If you ingest a lot of sugar in one hit, insulin production will be over stimulated (to regulate your blood sugar levels). We've all been warned about the sugar low, which customarily follows the sugar rush. Do I have a brain energy deficit that needs treating with sugar? "Feeling tired," says Tappy, "doesn't mean that your brain lacks sugar or energy, but taking a break and eating something maybe allows you to take a rest and give you a psychological boost." The myth of the sugar low? OK, so I'm a healthy person who, after lunch, did a few hours of hard brain work at my computer. The only time you'll ever consciously feel a difference in brain energy is if you correct (with sugar) hypoglycemic symptoms such as difficulty in concentrating, incoherent thoughts and anxiety. ![]() "You will have almost the same amount of glucose transporting around your brain when your blood sugar is relatively low or quite high," he adds. "I would say not much." Blood glucose is well regulated, you see, to ensure the brain has enough of the stuff, come what may. "What would be the effect on brain energy?" he asks. "It's giving us an energy boost, right?" Well, not according to Luc Tappy, a sugar expert at the University of Lausanne. The mid-afternoon sugar hitĪn indignant friend, who refused to believe any of the above, pointed out that grownups need a sugary pick-me-up in the afternoon. The other consideration is that sweets and cake are often bestowed on special occasions, when children are already excited, egg each other on and even ham up their general clowning about to satisfy parental expectation. Behavioural observations, it continues, "also revealed these mothers exercised more control by maintaining physical closeness, as well as showing trends to criticise, look at, and talk to their sons more". The mothers were filmed interacting with their sons and, says the study, "mothers in the sugar expectancy condition rated their children as significantly more hyperactive". In fact, all children had been given placebos. Some of the children's mothers were told their sons had been given a large dose of sugar, and the rest were told their boys were in the placebo group. Back in 1994, a study in the Journal for Abnormal Child Psychology assembled a group of 35 boys, aged between five and seven, whose mothers said they were behaviourally sensitive to sugar. How can millions of parents have got it so wrong? Easily: expectation causes cognitive biases, which cloud judgment. Sugar simply had no discernible effect on the children's behaviour in these studies. In 1995, a meta analysis of the 23 most reliable studies (using known sugar quantities, and placebos, and with the children, their parents and the researchers blind to the conditions) was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Scientists started looking into this in earnest in the 1970s after an American allergist, Benjamin Feingold, advocated the removal of food additives to treat hyperactivity in children. But one thing that it doesn't do is fuel sudden bursts of hyperactivity. ![]() We are addicted to the stuff and it has fully replaced fat as the widely accepted culprit behind obesity. ![]() Sugar, the food additive, has never seemed more evil.
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