Early-life sugar restriction tied to better mental health in adulthood

A recent study suggests that people exposed to post-war sugar rationing from conception through their second birthday had a lower risk of being diagnosed with anxiety and depression in adulthood. These findings provide evidence that early-life nutritional environments can have long-lasting effects on mental health. The research was published in Translational Psychiatry.

The research, led by Hana F. Navratilova and Nophar Geifman, who conducted the work at the University of Surrey, focused on a critical developmental window known as the first 1,000 days of life. Spanning from conception to a child’s second birthday, this is a period of rapid physical and brain growth. Nutrition during this specific time is thought to set the foundation for lifelong health and disease vulnerability.

To study the long-term effects of sugar intake during this period, scientists turned to a unique historical event. During and after World War II, the United Kingdom implemented strict food rationing, which included severe limits on sugar. Sugar rationing abruptly ended in September 1953, creating a natural experiment. People born in the years before this date spent some or all of their first 1,000 days under rationing, while those conceived afterward grew up with abundant access to sugar.

Previous research has used the end of post-war British sugar rationing to show that restricting sugar during the first 1,000 days of life was linked to a lower risk of dementia in older age, as detailed in a 2026 study. Similarly, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 found that this same early-life restriction was associated with a lower risk of asthma and lung conditions in adulthood.

“We have been working on the effects of diet on health using the UK Biobank study that has data from over 500,000 volunteers for some time now, and in particular the effects of diet on mental health,” Nophar Geifman, a professor of health and biomedical informatics at the School of Health Sciences at the University of Surrey, told PsyPost. “We then came across the study from Gracner and colleagues, published in the leading scientific journal Science, that stated sugar rationing in utero and in early life (first 1000 days) was associated with decreased risk of diabetes and hypertension.”

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“This is absolutely plausible, because fetal and infant nutrition is known to influence later metabolic disease risk,” added Geifman, who is also the Director of Informatics for the Veterinary Health Innovation Engine. “But what about mental health? We had access to all the data and a developed toolkit to ask the question and so Dr. Hana Navratilova, our colleague (who was a PhD candidate at the time), put in the hard miles to find the answer.”

Building on this research progression, Navratilova and colleagues tested whether this same early-life nutritional environment was associated with a lower risk of psychiatric conditions, specifically anxiety and depression. They also sought to look at brain structures and dietary preferences to understand how these associations might arise as a person ages.

The scientists analyzed data from 46,448 participants in the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database. These individuals were born between October 1951 and March 1956. The team divided the participants into different groups based on how many days of their early life coincided with the strict sugar rationing period.

For example, the longest-exposed group experienced rationing for about 1,000 days, starting in the womb and continuing up to 24 months of age. Other groups experienced shorter rationing windows, ranging from about 817 days down to 270 days. The primary comparison group consisted of participants conceived well after all food rationing ended in the United Kingdom, meaning they grew up with no restrictions on sugar.

The team tracked medical diagnoses of anxiety and depression using the participants’ linked health records. They also gathered questionnaire data from a subset of participants to gauge their preference for sweet foods and their actual daily sugar intake.

During an average follow-up of about 15.7 years, 2,776 participants were diagnosed with anxiety and 3,147 with depression overall. The results indicate a protective association between prolonged early-life sugar rationing and adult mental health. Participants exposed to the longest period of rationing had a 33% lower relative hazard of being diagnosed with anxiety in adulthood compared to the non-rationed group. In unadjusted terms, 5.79% of the longest-exposed group was diagnosed with anxiety during follow-up, compared with 6.28% in the non-rationed group.

“The size of the UK Biobank volunteer population means we can find a lot of people who experienced sugar rationing in early life,” Geifman explained. “That means our study is statistically quite powerful. Technically this means the so-called Hazard Ratio of sugar intake in the first 1000 days of life links very well to anxiety in later life.”

“This is subjectively pretty amazing, but also, it is a statistically sound conclusion,” Geifman added. “We set out to this work open-minded and as objectively as possible, but the significance of the link to anxiety was highly intriguing.”

Similar patterns emerged for depression. The 1,000-day rationing group had a 29% lower relative hazard of being diagnosed with depression. In unadjusted terms, 6.69% of this group received a diagnosis, compared with 7.23% in the highest-risk group, those conceived just after sugar rationing ended. Groups rationed for about 635 and 817 days also had lower risks for both conditions, while those rationed only in the womb or up to six months of age did not differ from the non-rationed group. This suggests that a longer period of early-life restriction may be needed for the association to appear.

The associations ran in the same direction for both men and women, though they appeared stronger in women. To verify their findings, the researchers checked for links to two conditions not expected to be affected by early sugar intake, type 1 diabetes and PTSD, and found none. They also found no association in a small group of participants born in Ireland, where sugar rationing ended in December 1951, though the authors note this check was too small to be conclusive.

Interestingly, the study found no major differences in the amount of sugar the participants consumed as adults. However, those exposed to the longest period of rationing did report a slightly lower preference for sweet foods, scoring an average of 5.82 out of 9, compared to 6.04 in the non-rationed group.

When the researchers adjusted their mathematical models to account for the participants’ adult sugar intake, the lower risk of anxiety remained, though the authors note this check relied on limited dietary data from a subset of participants. In contrast, the lower risk of depression weakened and became statistically non-significant. This shift suggests that an individual’s diet in adulthood might play a larger role in mediating their depression risk, whereas anxiety risk appears more deeply tied to early-life factors.

“We think that people who look at this study will hopefully recognize that wellness and mental health (especially anxiety) in later life can be influenced by diet in the first 1000 days of life,” Geifman said. “However, that isn’t to say that those first 1000 days are fatalistic, and current food choice of course can shape one’s health.”

Brain imaging analyses also pointed to structural differences linked to early diet. Analyzing brain scans from 5,990 participants, the researchers noted variations in the grey matter volume of certain brain regions. Grey matter is the tissue in the brain and spinal cord composed mostly of nerve cell bodies, which plays a major role in processing information.

While grey matter volume differed across the rationing groups in 80 of 139 measured regions, only 11 of these regions differed between most of the rationed groups and a never-rationed group conceived just after sugar rationing ended. These differences were particularly noted in the brainstem, which sits at the base of the brain and controls basic life functions, and the cerebellum, a structure at the back of the brain involved in movement and some cognitive processes.

The variation in these areas suggests that early-life sugar restriction might subtly influence how the nervous system develops. However, exploratory models did not support brain structure as a pathway linking rationing to lower anxiety.

The findings align with research covered by PsyPost earlier this year, which also linked higher sugar intake to greater odds of anxiety and depression. Similar patterns have been noted in a 2017 study linking sugar intake to later mood disorders, and in a 2024 study by the same Surrey team linking a preference for sweet foods to depression. However, a measurement caveat is needed when comparing these results. The previous studies primarily evaluated adult sugar intake or preferences alongside self-reported symptoms, whereas the new study focused on early-life sugar rationing and formal medical diagnoses decades later.

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting the new findings. The research relies on an observational, natural experiment, meaning it cannot confirm that sugar restriction directly caused the lower rates of anxiety and depression.

“This study is all about probabilities and potential risk,” Geifman told PsyPost. “Early-life sugar restriction was only associated with altered anxiety risk decades later, there is no attempt on our part to imply causality, i.e. that one leads to the other in all cases of high sugar intake in the first 1000 days of life.”

Other unmeasured historical factors, such as maternal stress during the post-war period or shifts in healthcare policies, might have influenced the outcomes. Rationing also changed families’ whole diets, not just sugar, meaning broader nutritional shifts could have played a role. Additionally, the medical records used to track anxiety and depression largely capture diagnoses made later in life. Mental health conditions were historically under-diagnosed, and many participants might have experienced symptoms in young adulthood that were never officially recorded in their health files.

Future research might explore the specific biological pathways involved in these associations. Scientists could investigate whether genetic predispositions interact with early-life nutrition to shape mental health, or look closer at inflammatory markers in the body to understand exactly how diet translates to psychological resilience.

“We will continue with follow-up studies when more data on primary health care is available from UK Biobank, and for example, when proteomic data is available for all participants and we can explore associations with biomarkers,” Geifman added.

Geifman also thanked the study’s participants. “Just to thank all of the UK Biobank volunteers, your selfless actions are making a difference to human health,” Geifman concluded.

The study, “Dietary sugar exposure in early life and risk of adult mental health disorders: UK Biobank cohort study,” was authored by Hana F. Navratilova, Anthony D. Whetton, and Nophar Geifman.