Sugar and sweets in the United Kingdom (UK) on a controlled amount began in July 1942 as part of a food rationing scheme that lasted for 14 years and was put in place because of the Second World War.
The main aim of the food ration was to promote healthy eating habits and fair distribution of food so as to prevent the incidences of hunger and starvation. The Ministry of Food provided all people with a predetermined figure of certain food items, which was meant to be the least consumption level propitious to good health.
Thus, the curbs on sugar and confectionery products which were considered as non-essential luxury items were subjected to ration control.
This research utilized an event study research design to assess the health outcomes associated with limiting the addition of sugars in the first 1000 days of life.
We used the abrupt and immediate lift of sugar rationing which occurred in September 1953 and led a rapid rise in sugar consumption, whereas other food consumption remained stable, and adhered this to a compare ‘sugar early victim’ adults and those who were not.
Birth fully determined one’s early-life exposure to rationing, leading to adults being quasi-experimentally assigned to either within recommended (rationed) or excessive sugar (nonrationed) amounts in utero or in early childhood.
To estimate refraining from absolute sugar restrained children and locate individuals conceptualized within 1000 days of the rationing ending carried out, it was measured that over the course of each of the four quarters there are 91 days on average.
There are 11 quarters or 1001 days which lie between 1951q1 and 1954q2 (exact number of days consists of consideration to overlapping years), hence we had tagged the beginning and the closing of the window to October 1st, 1951 and June 30, 1954 respectively.
Any person who is born and come to existence on or after the first of July nineteen fifty-four (1/07/54) is assumed to be under the non-rationed group which never underwent any raw sweetener’s rationing restrictions.
We expressed the results in the form of HRs with their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) and p-values. */**/*** indicates significance p value less than 0.05/0.01/0.001. Huber-White robust standard errors were applied in all analyses and also adjusted for the clustering of observations by year of birth and month of birth using Stata SE version 18.
This model compared the hazard rates across each period to the hazard rate of the reference the unexposed group, which was the first fully never-rationed cohort of adults who were conceived after September 1953 and born within the month ranges of July – December of 1954.
The ratios of these relative differences were expressed in terms of hazard ratios (HRs) for each k by the coefficients Beta. With 95% confidence intervals, serial correlation in the outcome was accounted for by clustering at the birth year birth month level.
Binary indicators for birth timing of non-rationed adults were included for two reasons: firstly, adults born after that date served as a comparison group.
Secondly, comparing outcome differences for adults born in 6-months increments helped us address a potential concern that our results may be biased due to either general time trends or improved disease diagnostics leading to earlier disease detection among non-rationed adults.
If this was the case, risk for chronic disease would increase with time. Our identifying assumption was therefore that, conditional on controls, the end of rationing was not associated with deviations in disease risk from the reference group for all nonrationed adults born after December 1954, keeping their HRs around 1.
Reference: Tadeja Gracner et al. Exposure to sugar rationing in the first 1000 days of life protected against chronic disease. Science0,eadn5421 DOI:10.1126/science.adn5421
