back

by zug_zug·2y ago·view on hn ↗
Sorry what? This is just out of the realm of plausibility.

There's a reason why academics no longer use sugar-pills as placebo, because sugar has immediate psychological effects.

-------

Edit: Just read it, the blog author doesn't understand statistics.

"—Sixteen reports met the inclusion criteria for a total of 23 within-subject design studies. The weighted mean effect size and related statistics for each of the 14 measurement constructs revealed that although the range for these means was from -0.14 for direct observations and up to +0.30 for academic tests, the 95% confidence interval for all 14 mean effect sizes included 0."

So there's a world of difference between "The studies didn't prove X" and "The studies proved X is not true."

To illustrate - I could do a study right now on myself about whether getting hit on the head reduces IQ, and odds are, I wouldn't have enough data to prove anything. Doesn't mean I proved the opposite.

Also, if the article wasn't paywalled I'd be curious how many grams of sugar were given etc, but probably not even worth my time. I also think that a placebo of artificial sweetener is dubious unless we are sure those can't cause behavior changes too.

8 comments
You may find the results surprising, but there is plenty of experimental evidence that sugar rushes, as popularly conceived, simply don’t occur in children.

Google ‘No such thing as a sugar rush’ to get a feel for how long this has been studied.

I can’t find anything to suggest that sugar pills were dropped as a placebo because of sugar’s effects.

I recall reading that people recognize the taste of sugar as differ then typical taste of medicine, so they conclude they are in placebo group.

So they guve them placebo people won't recognize as a placebo. Nothing to do with biological effect of sugar.

Well if there is plenty of evidence, perhaps it should be linked here rather than this relatively weak meta-study that confuses the absence of evidence with the evidence of absence.
After a short google search I am not seeing information that sugar is no longer used for placebos.

It's also already established knowledge that 'sugar makes kids hyper' is urban myth; this specific phenomenon is used as an example by countless psychology and epistemology university textbooks.

I think it's only for short-term psychological measures

Here's a study highlighting the psychological effects of sugar

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...

If you tell parents that their kids have had sugar, they will report those children as behaving hyperactively whether they've actually had sugar or not. It's a consistent outcome.

It's one of those things that you can't convince people of because there's some things they have a deep need to "know."

Other things that you can't convince people of: the caffeine levels in coffee don't really keep people awake (they'll still stay up if you slip them decaf), and that there never were any significant numbers of people putting razor blades in Halloween apples (other than parents looking for attention.)

Two things can be true.
yes, you're right about that being a misinterpretation of 'could not reject the null hypothesis'.

i couldn't get the full text of the meta-analysis, but i've read similar studies in the past and one critical effect was that parent's ratings about perceived hyperactivity were heavily affected by whether the parent thought their child received sugar but there was no effect detected based on whether the children actually received sugar.

so it doesn't completely rule out whether sugar has an effect, but it does show that parental 'hyperactivity detectors' are broken and will be biased based on whether they think their kid had sugar (so you and everybody else should look at your anecdotal expereience with suspicion)

> but it does show that parental 'hyperactivity detectors' are broken

I'll grant that some are for sure. But it doesn't mean other parents can't quietly and effectively notice their children's responses to various foods.

Frankly any sort of research on behaviors imo should eventually move to scoring by completely objective measures (e.g. computer assessment of whether they can watch a screen for 30 seconds and how often they look away, or whether they can read a paragraph)

That seems pretty pointless given that the "hyperactivity" under study is a condition operationally defined by asking the parent.
objective measures would be great for the physiological questions about a link between sugar and hyperactivity.

but these studies are about our cultural beliefs in the link between sugar and hyperactivity which requires subjective measures.

> So there's a world of difference between "The studies didn't prove X" and "The studies proved X is not true."

Right, because the second isn't possible in the real world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

> Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others.

> Russell specifically applied his analogy in the context of religion.[1] He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.

No, that's not it at all.

What you would do is you would have a higher standard of proof. If you conduct a study with a 95% confidence interval that sugar doesn't increase excitement more than 5% then, you can say with 95% confidence the mean falls above that 5% threshold.

However in this study, that confidence intervals were all over the place (from huge effect on mood to negative effect on mood) which generally means you need more participants to conclude anything.

Thanks for this. I will take it into account when I give some sugar to my child in the evening. I really "can see" that she has need to put out this sugar which sometimes she gets by running left and right, doing super energetic things, and if put to bed, she'll just randomly rotate for another hour. Usually it's been associated with an occasion, but recently I gave her something like a milk but with tons of sugar before sleep, and she was rolling in bed like a drill, and there was no special occasion or events that day...
Yeah, I've had this conversation with a friend who has a kid about the same age as mine. He swears that there's no such thing as a sugar rush, whereas I absolutely see it in my kid and there's nothing you can tell me to make me think otherwise.

As far as I can tell, the difference in our opinion comes down to general diet - his kid has a sweet cereal for breakfast and generally has a high sugar diet, whereas my kid absolutely does not. She has a single small sweetie at the end of the day after dinner.

Any time she gets spoiled (by someone else!) I can see her eyes widen and her energy levels go up and her behaviour become more bouncy and erratic about 10-20 minutes after consumption, lasting another 20-40 minutes thereafter.

Perhaps its genes or something else too, but I swear to god it's not simply 'confirmation bias'.

People in South America have never seen sugar rushes in real life, and every single child is given sugar every day. A common breakfast and afternoon snack includes coffee(!) with lots of milk and sugar.

If genes were involved we would expect the prevalence to be different, but there is no way that not a single South American child has the right genes for sugar rush.

Is sugar rush a culture-bound syndrome?

Yes, that's the point i was making - kids who have lots of sugar don't seem to be affected, as it's just their baseline, whereas kids who don't have a lot of sugar do seem to exhibit it.

Curiously, my friend's partner's Argentinian, so... .

It might depend on how literally you mean "have lots of sugar".

If the dominant component really is physicalist/biological then things that actually contain sugar but don't look like they contain sugar will cause sugar rushes. For example fruit juice, ketchup, pizza.

If it's cultural/psychological then only things that are "sugar-coded" will produce the effect. Like candy, syrup, ice cream, soft drinks.

If you feel like doing some mad science, see if you can give your kids a rush using sugar-free coke or something like that.

Sadly, I've informed my daughter that she can't have coke until she's 22 :)

Also, I'm 'one of those' and avoid sugar-free alternatives.

For sure though, I can't say I've much noticed it in the likes of fruit smoothies and such, nor when she has a lollypop or some other sugar-laden thing that takes time to consume.

But if she’s being spoiled then isn’t she in a situation in which she’d probably be excited anyway? At a party or grandmas house or wherever novel situation it is in which she is getting an unusual treat?
No, I account for that - also, I do buy her an icelolly or whatever at the end of an excited day and she upticks when I'd not expect her to.

I can't relay each and every data point from the last few years but I have noticed.

in the name of science, you could get gel caps, fill some of them with sugar and some with something else, say, xylitol, have someone else blind you so you don't know which is which and just test it for months and see what happens.

shame we can't actually do experiments like that.

Beating an old, weathered drum -

How can people be so disconnected that they believe some paper on the internet over their own bodies? Try drinking a big glass of fruit juice and observing that:

- there's a near-immediate "up" effect

- that's stronger the less sugar/carbs you've ingested recently

- consuming a lot of refined sugar traps you in a up/crash cycle that looks a lot like (a milder version of) drug dependence

It's because personal experience lies to you a lot. People are garbage at consistently and accurately recalling events over time unless they're taking notes about what's happening and reviewing those. It's also important to note what the studies are actually looking at, it isn't saying there's no energy boost but that there's no effect on "children’s behavior or cognition" people misremember and misattribute things all the time so it's important to study things scientifically it's the whole reason we use the technique.
We can't measure everything. Self-reporting + averaging misses subtle results, or even regular-sized results looked at the wrong way.

There's also the secondary layer - people are social creatures, and adjust our behavior to match what is allowed or expected.

The scientific system is designed for inanimate objects that function the same way every time. Why is it so hard to believe that the test is flawed, not the experience?

> Why is it so hard to believe that the test is flawed, not the experience?

It's multiple tests performed multiple ways by different people thinking about how to adapt to the issues that trying to measure people poses. That's far more convincing to me than adhoc non rigorous common knowledge. We're so beset by failures in our ability to draw good conclusions from non rigorous anecdata, confirmation bias, selection bias, hidden factors, faulty recall, etc, that I'm really hard pressed to believe anecdotal data when it contradicts multiple studies.

As someone with diabetes. Yes yes yes.

As someone who runs distance, yes yes yes.

Here is a better question:

Does higher blood sugar make someone feel higher energy? If we can solve that problem, we can likely answer the question about children using logic rather than subjectives.

Have you considered that your experience may not be universal? I don’t experience any of what you’re talking about.
Yes, if you are hungry and eat sugar, it metabolizes fast and you will be more active. That is not sugar high, that is how you should be all the time, you was just numbed by hunger.
I'd suggest getting tested for insulin resistance / prediabetes.
With things like this, we trust papers over ourselves because of confirmation bias and the placebo effect. The sugar rush in particular is very culturally prominent, so the seeds of that bias are well-planted in all of us.

Arguing against that principle is arguing for pseudo-science: “Acupuncture works, I tried it!,” “Crystal-healing works, I tried it! Don’t trust a paper over your own body!”

You could just as easily argue that photons stop moving when you close your eyes.
I've never experienced an "up" effective from fruit juice. Never as a child nor as an adult.

I presume it's because I never had that cultural expectation. I never heard of any of this "sugar rush" nonsense before I had access to the Internet, which wasn't until my late teens.