Nanogirl Michelle Dickinson: Sugar plays with parents' minds

Don't blame sugar, it might just be that our children feel like they can let go at birthday parties. Photo / 123RF

Many parents blame their children's over-energetic behaviour on consuming too much sugar, adding fuel to the bad press that sugar has been getting recently.

However, when it comes to eating sugar, science shows that it might be the parents' perception of their children's behaviour that is changed rather than the children themselves.

There is no doubt that excess sugar consumption is a contributing factor in some of our nation's health problems, including tooth decay, obesity and type 2 diabetes. Providing no vitamins or minerals, sugar acts only to add sweet, empty calories to our foods without adding any extra nutrition.

It's logical to link overly energetic behaviour to sugar because our bodies need to burn off any additional sugar flowing around the bloodstream. Our bodies, however, already have a natural way of regulating these extra sugars by converting the extra energy to fat for storage.

Although it is true that people with low blood-sugar levels (hypoglycaemia) can gain an energy boost from drinking a sugar-filled drink, the same is not true for the rest of us.

Over the last few decades, several scientific studies have looked at sugar and hyperactivity and an analysis of 16 different studies of children with and without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) all concluded that sugar does not affect the behaviour or cognitive performance of children.

One longer-term study published in the New England Journal of Medicine examined children of families that were placed on different diets for three consecutive weeks. The first diet consisted of food high in sugar in the form of sucrose, the second diet was low in sugar but high in the artificial sweetener aspartame, and the third diet was low in sugar and high in a non-caloric sweetener placebo called saccharin.

Cognitive and behaviour tests carried out on the children over the nine-week period found no significant differences among the three diets indicating that neither the children's intellect or behaviour were affected by sugar consumption.

The fun twist in this story comes from a study that tested the expectation of parents who believed that sugar had a negative effect on their children.

In the experiment, all of the children were given a non-sugar containing drink, however, half of the parents were led to believe that their children had been given a sugar-filled drink instead.

When asked to rate their children's behaviour, the parents who believed that their children had consumed sugar recorded their children as more hyperactive when compared to the parents who knew their children had drunk a placebo.

Interestingly, the parents who thought that their children had drunk too much sugar also stayed closer to them, watched them more and ended up criticising their children much more than the placebo parents did. Essentially, merely the thought that their children had consumed sugar was enough to change the behaviour of the parents and their perceptions of their children.

Typically children are more likely to eat large amounts of sugar at birthday parties, fairs or visits to their grandparents' house. These events are also usually fun and exciting places where traditional rules of behaviour may be a bit more relaxed.

Perhaps one theory could be that rather than sugar causing behaviour changes in our children, it might just be that these less rigid environments empower children to feel like they can let go a little more than usual.

So, the next time that your child arrives at a sugar-filled party as a calm, polite human being, and transforms into an over-excitable bundle of energy, just sit back and relax. The science says its probably just all in your mind anyway.