Sugar Rush: Myth or Reality?

I've always subscribed to the belief that eating too much sugar will indeed cause a sugar rush ...a high, if you will, or a surge of crazy energy followed by a debilitating crash. That may sound a bit dramatic but I've been affected by this my entire life ...or have I?

While on the phone with my cousin this morning, talking about the affects of sugar on children, she brought up a conversation she had with some mutual friends of ours a couple weeks ago who informed her that studies had been done to prove the sugar rush theory is just a myth.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAT!?!?!?!??!?!??!

...was my first reaction ...and hers as well but she told me that she read some of the studies proving it to be a myth and there weren't really any against it.



Thoughts of young girls drinking Shirly Temples thinking they were Cosmopolitans and "acting" drunk because of it pierced my brain. Is it really just a placebo affect? Have I been faking sugar highs since I was four years old?




Feeling like an absolute fool, I had to do some research of my own to prove my theory but did indeed find more than one article/study on the affects of sugar and the myth of the sugar high.

The Journal of the American Medical Association ran a survey of 23 comparatively rigorous studies conducted between 1982 and 1994 where children were given food or drinks containing a known quantity of sugar or artificial sweetener as a placebo and their behavior was observed and tested afterward. The tests were double blinded: neither the children, parents nor the researchers knew which children were getting the sugar and which were getting the placebo.



Their Findings:

“The meta-analytic synthesis of the studies to date found that sugar does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children. The strong belief of parents may be due to expectancy and common association. However, a small effect of sugar or effects on subsets of children cannot be ruled out.”


Another study done by the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology in 1994 by Daniel Hoover and Richard Milich, where they tested 31 boys ages five to seven and their mothers, all of whom had described their offspring as being "behaviorally affected by sugar" produced similar results.

This study also used "artificial sweetener" as a placebo but told half of the mothers that they were given the "real thing" instead. In reality, all the kids had the placebo but...

"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."


What I'm not too sure of is how an "artificial sweetener" (aspartame) is a placebo? Shouldn't they have tested sugar against no sugar at all? Or simple sugars from fruit tested against corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup used in processed foods like, let's just say store-bought birthday cake?

While I want to believe that it is a myth {even though it feels like I was just told there was no Santa or God}, I'm not sure that all the tests were definitive. They didn't take into consideration many other variables that I feel, should have been included, for instance, I never really reach for sugary hard candy, it's always chocolate for me. So maybe it's the caffeine in the chocolate giving me the "rush" I am feeling. I didn't read any studies that mentioned that.

Then again, maybe I have an impaired glucose tolerance which is why I feel particularly sensitive to sugar . . . or maybe it's just my mother's persuasiveness inducing a sugar high placebo affect ...still, at 32 years of age?


So moms, what are your thoughts? How were your kids yesterday after finding their Easter baskets? ...and non-moms, how do you feel after eating sugar? How do you feel after reading this? ...because I may still be on the fence.



Sources: The Straight Dope, WikiAnswers, Rationalmoms.com, The Journal of the American Medical Association