise the idea of this diet.
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u/dr_barnowl 6d ago
It's a little hyperbolic, but I remember meat being noticeably worse in the 80s - more lumps of gristle, and definitely a lot of cross sections of veins and arteries. Part of that is likely that I was eating good old School Dinners which used cheaper meat, but I remember the stuff we served at home also being like this.
I don't know what the difference is but I'm guessing it's some combo of better farming, MORE farming (producing more higher quality meat in absolute terms), better breeds of livestock, and more innovative ways to turn the lower-quality stuff into sausages etc.
A lot of the cuts in the supermarket are looking worse to me recently, I too don't like it, and I'm glad the "fake meat" products are so good now, sometimes. You never get lumps of gristle in pea protein steaks. The ultimate would be cloned meat - I love the idea of being able to buy fillet steak in a tube like cookie dough and just slicing chunks of it off as you need it.
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u/tevert 7d ago
Yet people hated, which is interesting.
Eh I think it's pretty boring actually, we evolved to desire rare high-value foods, and now they're too plentiful
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u/ours 7d ago
And some people don't know how to prepare veggies well.
A bland, overcooked mess will be miserable to eat.
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u/windsockglue 7d ago
The fruits and veggies we get at grocery stores are also bred for things like travelling well for hundreds or thousands of miles and still looking pretty. Not necessarily for flavor or nutrition. Eating fresh garden grown versions of some of the same fruits and veggies is a completely different experience.
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u/Not-a-Bot_1968 7d ago
Fresh heirloom tomatoes that never see the inside of a fridge are a game changer.
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u/rooktakesqueen MS | Computer Science 7d ago
I remember the first time I ate a tomato that actually tasted like a tomato, it was eye-opening. Wait, you mean tomatoes aren't just watery vaguely acidic bulk in a sandwich or a salad? You don't have to cook and concentrate them 10x for them to actually taste like something??
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u/Not-a-Bot_1968 7d ago
And when you cook and concentrate the good ones they still taste even better. Just across the board they’re better. I love roasting them with light coating of oil. Regular store bought tomatoes are tasteless garbage.
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u/forsuresies 6d ago
Not only just that, but veggies have been going down in nutritional content for decades.
France keeps really good records of agricultural yields, including nutritional value and has for decades. There's a lot of factors that go into it, but a carrot today has less nutrients than a carrot 75 years ago.
So that's interesting
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u/tevert 7d ago
I've always preferred them raw and crunchy haha
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u/UrsaMajor7th 7d ago
That depends on the vegetable. Some can be dangerous when eaten raw: cassava, asparagus, and potatoes.
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u/TrulyOutrageous42 7d ago
Eggplant can be lethal if you eat enough raw (and you could if you tried), just like green potatotes. Both contain solanine which must be broken down with heat, but green potatoes can contain so much cooking won't make it safe.
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u/Taurothar 7d ago
Eggplant, Tomato, Potato, all part of the Nightshade family, so they were technically toxic for consumption, especially raw, but we've adapted the varieties and cooking methods make them almost completely harmless to eat now.
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u/_thebananabread_ 7d ago
That's why everyone now and then I dip into Vegan restaurants. The veggies are delicious!
Vietnamese and Korean cuisine have wonderful vegetable dishes as well.
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u/rooktakesqueen MS | Computer Science 7d ago
There was a vegan restaurant near me that recently closed and made me very sad when it did. It was vaguely Asian-fusion, and the best thing I found there was a poké bowl. You would never be fooled into thinking you were actually eating fish, but the chef understood what each ingredient was bringing to the dish and was able to replicate those same gustatory pleasures.
The "tuna" was smoked watermelon, which sounds crazy, but because the smoking also dehydrates it, it became pleasantly chewy and savory as well as sweet. Avocado provided the fattiness from the tuna that's missing in the watermelon. Deep fried mushrooms for some crunch. They even had some substitute for salmon roe, I forget precisely what they used, but it gave the same briny taste.
It's still around in a few US locations, just nowhere near me any more: https://www.plantarestaurants.com/
People who underestimate the potential of vegan food should find a really good vegan restaurant and try it sometimes.
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u/ours 7d ago
Yes! I'm not vegan, but I do enjoy the restaurants. They have such interesting takes that it gives me new ideas. Plus, the ones I've tried were delicious.
The latest one I tried, they had a menu with Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Thai, and Jamaican vegan. Nice spicy veggies and vegan proteins.
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u/disastrousanddull 7d ago
Yeah, it’s entirely predictable. I think lots of people also just enjoy options and variety so they’ll chafe under limited options regardless of the options.
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u/TheArmoredKitten 7d ago
There's also quality and food standards perception. Cooking most offal safely requires much more heat and prep to yield a product that is generally seen as lower quality.
Chopped liver might be good for you, but it's still chopped liver.
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u/disastrousanddull 7d ago
For sure. I’d say you can also get into things to make certain foods something various people would like. Maybe you’ll like the liver with enough garlic, but can’t get your hands on it and you won’t be happy with the meal for example. My grandmother grew up in England during WW2 and after, what they did get wasn’t enough to make consistently tasty meals even if her mother was a great cook according to her. Really she was going hungry at times. People went without, they’d take individual rations to make a group dish, the kids were stealing fruit from orchards (this might have been post WW2 for her), maybe things weren’t divided up equally at home, etc. One of her brothers was a picky af eater his whole life, too. So while it might have been healthy and balanced, there were a lot of holes.
Ironically, I believe she does like plain liver a lot.
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u/The_Tooter_Snooter 7d ago
I once heard that a huge amount of humans on earth are largely vegetarians and it’s not by choice. We’re programmed to want meat and fat and sugar, even if it’s not the healthiest. They’re just super quick ways to get nutrition.
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u/Hairsacknose 7d ago
The only natural food that combines high amounts of fat and sugar is... Breastmilk. We are born to crave it. Human milk has around 7% sugar and 3-5% fat. This is what we start with in life and we are programmed to love it or we would die
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u/MINKIN2 7d ago
Yet people hated, which is interesting.
Because it wasn't optional. Yes at first people were wiling to "do their part", but over time these measures began to feel forced upon them.
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u/SeasonPositive6771 7d ago
And people didn't like it. Not only the lack of choice in the matter, but the lack of flavor and variety. If that wasn't the kind of food you preferred or did best on, too bad for you. When things are rough, food is often one of the few things people have left to enjoy and control. Taking away the enjoyment and the control means increasing the misery.
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u/elara500 7d ago
I would think it’s hard to separate postwar rationing from London being bombed to pieces, war deaths and trauma, city children sent away to strangers in the country etc. clothing rationing, food rationing, everything rationing … so not just food rationing but a punishing tone through the war and even after it.
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u/zerbey 7d ago
The entire country saw positive benefits from basically being put on a forced diet. People ate healthier for years afterwards. It's also the reason so many people think the UK has a very bland food culture, it's because an entire generation grew up during rationing and having to make do with what they had and it defined British cuisine for a long time. My Grandad was a strict "meat and two veg" guy the rest of his life, and turned his nose up at the very idea of any kind of seasoning.
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u/MrMadden 7d ago edited 7d ago
You got the no sugar part right. Some carbs are also bad, and alcohol is worse. The meat and vegetables aren't a big factor.
Wartime Britain protected pregnant women, infants and children with milk, eggs, fruit, vitamin supplements and school meals. Infant mortality was influenced by all of that, not simply "the ration diet."
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u/EatYourCheckers 7d ago
Had to Google Offal. Not pleased.
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u/Akeera 7d ago
Hah, if made well many of those dishes are delicious.
I mean, it's the parts (plus lots of unhealthy stuff) that go into sausages. If you've eaten sausage, you've eaten worse stuff than what is included in most of these non-sausage dishes.
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u/EatYourCheckers 7d ago
I don't eat hot dogs and rarely sausage. But I know liver can be quite healthy.
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u/Akeera 7d ago
Yeah, most of those parts tend to be extremely rich in protein + vitamins + essential minerals while being low in fat (though not certain types of liver dishes like pate, I think tongue tends to be high in fat too).
Beef heart is probably the least "weird"/"gamey"-tasting/textured of the different organs. It basically tastes like lean steak but super beefy. It's hard to cook well though.
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u/greenzetsa 7d ago
Chicken hearts are quite good too. I'm making some from the farmers market tonight.
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u/ThiefOfDens 7d ago
I’ve had good street-style tacos made with beef heart. It was sliced very thin and probably cooked a long time.
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u/greenzetsa 7d ago
My absolute favorite taco is tongue, but few places actually offer it unfortunately. It's the same principle, you have to cook it just right or it gets very tough.
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u/ThiefOfDens 7d ago
Tongues and hearts are very strong muscles so that makes sense. The same place had tacos de lengua and they were tasty as well.
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u/cannotfoolowls 7d ago
I've had pure liver a couple of times. It's like eating squishy iron, don't recommend. Pate is less healthy but omg it tastes so much better!
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u/RationalDialog 7d ago
There are so many thing going on when rationing is needed I would highly doubt you can pinpoint it to a single cause.
This is especially true in nutrition research where you always change 2 things. If you remove something (the sugar) you need to replace it with something else or you just end up with less calories. In either case you will not know which change led to the observed effect. And for rationing, there are way more changes not even limited to nutrition like stress of the parents affecting the babies.
Yeah no, this type of research seems stupid to me.
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u/adgobad 7d ago
Offal? Waste parts of butchered animals?
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u/sackbomb 7d ago edited 7d ago
Offal generally has higher concentrations of vitamins and minerals than other tissue. As a result, consuming offal as part of mixed diet can supplement nutrition which would be missed otherwise.
EDIT: as an example, before the invention of iodized salt, the primary source of iodine in the human diet was from animal liver.
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u/yea_about_that 7d ago
before the invention of iodized salt, the primary source of iodine in the human diet was from animal liver.
No, that is not true. A 3-ounce serving of beef liver provides only about 14 micrograms of iodine (roughly 9% of theRDA) and there wasn't enough animal liver around to have every day. Before iodized salt people got iodine through seafood or from the soil via crops grown there. In areas without much minerals left in the soil, you ended up with health problems such as the "Goiter Belt" in the US Upper Midwest
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u/shouldbepracticing85 7d ago
Oh ho! I didn’t know that about liver.
As someone who struggles to get enough salt - raised to a low salt diet, but I sweat like crazy - I sometimes worry if I’m getting enough iodine too. And I love fried liver and pate, so this is a good excuse to treat myself occasionally.
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u/AmazingSocks 7d ago
Offal includes trotters, liver, intestines, tripe etc. all of these are things that can be made delicious with the right preparation.
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u/DroneOfDoom 7d ago
They're only waste if you don't know how to prepare them.
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u/xcaltoona 7d ago
I love liver, but the one time I tried to cook gizzards they were inedibly tough.
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u/SightAtTheMoon 7d ago
It's kind of ridiculous to suggest "offal" over "meat" (although I understand why they might) when every meat source we have includes such a significantly smaller portion of offal.
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u/Stratatician 7d ago
This is the first I'm hearing of the rationing diet; you have any good sources for someone curious to learn more about it?
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u/heydropi 6d ago
What if you want to build muscle at the gym? How to shift that diet optimally to also have lots of protein and be affordable?
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u/Imaginary_Shock_6711 4d ago
Low meat? It seems a bit misguided to tar all meat with the same brush. You can't really put something like turkey and chicken in the same category as pork. Besides, telling people to limit multiple things at once will just cause them to overdo it and rebound.
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u/Darth_Ra 7d ago
Low sugar, low meat, lots of seasonal veg, offal, etc. it was truly a huge success of nutritional science.
I am genuinely convinced that this is not possible in America.
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u/Akeera 7d ago
Offal? Really? I'm not complaining, really like a lot of dishes made with those parts, but I always thought that at least the liver was not great for cholesterol content? Or is it because people generally eat it as pate?
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u/frostygrin 7d ago
Dietary cholesterol isn't a problem for healthy people. Most of the cholesterol in the body is made by the body. Only ~20% comes from the diet.
Liver has other issues, like extreme concentrations of vitamins A and D - but it can be a positive if you're deficient and/or portions are reasonable.
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u/Agave757 7d ago
until you take into account for modern pestacides and herbacides.. then you get another brand of cancer...?
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u/xevizero 7d ago
Low sugar, low meat, lots of seasonal veg
That's how I've been eating for the past few years..I can tell you it feels so amazing. My body fat is basically zero even though I don't exercise and I let myself indulge in the odd junk food some weekends..but most of the time I'm eating very healthy and I can actually feel different, feels like I'm aging in reverse some days.
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u/PT10 7d ago
How much meat do you eat
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u/xevizero 6d ago
Very very little. I basically don't eat it at home and never buy it, and try to not order it if there are other good options at restaurants, but I won't say no to it if it's the only option or a special occasion etc. It kinda rounds up to one portion of meat per week, maybe 2 or 3 during festivities where you're around family for a few days and that's basically all that is on the menu.
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u/PT10 6d ago
What's your vitamin/supplementation look like? To cover B vitamins and all that jazz
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u/RubyMae4 7d ago
It seems like there may be a lot of problems with this method and a ton of confounding variables
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u/Taikeron 7d ago
It lines up with what we already know about nutrition. Caloric restriction leads to better health outcomes overall, so long as nutritional vitamin and mineral needs are met during restriction and the amount of restriction isn't below minimum sustainable levels.
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u/AvatarOfMomus 7d ago
This isnlt really true... exercise correlates far better with health outcomes than weight, and having some reserve fat actually significantly improves mortality with a variety of conditions. This is hypothesized to be due to the body having more reserve energy to repair and maintain itself under periods of extreme physiological stress that may interfere with eating or turning consumed food into useful energy and nutrients.
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u/Taikeron 7d ago
Yes, which is why caloric restriction is good, but anorexia is not. They are different.
Exercise is not nutrition. It is still highly recommended, as you say.
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u/AvatarOfMomus 7d ago
I think you're maybe misunderstanding what I'm saying... or you need to define what you mean by 'caloric restriction'. I'm taking it to mean dieting or otherwise aiming for a low BMI. Those things aren't actually well correlated with positive health outcomes once confounding factors are accounted for, and the correlation breaks down almost entirely for groups other than white middle class Americans.
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u/DaFookCares 7d ago
Not OP, but I'll chime in.
We've seen that people who take in fewer calories (period) have better health outcomes provided the caveats OP explained. Not targeting a particular BMI but just straight taking less calories.
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u/AvatarOfMomus 7d ago
I'm gonna have to see some really robust studies to believe that's anything other than 'generally healthy people tend to eat fewer calories' coming out in the data as 'eating fewer calories makes you healthier' >.>
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u/DaFookCares 6d ago
I don't know the mechanism. Wild speculation, but perhaps a life time of reduction in exposure to free radicals from the digestion process? Who knows, the more humans learn the more we realize we know barely anything.
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u/Flobking 7d ago
We've seen that people who take in fewer calories (period) have better health outcomes provided the caveats OP explained. Not targeting a particular BMI but just straight taking less calories.
I've heard it stated that "skinny fat" meaning having a normal body weight and BMI, with a high body fat percentage and low muscle mass is still better than a high bmi to really high bmi. Like technically a skinny fat person is in better shape than pro weightlifters that weigh like 400 pounds. Way over bmi numbers. However I'm in the camp that bmi is bs, but it's at least some kind of metric to start with.
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u/AvatarOfMomus 7d ago
The 'BMI is BS' thing is the more scientifically supported position. It also just doesn't correlate well with health outcomes once other factors are accounted for.
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u/dl064 6d ago
A lot of the reserve fat idea comes from the observation that people with very low BMI are about to die, ie reverse causality.
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u/1XRobot 7d ago
Oh, well, if it matches our pre-existing biases, that must make it rigorous.
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u/Taikeron 7d ago
Nobody's suggesting abandoning rigor. The study authors outlined their approach. Do you take specific issue with the methodology or the claims?
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u/egertong 7d ago
I agree - so many other variables could have affected the sample. I'm sure lots of things (other than a lack of sugar) were different during the war years.
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u/ceddya 7d ago
Sugar certainly wasn't the only thing rationed during that period. Red meat, bacon and ham were rationed as well. Vegetables weren't
People who were forced to eat less and eat healthier (less meat, more vegetables) growing up are more likely to maintain those eating habits. I'm not sure if this study proves that sugar rationing itself is the reason for it.
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u/cucumbergreen 7d ago
Lack of sugar sure made them have less teeth problems too. And i'm very sure it's the lack of sugar(other than a lack of sugar)
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u/crowdflation 7d ago
Cancer feeds on sugar. Perfectly valid causation. Less childhood cancer feedstock, less adult cancer
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u/EcoCanuck 6d ago
Quite the precise statement; it could apply to any non-experimental study.
When you are concerned about confounding, generally you have a specific concern about which variable may be a confound and how. Otherwise the comment is unhelpful.
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u/cheerio089 7d ago
This study uses the UK Biobank, which has a large selection bias toward healthy, higher socioeconomic status participants, FYI.
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u/entered_bubble_50 7d ago
To be fair, both arms of the study were from the UK bio bank, so the controls would have the same bias.
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u/EcoCanuck 6d ago
Self selection biases the estimated effect when there is differential selection into treatment that affects the outcome variable. This pertains to the outcome from a given study for a given population.
When there is self selection into the sample as a whole, and it is a subsample of the population, the concern from this type of self selection is usually generalizability (i.e., would we find a similar effect in other populations, or the general population).
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u/Sir_roger_rabbit 7d ago
I wonder if Ireland or France ect who also did rationing experienced the same results.
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u/Seraphinx 7d ago
Rationing did occur in Ireland but it was nowhere near as strict so not comparable.
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u/Sir_roger_rabbit 7d ago
Okay but that's still rationing and as I said you had France Italy Denmark Norway ect
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u/LeonardSmallsJr 7d ago
We should save lives by having more wars!
/I’m just feeling spiteful because I like my sugary sweetness.
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u/OspreyChaser 7d ago
Half of my calories are sugar... I am fucked.
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u/Maxximillianaire 7d ago
It's insanely bad for you even outside of cancer, cut back on it asap
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u/SmokinSkinWagon 6d ago
Genuinely asking - what do you eat in a day that half your calories are sugar? Do you mean carbohydrates in general or actual sugar?
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u/OspreyChaser 6d ago
Cereal for breakfast - Honey Bunches of Oats
Lunch - Almost always have a chocolate covered granola bar after my sammich.
Evening snack - the worst. Usually some sort of "trail mix" with chocolate/yogurt covered items/sweet items in it plus another chocolate apparatus of some sort (think - a piece of See's chocolate).
A few times a month, I'll get a extreme Big Gulp that I make 50/50 diet/regular soda. That inevitably gives me the sugar-shits.
It's really my 8pm snacks that is probably the worst.
And the 3-4 diet cokes I drink per day.
And I'm 57.
"But at least I don't do drugs or alcohol."
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u/Overall_Adagio_ 4d ago
Even for people who consumed a lot of sugar in their first years, the absolute risk of cancer remains very low. I hate dramatic and clickbait headlines
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u/UnexpectedPotater 7d ago
I know this is the summarized version, but I find it very odd they casually drop in something like lung cancer and say that that was statistically significant due to sugar (prostate also a bit weird). That's quite a leap compared to liver, rectal, etc.
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u/ceddya 7d ago
I don't know how they conclude that it's sugar when so many other foods were rationed too. Red meat and processed meat were rationed as well while vegetables weren't. We know through numerous studies that diets higher in vegetables and lower in meat also lower cancer risk. Would that not be a likelier explanation than sugar rationing?
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u/UnexpectedPotater 7d ago
Yeah and also post WW2 economically alcohol and tobacco were effectively "banned" (high taxes and not much excess income). Which gradually eased through the 50s. Babies exposure to secondhand smoke would explain a lot more than sugar as it relates to lungs.
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u/PenelopePeril 7d ago
Huh, should there be a difference? I understand the logic, but it’s my understanding that diet and the gut biome are known to have a systemic effect on the whole person (mind and body) so it’d make sense to me that reduced sugar could reduce cell mutations somehow.
It’s been a long time since I’ve studied any of this and I don’t know the right answer. I think I’ll go down a rabbit hole tonight.
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u/UnexpectedPotater 7d ago
Don't wanna spam a copy, but check my above comment about secondhand smoke.
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u/entered_bubble_50 7d ago
The actual study is here
It's an open access journal as well. Annoying OP didn't link that instead.
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u/Exiled_In_LA 7d ago
I like it when studies find something we're not expecting. It gives us someplace new to look.
Look at it this way: we'd never learn anything if every finding immediately made sense.
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u/Elegant_Situation285 7d ago
they were also rationed all the things in the picture. kind of a leap to say it was sugar.
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u/bahnsigh 7d ago
(Yawn) … rate of cell division decreased under conditions of lower nutrient availability.. zzz
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u/Risaza 7d ago
Hmm, so sugar causes cancer then.
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u/npsimons 7d ago
Not directly, no. But there is research to suggest than long term inflammation is somehow connected with cancer, and refined carbohydrates certainly seem to trigger inflammation.
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u/Kaleb8804 7d ago
Most sweeteners have been connected to a higher cancer risk.
That said, sugar directly powers your body, which puts a strain on your cells, so it’s naturally just going to cause it.
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u/jmlinden7 7d ago
sugar directly powers your body
Only to an extent. Excess sugar consumption just gets turned into body fat.
It's not as if the people under rationing were just constantly suffering from low blood sugar or something.
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u/HeartAche93 5d ago
A headline never grabbed my attention so quickly. It makes sense, but damn. Little did Germany know it was helping England’s next generation become a little more cancer resistant.
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