CHICAGO, NOV. 21 -- The sugary treats that many children love to eat do not appear to cause hyperactive behavior, a finding that may surprise their parents and teachers but few of their physicians, researchers said Tuesday. 'The reality is that it's hard to find simple answers to complex problems like behavior,' said James Perrin, a pediatrician at Massachusetts General Hospital and chair of a committee on children with disabilities for the American Academy of Pediatrics. The investigation, published in Wednesday's issue the Journal of the American Medical Association, gathered results from 23 studies conducted since 1984 and used statistical methods to detect any link that the smaller, individual studies may have missed. Despite tests that measured academic performance to motor ability, observations of mood to aggressive behavior, and exams from the neuropsychological to cooperative learning, the researchers concluded that sugar did not affect behavior or cognitive performance in the 560 children studied. Mark Wolraich, the lead scientist in the JAMA study and chief of Vanderbilt University's Child Development Center in Nashville, said that parents' expectations, based on misguided popular beliefs about sugar 'buzz,' most likely color how they attribute their children's excited behavior. 'Nutrition is one thing that we as individuals can control,' said William Klish, a pediatric nutritionist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. 'If we have a particular problem, we want an explanation, and it's easy to point to what we eat.' The sugar myth, according to pediatric neurologist Gerald Erenberg, dates back decades to early, poorly conducted studies.
'There were no double-blind studies in those days,' he said. 'They approached the question from anecdotal experience, and everybody -- researchers and parents -- knew what was going on.' Erenberg is the director of learning assessment at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. A recent study at the University of Kentucky, said Wolraich, demonstrated this bias. Parents were asked to evaluate their youngster's behavior after the 35 children drank a placebo of artificial sweetener. Half the group's parents, however, were told the drink contained sugar -- and it was these parents who most often recorded signs of hyperactive behavior in their children as researchers watched. 'What is especially interesting to note here,' said Wolraich, 'is that the parents NEWLN:in the 'sugar' group> tended to stay closer to their children. They were also more demanding.' Denying a child candy can in fact cause more problems than it solves, said child psychiatrist Madhu Bhatia, who is on staff at Charter at Springwood, a psychiatric hospital in Leesburg, Va. 'Children who are placed on restrictive diets tend to start to develop other behavioral problems,' she said. 'Control and power become the issue,' Bhatia said. As for the proverbial sugar buzz, 'That's really a different physiology entirely,' saidKlish. 'If you eat a lot of sugar on an empty stomach, you can experience what's known as dumping: the sugar empties rapidly into the small intestine, and for a brief period of time you may feel uncomfortable. But the body quickly compensates.' The sugar-buzz phenomenon has nevertheless encouraged some court attorneys to offer the famous 'Twinkie defense' on their client's behalf. Wolraich said this explanation for criminal behavior was based on correlational studies, which noted that hyperactive children tended to consume more sugar than their calmer counterparts, and that some prisoners exhibit unusually low levels of blood glucose (the sugar the brain uses for energy). So far, the defense hasn't worked. 'The problem with this kind of study,' said Wolraich, 'is that it doesn't tell in which direction the behaviors might be linked.' In other words, the conclusion that hyperactivity causes children to eat more sugar is equally valid. 'Is it absolutely impossible that sugar may play a minor role in child behavior? No,' said Perrin, of the American Academy of Pediatrics. 'But think about the seven-year-old who's acting up in the classroom. It may be because he's eaten, or because he hasn't eaten...or perhaps it's fatigue. Maybe he had an argument at home with dad.' (Written from Front Royal, Va., by Elizabeth Manning; edited from Washington by UPI Science and Technology Editor Larry Schuster)
