People exposed to less sugar during the first 1,000 days of life had lower rates of anxiety diagnosis decades later.
Anxiety can feel like an adult problem, shaped by work, relationships, health, and everyday pressures.
But some influences on mental health may begin much earlier, during pregnancy and the first years after birth.
A new analysis of people born around the end of post-war sugar rationing in Britain suggests that early sugar exposure may be one part of that story.
The clearest result was a link between longer exposure to rationing early in life and a lower rate of anxiety diagnosis decades later.
A rare window into early diet
The researchers used UK Biobank, a large health database, to examine records from 46,448 people born between 1951 and 1956.
Britain was ending food rationing at the time, so people born only months apart could have had very different access to sugar.
Some participants experienced sugar rationing only before birth.
Others remained under rationing for about six, 12, 18, or 24 months after birth, while comparison groups were born after sugar rationing ended.
This piece of history created a comparison that would be almost impossible to set up deliberately today.
It gave researchers a way to look at different levels of likely sugar exposure during an important period of early development.
Why the first 1,000 days matter
Dr. Hana F. Navratilova, now at IPB University in Indonesia, led the work while at the University of Surrey.
“Research has shown that sugar exposure during the first 1000 days of life may influence the risk of suffering from several chronic diseases, such as diabetes,” Dr. Navratilova said.
“Because we’ve seen in our previous work links between the liking of sugary foods and mental health issues, we were specifically interested in understanding if having sugar in early life could contribute to incidences of mental health issues such as depression and anxiety later in life.”
Dr. Navratilova added that understanding how sugar affects physical and mental health across the lifespan could help shape public health policy and dietary guidance.
Anxiety showed the clearest pattern
The team used linked medical records to identify diagnosed anxiety and depression.
Over an average follow-up of 15.72 years, 2,776 participants had a recorded anxiety diagnosis and 3,147 had a recorded depression diagnosis.
The strongest pattern appeared in people who spent the longest time under sugar rationing.
Those exposed for roughly 1,000 days, from pregnancy through about age two, had a lower rate of anxiety diagnosis than the main group born after rationing ended.
Anxiety link remained strong
After taking several health and social differences into account, the statistical model estimated that their hazard of anxiety diagnosis was about 33 percent lower.
The actual proportion of people diagnosed with anxiety differed much less, ranging from 5.45 to 6.29 percent across the groups.
The link also remained when the researchers accounted for adult sugar intake in a smaller part of the dataset. That makes anxiety the most consistent mental-health finding in the paper.
Depression was less clear
Depression first seemed to follow a similar pattern, with lower rates in some groups exposed to longer rationing.
But the result weakened after the researchers accounted for sugar intake later in adulthood.
That makes the depression finding less certain than the anxiety result. Eating habits later in life may be more important in understanding that connection.
Sweet habits barely changed
A simple explanation would be that babies exposed to less sugar grew into adults who wanted much less of it. The data did not show that.
Among 15,058 people with food-preference information, those exposed to rationing for about 1,000 days reported slightly less liking for sweet foods.
The difference was only 0.22 points on a nine-point scale.
Adult sugar intake was also almost identical across the groups. Early rationing did not simply produce adults who went on to eat far less sugar.
Brain scans showed differences too
The researchers also examined brain scans from 5,990 participants.
They measured gray matter, the brain tissue that contains many nerve cell bodies, across 139 regions.
Eighty regions differed across the rationing groups in the initial analysis. Closer comparisons highlighted 11 regions, including parts of the cerebellum and brain stem.
Those brain differences are interesting, but they do not show that rationing changed the brain in a way that reduced anxiety.
The analysis also could not show that brain structure was the reason the mental-health pattern appeared.
The history makes this complicated
Rationing was not a controlled experiment, and the researchers did not know exactly how much sugar each mother or child consumed.
They used rationing history as an indirect sign of likely sugar exposure.
People born in different years could also have experienced changes in health care, family circumstances, infections, maternal stress, and other conditions.
The researchers accounted for many factors, but they could not remove every possible difference between the groups.
Early diet may persist
Nophar Geifman, professor of health and biomedical informatics at the University of Surrey, was the study’s senior author.
“The UK Biobank is a treasure trove of data that allowed us to look at this post war diet rationing, giving us unique insight into the impact of sugar exposure on our mental health,” Professor Geifman said.
“It is highly unlikely that this sort of dataset would exist again, whereby so many people did not have excess sugar in their diets and then had it slowly phased in over a prolonged period of time.”
Professor Geifman noted that people exposed to sugar rationing early in life tended to like sweet foods less and had a lower risk of anxiety.
The findings also suggest that early diet may still matter for mental health many years later.
What this could mean today
The findings do not show that reducing sugar during pregnancy or infancy will prevent anxiety. They also do not provide a feeding rule for parents today.
Instead, the work suggests that nutrition during a very early stage of life may be connected with mental health many decades later.
Mental health has many influences, but this unusual chapter of British history gives researchers another reason to look closely at what happens during the first 1,000 days.
The study is published in the journal Translational Psychiatry.
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