So the study does actually address that , and found that indeed people who didnt eat the sugar in those first 3 years tended to consume less later in life.

Annecdotally (which isnt evidence!) that rings true to me. My mother was pretty strict on no sugar and minimal salt (in the 1970s the thinking on salt linked it a lot closer to heart disease than current thinking does which has de-emphasized that a little), and nowdays I pretty much never put it in my food and shy away from sweet food, and use pretty mini

"It suggests" if you ignore that their confounder control is terrible. First, sugar wasn't the only restricted food in post-war Britain - there was also rationing of eggs, butter, cheese and meats that ended during the same timeperiod. So you're not actually testing the effects of sugar consumption, now are you? Also, the early 1950s was a period of rapid change in the US, including the maturation and expansion of the NHS (founded in 1948), the introduction of new childhood vaccines, major environmental shifts (for example, the Great Smog of London in 1952 vs. the 1956 Clean Air Act). Saying "all changes = sugar" just based on birthdate seems absurd.

It's also worth mentioning that there's also survivorship bias - anyone who died before the study couldn't be enrolled, and there's also no actual linking to any maternal / childhood dietary logs. Also, the ratios of cancer differences they're describing aren't small, they're massive . Are we to attribute a lung cancer difference on the order of smoking vs. nonsmoking households as being to sugar, or due to, you know, smoking (or pollution) trends not accounted for in their cohort?

> It suggests that people who learn good habits early tend to follow them for their entire lives.

By attributing this primarily to "habits" I think you're minimizing the difficulty here. Maybe because in English we use "habit" to describe both an accustomed and reflexive action, and a biological addiction?

The distinction is important. TFS says "children born just a few months apart had very different levels of sugar exposure both in the womb and during early childhood". It also says "early-life sugar exposure continued to affect people's diets even 50 years later".

From those I deduce both a five-alarm f

Medical researchers are not always especially good at distinguishing between correlation and causation.

My candy thermometer has "Hard Crack" on the scale, so this is clearly true.

The question is rather how you weigh a life without sugar against a life with cancer?

Or, more precisely, a life with limited sugar against a life with a chance of cancer.

Sugar is fine. Half the items in a grocery store having ingredient labels starting with "high fructose corn syrup" is not fine.

We have very reliable findings to suggest that limited energy intake is fatal.

It's in the summary.

rolls_eyes maybe_right(arg, arg);

I don't often say this. But you're fucking retarded.

Good point. Bacon, butter, and sugar were rationed first. Meat, tea, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereals, cheese, eggs, lard, milk, canned and dried fruit were all rationed afterwards to some degree.

Fresh fruit, vegetables were not rationed, although things like lemons and bananas were rare if any were available at all. Oranges were saved for pregnant women and children when available.

People were encouraged to, and did grow their own fruits and vegetables. Game like rabbits were not rationed, but during the wa