British children who lived under sugar rationing through pregnancy and their first two years of life had about 33% lower hazards of being diagnosed with anxiety as adults, and about 29% lower hazards of depression, according to a UK Biobank study published August 19, 2026 in Translational Psychiatry. Researchers at the University of Surrey compared 46,448 people born between October 1, 1951 and March 31, 1956, using the end of British sugar rationing as a dividing line.
The anxiety result held up when the researchers accounted for how much sugar people ate later in life. The depression result did not.
Key takeaways
- The longest-rationed group had about 33% lower hazards of anxiety (hazard ratio 0.67) and 29% lower hazards of depression (hazard ratio 0.71) than people conceived after all food rationing ended.
- After adjusting for adult sugar intake, the anxiety link stayed, but the depression link weakened and was no longer statistically significant.
- This is an observational study of birth timing, not a trial of sugar, so it cannot show that early sugar causes anything.
What the study found
The researchers sorted participants into seven groups by how long they were exposed to rationing, from in utero only up to in utero plus the first 24 months. The longest-exposure group had 6,856 people. The main comparison group, 3,102 people, was conceived after all food rationing had ended.
For the longest-rationed group, the anxiety figure was a hazard ratio of 0.67, very likely somewhere between 16% and 47% lower risk (95% CI 0.53 to 0.84). Depression came in at a hazard ratio of 0.71, very likely between 13% and 43% lower (95% CI 0.57 to 0.87). Shorter-exposure groups showed no significant differences.
The same group scored slightly lower on liking sweet foods as adults: 5.82 out of 9, against 6.04 in the comparison group, with about a 4 in 1,000 chance that gap is coincidence (p = 0.0042).
Type 1 diabetes and PTSD, included as checks, showed no relationship with rationing.
Dr. Kumar’s take
The biology is not absurd. The first 1,000 days is a real window, and nutrition in that window plausibly leaves durable marks. Prior work has already tied sugar rationing during the first 1,000 days of life to later chronic disease risk.
But rationing ended on a date, not a randomization. The graded design helps, since seven groups were ranked by how long rationing lasted for them and only the longest-exposed group differed on either outcome. The grading is still by birth date, though, and the models could adjust only for the demographic, lifestyle, and health covariates the researchers had on hand. Whatever else separated children born a few years apart travels with the sugar exposure.
The most honest read of this paper is the authors’ own: the depression signal dissolved under sensitivity analysis, and the anxiety signal survived. One finding out of two, in a design that cannot isolate sugar.
What it means for you
Nothing here gives a pregnant woman or a parent of a toddler a sugar number to hit. The study did not test that.
What survives is unremarkable advice that did not need this paper: added sugar in infancy has no nutritional upside, and early feeding shapes later taste. The lower sweet-food preference decades on, small as it was, is the most believable thing in the study.
This study looked at when people were born and what they were later diagnosed with. It says nothing about how to treat anxiety or depression in an adult today. It is also worth knowing what the evidence says about over-the-counter products for depression, anxiety, and insomnia before reaching for one.