The current epidemic of obesity could have been caused by sugar consumption among children decades ago – ScienceDaily

"While most public health studies focus on current behaviors and diets, we have taken a new approach and examined how the diets we have consumed in our childhood have an impact on levels of obesity, now that we are adults, "said Alex Bentley, head of the department of anthropology and principal investigator of the study, which was published in Economy and human biology.

Sugar consumption in excess, especially in sugary drinks, contributes in a known way to obesity in children and adults. Many population health studies have identified sugar as a major factor in the obesity epidemic. A problem with this theory, however, was that sugar consumption in the United States began to decline in the late 1990s, while obesity rates continued to rise during the 2010s.

This increase shows the following figures: in 2016, almost 40% of all adults in the United States – just over 93 million people – were affected by obesity. In Tennessee alone, the rate of adult obesity has more than tripled, from about 11% in 1990 to nearly 35% in 2016. However, in 2017, obesity in the Tennessee had decreased by 2% over the previous year.

If high-sugar diets during childhood have long-term effects, the changes we are currently seeing in obesity rates in adults may have started with older diets ago many decades, when these adults were children.

"Since the 1970s, many of the infant foods available were extremely high in sugar," said Hillary Fouts, co-author of the study and cultural anthropologist and professor in the department of Child and Family Studies. the family of the University of Texas. "Other independent studies in medicine and nutrition have suggested that sugar intake during pregnancy can lead to increased fat cells in children," she added.

"Until now, no study has explicitly explored the time lag between increasing sugar intake and increasing obesity rates," says researcher Damian Ruck. postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology and co-author of the study. To address this problem, the authors modeled the increase in obesity among adults in the United States since the 1990s, taking into account the increase in excessive sugar consumption measured in adults. children in the 1970s and 1980s.

The researchers tested their model with the help of national obesity data collected between 2004 and 1990 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They compared these obesity rates to the annual sugar consumption since 1970 using the median per capita rates published by the US Department of Agriculture.

The model also roughly describes the variation in obesity rates by age group in children and adolescents.

"Our findings suggest that dietary habits learned by children 30 or 40 years ago could explain the adult obesity crisis that emerged years later," Ruck said.

Prior to 2000, the increase in sugar came largely from high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which after 1970 quickly became the main sweetener of soft drinks and a common ingredient in processed foods. At the peak of sugar consumption, in 1999, each person in the United States consumed an average of about 60 pounds of HFCS per year and more than 400 calories per day in excess of total sugars.

Sugar consumption in the United States has declined since 2000. "If 2016 turns out to be the peak of the obesity rate," added Mr. Bentley, "it would be a generation after the peak of excess sugar consumption ".

The researchers plan to continue their studies in the region by exploring the effects of sugary drinks. "This is important because obesity disproportionately affects the poor," Bentley said.

In an article published in Palgrave Communications In 2018, Bentley and his colleagues found that the relationship between low income and high obesity rates became nationally noticeable in the early 1990s. The 2018 study shows that the correlation between low income and high obesity rates became noticeable at the national level in the early 1990s. between household income and the rate of obesity has steadily increased from a virtually zero correlation in 1990 to a very strong correlation in 2016.