Raising children who don't want sugar

Loosening the grip that sugar has on young minds

We all know that sugar is bad for health. Next week I’m going to go into the gruesome metabolic details of exactly how bad and in exactly which ways. But that is a huge pile of evidence that no-one of us has got an appetite for this close to the new year. For now, let’s just go with something everyone agrees with: Sugar rots your teeth. Let’s just start with that. It’d be better for kids' teeth if they grew up not wanting to eat sugar. So. How do we achieve that?

Nancy Aidoo has some ideas. As a headteacher in one of Ghana’s most metabolically at-risk regions, Nancy's health-first policies around sugar have been credited with revolutionising both academic performance and long-term health of the students going through her school. I knew I had to meet her!

It's hard to not feel a bit nervous while sitting, waiting in a headteacher's office. 5000km and 30 years made no difference, my knees were shaking. Outside, hordes of children, my own freshly enrolled amongst them, were being marshalled into lines. I watched out of the window as they listened, prayed, and moved away to their classrooms. Every single one of them was holding a hard-boiled egg.

The eggs, I learnt not long after, were part of Madame Nancy's doctrine. Alongside stacks of stationary and sanitation products that all new parents were requested to contribute to the school’s community stores, we were told that, without fail, the children would need to bring in a piece of fruit on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and an egg on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Hence hundreds of egg-bearing small kids.

The fruit and egg rule had been half of Ms Aidoo’s reaction to the problem of malnutrition. When she had arrived at the school a few years earlier, the pupils were given lunch money by their parents and then spent this almost exclusively on soft drinks and sweets which were mostly consumed before the first lesson. As a result, their growth was stunted and spending every school day with no way up from a sugar crash was trashing their grades. The other half of her response, the half that raised most eyebrows in the community, was banning sugar from the entire school premises (see the video below for her eloquent explanation of what she did and why).

Sugar. Next week, you and I are going to have a proper chat about what sugar is, where it comes from, where it goes, and how it does what it does to us. For now, I'll keep it light: Table sugar, or sucrose (or the type of sugar that we all call ‘sugar’) is a semi-detached molecule made of one glucose neighbour and one fructose. Plants make sugar primarily because it tastes sweet and tempts animals to eat their fruits and disperse their seeds. Animals, in return, use the fructose part of sugar as a signal to trigger our metabolisms to get the most out of those short-lived bounties that the plants provide: it boosts our appetites, drives hyperactive food-finding behaviour, and helps us store more fat.

The problem for Madame Nancy was that, taken out of plant tissues (like fruit) and put into other foods, sugar takes these ultra-rewarding and appetite-stimulating properties with it. A boost for manufacturers of ultraprocessed food and drink. A problem for a headteacher whose students are being driven to eat food without many nutrients.

But it's not just central Ghana. Most of us in the UK eat too much sugar too. The World Health Organisation recommends that we get no more than 5% of our calories from added sugar (for an adult, that’s 25g). The NHS says no more than 30g for adults, 24g for children aged 7-10. But almost no children do this. 98% of UK seven year olds exceed this every day. 60% of adults double it. Our culture is geared towards it - every British celebration is a festival of sugar.

It feels like there’s nothing we can do. It's bad for kids (so much more on this next week), but every part of our culture and our biology is trying to get us hooked, and it's freely available at kid-eye-level in every shop that doesn't want to get outcompeted and thrown off the high street. Sugar going into kids is one of those problems that is so big and so impossible that it fades from view.

Cultural sugar overconsumption can feel like an impossible problem to solve.

What could we do to raise children who don’t want to eat sugar?

So, is Nancy Aidoo's approach of total prohibition to fight habit formation the only way forward? Are there other things we can try? It turns out help comes from an unexpected quarter: there's plenty of advice on how to prevent kids in a society from smoking.

It feels a bit stupid to be drawing parallels between tobacco and sugar. Smoking is the devil and sugar is pink, fluffy, ubiquitous, socially acceptable, and freely given to young children at schools. But it hasn't always been that way. Kids have smoked in the UK since tobacco arrived from the Americas. Smoking was even compulsory in some British schools for part of the 17th century. Even 50 years ago, tobacco companies were still telling us that tobacco was ‘habit-forming’ and not ‘addictive…’, they were just moreish, just a treat to be enjoyed as part of a balanced diet…wait. This all sounds very familiar.

In the UK, we changed things and kids no longer smoke, chew, or snort tobacco. So interventions to prevent kids from falling prey to addictive substances embedded in a culture clearly work. Here's a list of some of the interventions that are currently recommended for parents in cultures where kids still smoke, and a look at how they might also be applied to sugar.

What can we learn from advice on raising smoke-free children?

• Establish a smoke-free home - Children raised in smoke-free homes are much less likely to smoke. They don’t see their parents smoking. They don’t develop beliefs around times of day when you have a cigarette. Children with parents who smoke are four times more likely to smoke than the children of non-smokers. Epigenetic addiction priming aside, parental behaviour clearly has an enormous effect on children.

  • Establish a sugar-free home - Children raised in sugar-free homes are much less likely to eat sugar. They don’t see their parents eating sugar, they don’t develop habits around sweet foods, and they don’t see predictors for when their parents eat something sweet.

• Delay the first exposure to cigarettes - the later that a child tries something addictive, the less likely they are to become addicted, because their brain’s reward systems don’t form around the addictive substance. Every extra year, every month, even one extra day makes a difference.

  • Delay the first exposure to sugar - The later that a child tries something addictive, the less likely they are to become addicted, because their brain’s reward systems don’t form around the addictive substance. Every year, every month, every day counts.

• Make smoking seem disgusting - Disgust is a powerful deterrent, a much more basal emotion than dislike. If someone shows you that they think smoke smells gross and makes them feel sick, then it’s hard to want to do it.

  • Make sugar seem disgusting - disgust is a powerful deterrent, a much more basal emotion than dislike. If sugar makes you retch, burns your mouth, or is associated with foul-tasting medicine, then it’s hard to want to eat it.

• Help a child identify with a group that doesn’t smoke - If a child feels part of a group that does not smoke, such as certain religious or cultural groups, the child is less likely to start smoking.

  • Help a child identify with a group that doesn’t eat sugar - Sugar has become widely used in almost all cultures, so it’s hard to find an in-group outside the family. However, a child who feels a strong connection to their family, and whose family frequently discusses their shared dislike of sweet food, is much more likely to identify as someone who doesn’t eat sugar. And hey, if they rebel as teenagers, at least they are less likely to become addicted and haven’t formed habits around sugar consumption.

• Explain how hard it is to quit - A child that understands how nicotine makes them want more nicotine is a child that understands that it’s much easier to start smoking than to stop.

  • Explain how hard it is to quit - the longer that someone has been eating sugar, the more difficult they will find it to quit. Once you start eating sugar, the sugar tricks your brain into wanting more and more. This helps children to understand that there is a hidden cost to starting to eat sugar.

• Help children practise resistance skills - the more often a child thinks (and plans) about how they would refuse a cigarette, the more likely they are not to smoke in the long term.

  • Help children practise resistance skills - The more often a child thinks (and plans) about how they would refuse sweet food, the more likely they are not to eat it in the long term. With our children, we played games when the oldest were small (and then they played the games with their younger sibling) and we asked them “Do you want… a carrot? A cookie? Some pasta? Some cake?” When they were small, they would respond with a ‘Yes please’ or a fake retch (building the disgust association), and as they got older, we helped them to practise a more polite ‘No thank you.’

• Explain why tobacco companies want people to smoke - Discussing with children why the tobacco industry exists and how it makes people buy cigarettes helps them how people like them are manipulated, used, and injured. This can make them feel angry and find ways to take back control so they are not victims. This approach is especially effective for teenagers.

  • Explain why ultraprocessed food companies want people to eat sugar - Discussing with children why the food industry exists and why it puts sugar in most of the food helps them to see how children like them are manipulated, used, and injured. This can make them feel angry and find ways to take back control so they are not victims. This approach is especially effective for teenagers.

Having read this, I'd guess you have one of three responses.

1. “I'm not going to worry about this, sugar’s not that bad”. Which I totally get. A $40BN industry spends hand-over-fist to make sure this is what we believe. Next week's article is for you.

2. “This is very doable, I'll start tomorrow!”. Which I applaud. I don't know where you get your attitude, but I'd like some too.

3. “This is too hard. It's too big. I’m not sure it would ever work.” Which I felt too. And for you I want to end with a story of optimism:

One of my children has cerebral palsy, caused by a brain injury when she was a small fetus. Children with cerebral palsy are much more likely to suffer from malnutrition than other children because many different foods feel strange in their mouths and it can even taste different on different sides. This drives a lot of picky eating. We knew that we would have to structure her food environment very carefully to ensure that she did not become malnourished on top of all of her other health problems.

At that point, we knew very little about diet-induced disease, but we did know that most children liked sweet foods more than any other, and that sweet foods make every other food taste worse by comparison. Therefore, we realised that to help her eat a balanced, diverse diet, we couldn’t have her selectively prioritising sweet foods.

So we didn’t give her sugar. That was important for her health, so we stuck to it. At each point where there was a challenge to this position, we addressed it. At the beginning, we told friends and family that we would not give her sugar. When she started nursery, we requested no added sugar in her diet, and went through the menu to help the nursery staff identify sources of hidden sugar. From a young age, we talked with her about why we didn’t eat sugar and we practised and modelled politely declining sugar. At birthday parties when she was young, we filled her plate with non-sweet foods and her cup with water. When her siblings arrived, we treated them in the same way, and she taught them what she had learned. At school, she was able to select fruit rather than sweet desserts, and would decline the sweets that parents felt obliged to provide with every birthday. We provided non-sweet alternatives for the various sugary cooking experiments at the school. Now, she’s seven, and when her schoolmates give her sweets, she likes to experiment with them. She’s melted them, burned them, dissolved them, and unsuccessfully tried to powder them.

She’s eaten sugar from time to time, accidentally, and calls it out because it tastes like medicine. Her favourite treat is fruit. As she gets older, she’ll no doubt try sugary foods. But, because of how she has spent her early years, she’s much less likely to ever become dependent on them, and she has no habit-space in her life for sweet foods. Both of these mean that she’s much less likely to have to contend with non-communicable disease at a young age.

Our culture tells us that it’s impossible to bring up children without sugar. It’s not impossible, but it is hard. It would be much easier with increased regulation and decreased availability. But we can’t afford to wait for widespread societal change to limit our children’s sugar intake, especially not when there are enormous commercial interests at play. Societal change will be necessary to ensure that all children are protected, but it will likely be a long time coming. But all of us can make individual changes starting now.

---

You may also like:

Why does sugar affect every part of health?

Why aren't all children picky eaters?

Ozempic is needed because of how we raise children

---

Prefer a podcast?

Avoiding addiction in childhood

Dealing with pain

Making sleep stronger

---

References

Advice on raising smoke-free children: https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=guidelines-for-raising-smoke-free-kids-1-1374 and https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-lifestyle/quit-smoking-tobacco/how-to-keep-kids-and-teens-from-smoking-and-vaping

1.5% of seven-year-olds meet the NHS sugar limits: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/oct/31/less-sugar-in-first-1000-days-of-life-protects-against-chronic-disease-study-finds

Children of parents who smoke are four times more likely to smoke: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/children-whose-parents-smoke-are-four-times-as-likely-to-take-up-smoking-themselves