"Sugar rush" in children seems to be confirmation bias

https://juliawise.net/sugar-rush-in-children-seems-to-be-confirmation-bias/

by paulpauper • 2 years ago

40 76 2 years ago

juliawise.net

zug_zug6• 2 years ago

Sorry what? This is just out of the realm of plausibility.

There's a reason why academics no longer use sugar-pills as placebo, because sugar has immediate psychological effects.

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Edit: Just read it, the blog author doesn't understand statistics.

"—Sixteen reports met the inclusion criteria for a total of 23 within-subject design studies. The weighted mean effect size and related statistics for each of the 14 measurement constructs revealed that although the range for these means was from -0.14 for direct observations and up to +0.30 for academic tests, the 95% confidence interval for all 14 mean effect sizes included 0."

So there's a world of difference between "The studies didn't prove X" and "The studies proved X is not true."

To illustrate - I could do a study right now on myself about whether getting hit on the head reduces IQ, and odds are, I wouldn't have enough data to prove anything. Doesn't mean I proved the opposite.

Also, if the article wasn't paywalled I'd be curious how many grams of sugar were given etc, but probably not even worth my time. I also think that a placebo of artificial sweetener is dubious unless we are sure those can't cause behavior changes too.

p0w3n3d• 2 years ago

Thanks for this. I will take it into account when I give some sugar to my child in the evening. I really "can see" that she has need to put out this sugar which sometimes she gets by running left and right, doing super energetic things, and if put to bed, she'll just randomly rotate for another hour. Usually it's been associated with an occasion, but recently I gave her something like a milk but with tons of sugar before sleep, and she was rolling in bed like a drill, and there was no special occasion or events that day...

detritus4• 2 years ago

Yeah, I've had this conversation with a friend who has a kid about the same age as mine. He swears that there's no such thing as a sugar rush, whereas I absolutely see it in my kid and there's nothing you can tell me to make me think otherwise.

As far as I can tell, the difference in our opinion comes down to general diet - his kid has a sweet cereal for breakfast and generally has a high sugar diet, whereas my kid absolutely does not. She has a single small sweetie at the end of the day after dinner.

Any time she gets spoiled (by someone else!) I can see her eyes widen and her energy levels go up and her behaviour become more bouncy and erratic about 10-20 minutes after consumption, lasting another 20-40 minutes thereafter.

Perhaps its genes or something else too, but I swear to god it's not simply 'confirmation bias'.

neom• 2 years ago

Here is the full study: https://www.scribd.com/document/450826901/Effect-Sugar-on-Ch...

Angostura• 2 years ago

You may find the results surprising, but there is plenty of experimental evidence that sugar rushes, as popularly conceived, simply don’t occur in children.

Google ‘No such thing as a sugar rush’ to get a feel for how long this has been studied.

I can’t find anything to suggest that sugar pills were dropped as a placebo because of sugar’s effects.

watwut3• 2 years ago

I recall reading that people recognize the taste of sugar as differ then typical taste of medicine, so they conclude they are in placebo group.

So they guve them placebo people won't recognize as a placebo. Nothing to do with biological effect of sugar.

zug_zug6• 2 years ago

Well if there is plenty of evidence, perhaps it should be linked here rather than this relatively weak meta-study that confuses the absence of evidence with the evidence of absence.

pessimizer• 2 years ago

If you tell parents that their kids have had sugar, they will report those children as behaving hyperactively whether they've actually had sugar or not. It's a consistent outcome.

It's one of those things that you can't convince people of because there's some things they have a deep need to "know."

Other things that you can't convince people of: the caffeine levels in coffee don't really keep people awake (they'll still stay up if you slip them decaf), and that there never were any significant numbers of people putting razor blades in Halloween apples (other than parents looking for attention.)

zug_zug6• 2 years ago

Two things can be true.

sdwr2• 2 years ago

Beating an old, weathered drum -

How can people be so disconnected that they believe some paper on the internet over their own bodies? Try drinking a big glass of fruit juice and observing that:

- there's a near-immediate "up" effect

- that's stronger the less sugar/carbs you've ingested recently

- consuming a lot of refined sugar traps you in a up/crash cycle that looks a lot like (a milder version of) drug dependence

sbelskie• 2 years ago

Have you considered that your experience may not be universal? I don’t experience any of what you’re talking about.

resource_waste• 2 years ago

As someone with diabetes. Yes yes yes.

As someone who runs distance, yes yes yes.

Here is a better question:

Does higher blood sugar make someone feel higher energy? If we can solve that problem, we can likely answer the question about children using logic rather than subjectives.

n4r9• 2 years ago

You could just as easily argue that photons stop moving when you close your eyes.

malicka• 2 years ago

With things like this, we trust papers over ourselves because of confirmation bias and the placebo effect. The sugar rush in particular is very culturally prominent, so the seeds of that bias are well-planted in all of us.

Arguing against that principle is arguing for pseudo-science: “Acupuncture works, I tried it!,” “Crystal-healing works, I tried it! Don’t trust a paper over your own body!”

rtkwe2• 2 years ago

It's because personal experience lies to you a lot. People are garbage at consistently and accurately recalling events over time unless they're taking notes about what's happening and reviewing those. It's also important to note what the studies are actually looking at, it isn't saying there's no energy boost but that there's no effect on "children’s behavior or cognition" people misremember and misattribute things all the time so it's important to study things scientifically it's the whole reason we use the technique.

astura• 2 years ago

I've never experienced an "up" effective from fruit juice. Never as a child nor as an adult.

I presume it's because I never had that cultural expectation. I never heard of any of this "sugar rush" nonsense before I had access to the Internet, which wasn't until my late teens.

omnicognate• 2 years ago

I'd suggest getting tested for insulin resistance / prediabetes.

watwut3• 2 years ago

Yes, if you are hungry and eat sugar, it metabolizes fast and you will be more active. That is not sugar high, that is how you should be all the time, you was just numbed by hunger.

msla• 2 years ago

So there's a world of difference between "The studies didn't prove X" and "The studies proved X is not true."

Right, because the second isn't possible in the real world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others.
Russell specifically applied his analogy in the context of religion.[1] He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.

zug_zug6• 2 years ago

No, that's not it at all.

What you would do is you would have a higher standard of proof. If you conduct a study with a 95% confidence interval that sugar doesn't increase excitement more than 5% then, you can say with 95% confidence the mean falls above that 5% threshold.

However in this study, that confidence intervals were all over the place (from huge effect on mood to negative effect on mood) which generally means you need more participants to conclude anything.

parpfish2• 2 years ago

yes, you're right about that being a misinterpretation of 'could not reject the null hypothesis'.

i couldn't get the full text of the meta-analysis, but i've read similar studies in the past and one critical effect was that parent's ratings about perceived hyperactivity were heavily affected by whether the parent thought their child received sugar but there was no effect detected based on whether the children actually received sugar.

so it doesn't completely rule out whether sugar has an effect, but it does show that parental 'hyperactivity detectors' are broken and will be biased based on whether they think their kid had sugar (so you and everybody else should look at your anecdotal expereience with suspicion)

zug_zug6• 2 years ago

but it does show that parental 'hyperactivity detectors' are broken

I'll grant that some are for sure. But it doesn't mean other parents can't quietly and effectively notice their children's responses to various foods.

Frankly any sort of research on behaviors imo should eventually move to scoring by completely objective measures (e.g. computer assessment of whether they can watch a screen for 30 seconds and how often they look away, or whether they can read a paragraph)

HeatrayEnjoyer• 2 years ago

After a short google search I am not seeing information that sugar is no longer used for placebos.

It's also already established knowledge that 'sugar makes kids hyper' is urban myth; this specific phenomenon is used as an example by countless psychology and epistemology university textbooks.

zug_zug6• 2 years ago

I think it's only for short-term psychological measures

Here's a study highlighting the psychological effects of sugar

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...

Zanfa• 2 years ago

Growing up in a ex-soviet country, "sugar rush" wasn't a thing. In fact, when I was a kid, sugar water was given to children to get them to calm down. It wasn't until recently that it's become a term here, probably introduced from US media.

bestouff• 2 years ago

Same from France

nostrademons3• 2 years ago

Sugar water is also given to newborns in the U.S. as an anesthetic for minor surgical procedures like circumcisions and tongue-tie releases.

watwut3• 2 years ago

That sounds scary, sugar is not anesthetic.

saint_fiasco7• 2 years ago

Same here in South America. We even give children coffee and it causes no apparent issues. Admittedly this coffee is taken with lots of milk, but even that is only because children don't like the bitter taste. Over-stimulation was never even a consideration.

I thought sugar rushes was a culture-bound syndrome in which children in the US go hyperactive and other children do not. From the article, it seems like it's something even more mundane than that, and children in the US never got hyperactive from sugar at all.

andrewla• 2 years ago

My experience with my two kids and observing other children tends to lean this way, though I'm leery of accepting social science results that confirm my biases [1]. That sugar rushes exist is very much conventional wisdom, but I've seen any number of cases where a parent says something like "wow, so-and-so is going crazy; did they have any sugar" with "no" -> "I guess it's a mystery" and "yes" -> "oh, of course". Not definitive, but it's a similar experience I've seen with people who are critical of women drivers -- when someone drives badly, and it turns out to be a woman, the reaction is "of course" and when it's not, it is just ignored.

I've had innumerable low-key evenings where children have had chocolate cake or candy before bedtime and were fine; and similarly healthy nights where they were going wild. Of course I've seen the opposite as well; just mostly uncorrelated to the food. I think if there is an effect it is probably smaller than conventionally believed.

[1] The only thing I'm more leery of is social science results that contradict my biases

readthenotes1• 2 years ago

Your anecdata matches mine. I tried to reason with other parents that there were too many confounding factors to assign sugar poisoning as the cause for hyperactivity, but it fell on deaf ears because they just knew.

Of course, a right thing to do is to avoid giving our children any substance to which that poison has been unnaturally added...

giantg28• 2 years ago

Artificial dyes are the bigger factor.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9052604/

saint_fiasco7• 2 years ago

Priming effects are out of fashion now, but I can see how a bright-colored food could make a child more excited than a plain-colored food.

giantg28• 2 years ago

Not sure what you're comment is about. The visual stimulus wouldn't have any effect after the stimulus is no longer present.

bruckie• 2 years ago

This is one of my favorite items from Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions). There are lots of other interesting ones there, too.

nemo44x• 2 years ago

I've always heard that it's more likely certain additives, preservatives, and food colorings are what cause hyper activity and that a lot of sugary things contain these and could be responsible in part. There is a lot of absolutely insane "foods" out there that if possible it's probably best to not give children. Hyper activity is the least of my concerns, personally.

lm2s• 2 years ago

This is really weird. It's something I feel as an adult when I consume too many sugary things. Could it be related to something else in those sugary things (candy, sodas, ..) instead of sugar? That'd be interesting to find out.

yetanother-1• 2 years ago

But sugar is still considered unhealthy to give to children on a regular basis. Given how much the water is mudded by a lot of talks, and that parents are always confused what treat to give/promise to their children...

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 years ago

Given how much the water is mudded by a lot of talks, and that parents are always confused what treat to give/promise to their children...

No, don't trail off, what's the end of that sentence? "...we should lie to them and support this misconception so they'll do an unrelated thing we think is healthy"?

testaccount135• 2 years ago

In those party circumstance drinks containing caffeine (energy, coke) are often consumed by kids. Those drinks usually also contain lots of sugar which is known by the people. It could be that the "sugar rush" rather comes from the caffeine than the sugar, but the people put it on the sugar.

xnx• 2 years ago

My hunch is that "sugar rush" is parents thinking that the corn syrup is the active ingredient in soft drinks and not the caffeine.

patwolf• 2 years ago

I've heard before that there's no such thing as a sugar rush. I've been careful to observe my own children's reactions to sugar.

My conclusion is that it doesn't affect their behavior much during the day. However, if they have sugar closer to bedtime, it seems to inhibit their desire to go to bed. They start acting like overtired children which can look similar to a sugar rush.

We also don't make it a habit of giving our kids sugar close to bedtime, so there could still be bias because I'm observing situations the kids are staying up late and consuming sugar.

Fire-Dragon-DoL8• 2 years ago

I haven't noticed sugar rush being a thing. What I do see is sugar addiction though: the more refined sugar they get, the more they ask. We have to do cleanup weeks to reset that. Also everybody seems ok giving constantly sugar to children. (multiple times per day)

lovethevoid• 2 years ago

The consistency of sugar isn't the problem, many cultures use sugar to balance meals and therefore make them taste better. This is often how those cultures get kids used to eating a variety of veggies that Americans would quite literally throw up at the sight of.

The problem is the large quantity in one sitting, especially in the morning. It's juice and french toast and maple syrup. It's cereal and milk. It's pancakes and whipped cream. It's granola bars and juice. Everything standardized as breakfast is too much sugar with not much of anything else, and most parents don't really think twice about it. More parents would quite literally be better off just giving their kids one of those premade protein shakes in the morning. At least they would get some protein with the sugar.

cafard• 2 years ago

An MD of my acquaintance said that what parents imagine to be a sugar rush is actually the effect of caffeine in coffee. I had always heard that sugar is if anything soporific.

EForEndeavour• 2 years ago

Do you mean caffeine in chocolate?

"Sugar rush" in children seems to be confirmation bias

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