"For example, choosing sugar is shaped by the addictive nature of sugar; it is not a free choice."

If sugar is addictive then our child, the genetic spawn of two sweets loving people, who grew up in a house where sweet foods were always available, should be floundering in a sugary haze. He doesn't much care for sweets. When he was little and would go out on halloween, he'd come home and give his candy to his dad. David would eat all the good stuff and then the bag would sit around for months and finally get thrown out.

I could have decided Dylan was doomed to a life of sugar addiction because both his parents liked sweets. But I had read some ideas that it was the rareness of sweets in a kids life that made them more valuable and I wondered if Dylan could have a better sense of balance than his dad and I had. Dylan has never eaten a candy bar. He's never eaten Twinkies or any of the other packaged Twinkie like things. He doesn't like pie. He doesn't eat sweet cereal. He doesn't like hard candy or soft candy or gummy candy. He doesn't like Kool-Aid. He drinks cola.

I still really like sweets. I bake a lot. I don't feel guilty about it anymore. I don't feel like I shouldn't be eating it, I enjoy sweets and I eat them whenever I want. But it turns out, I eat less than I did twenty years ago or even ten years ago. Something about knowing I can have whatever I want, whenever I want it and that I won't punish myself with guilt about it has made that difference.

So, I don't believe sugar is addictive. I believe some people naturally like sweets more than others and I believe our attitude about sugar, about any food, creates more problems than the food itself. I think one of the best things we can do to ensure a healthy attitude about foods for our kids is to not screw up their psychology with fear and guilt and dire warnings.

Deb Lewis
(full discussion in the archives of Always Learning)

Living in fear about purported truths can make anything seem true. When I lived in fear concerning my kids consuming sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup I could swear that it changed their behavior. Truthfully though, it didn't, and it still doesn't now that I've moved past living in fear.

Absolutely. I've given up telling folks that sugar doesn't make kids hyper, they simply don't believe it. The link below will take you to a sweet little article that sums up the research done on this topic.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2747/does-giving-sweets-to-kids-produce-a-sugar-rush

Most interesting to me was the study where they told the moms they were testing for the effects of sugar on behavior, but they were really testing the moms' reactions. It's in the article linked above, but here's [some of the article by Cecil Adams]:

Why would a sizable chunk of the child-rearing population continue to swear it (the sugar/hyperactivity link) exists? For a crucial piece of the puzzle we turn to the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology and a 1994 study by Daniel Hoover and Richard Milich, in which they looked at 31 boys ages five to seven and their mothers, all of whom had described their offspring as being "behaviorally affected by sugar."

The mom-son teams were split into the customary two groups: the moms in one were told their sons would be given extra-sugary Kool-Aid, while the others were told their kids were in the control group and would get a drink sweetened with aspartame. In reality, though, the same artificially sweetened stuff was administered to both sets of kids while the women got a sheaf of surveys to fill out. Mothers and children were then videotaped playing together, after which the moms were asked how they thought things went.

What did Hoover and Milich find? You guessed it: the moms who thought they were in the sugar group said their sons acted more hyper. In addition, they tended to hover over their children more during play, offer more criticism of their behavior, etc. The mother-son pairs in the other group were judged by observers to be getting along better. What's more, those moms who, going into the experiment, most strongly believed their kids were sugar-sensitive also scored highest on a test designed to gauge cognitive rigidity.

From there, of course, it's not too hard to whip up a hypothesis explaining why the sugar-high myth persists. Having always heard that sugar makes kids act crazy, some parents, particularly those hailing from the control-freak end of the spectrum, may go a little crazy themselves when the sugary stuff enters the picture. In situations where sweets are freely available to their children - like birthday parties or other high-stimulation events - they watch worriedly for any sign of obstreperousness, see it even if it's not there, call it hyperactivity, and attribute it to the cookies and cake. Kids, meanwhile, typically aren't oblivious to this sort of anxiety; consciously or not, they may well figure out that after taking on a load of candy they're expected to run amok and happily oblige.

I've seen this active group of boys play enthusiastically together on many occasions, and my guess is that sugar was probably not always involved. ;-) And let's not forget to mention that they'd been sitting through a class and were probably now really ready to move.

I think some people talk about a sugar high now in such commonly accepted terms, flying in the face of how science has shown us that bodies react to sugar, that its just a short-hand for a group of kids playing energetically. "Oh, they must be on a sugar high."

Joanna
(edited slightly by Sandra to protect the goofy.)

Sugar causes hyperactivity.

False, but repeated OFTEN in sitcoms and comedies, and by moms who want to limit and shame their kids.

BBC article on Sugar and Hyperactivity in which parents are tricked, and can't tell the difference

http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/children/9911/22/diet.sugar.myth.kids.wmd/
http://www.usnews.com/articles/science/medical-science/2008/12/17/5-surprising-holiday-health-myths.html I think you need a subscription to get to back issues.