Sugar Doesn’t Make Kids Hyper

Toddler parenting is an exercise in picking battles, and one I almost never pick is the battle over sugar. Quite often, my 2-and-a-half-year-old eats just a few bites of his meal before proclaiming himself “done, done, done,” yet mysteriously also desirous of dessert. Generally, at this point, I’ll give him a cookie, or whatever sweet he’s fixated on—yes, even if he hasn’t finished his healthy dinner, or if it’s almost bedtime, or if we’re somewhere I need him to behave.

I feel good about these choices because: science. For one thing, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations on added sugar are generous, allowing for more than an entire Klondike bar’s worth of it a day. For another, sugar doesn’t make kids hyper. The sooner parents internalize this, the sooner they can drop sugar policing from the dreaded mental load and reapportion that slot to some other parental drudgery, such as keeping track of spirit days.

Wherever a child is tipping over a bin of Legos or jumping on a couch, a “sugar rush” is bound to be blamed. Popular shows including The Office and Abbott Elementary have episodes in which characters eat too much sugar, go into overdrive, and crash. I’m often warned by other moms not to give my son anything sweet—by which I guess they mean any and all toddler food—before naptime.

Their admonitions, however, are misguided. “I know parents, and many people would love to be able to point the finger at sugar” when a child acts up, Jill Castle, a pediatric dietitian, told me. “But it just doesn’t hold up in the research.” A series of studies from the 1980s and ’90s, led by a prominent pediatrician named Mark Wolraich, helped break the connection between sugar and hyperactivity, which is generally defined as restlessness, poor behavior, and impulsivity.

In 1985, Wolraich and his colleagues studied 16 hyperactive boys who were fed a clinically monitored, sugar-free diet for a day, then given either a sugary or an artificially sweetened drink. The researchers found no difference in behavior or cognition between the boys who consumed the sugary drink and those who had the sugar-free one. In a 1994 double-blind, controlled trial, Wolraich found that when kids ate a high-sugar diet for three weeks, they performed no differently on a series of behavioral and cognitive measures than when they ate little sugar. In a 1995 meta-analysis, he examined the results of 23 studies and concluded that “sugar does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children.”

[Read: How baby-led weaning almost ruined my life]

For some children, sugar can have a slight sedative effect, and regularly consuming way too much can eventually put kids at risk for type 2 diabetes and obesity. The AAP recommends that kids ages 2 to 18 have no more than 25 grams of added sugar a day, the equivalent of about three fun-sized packages of M&Ms. (The guidance doesn’t apply to naturally occurring sugar, including the kind in fruit.) On special occasions such as Halloween, exceeding this limit is fine, Gwen Cook, a pediatrician at the University of Utah Hospital, told me. Many pediatricians discourage trying to eliminate sugar from a child’s diet entirely, Cook said, because doing so is “unnecessarily restrictive, especially socially.” No one wants to be the kid at a birthday party eating carrot sticks instead of cake.

Despite these findings, the sugar-hyperactivity myth has survived for decades because sugary foods tend to be served during celebrations that are otherwise chaotic and overstimulating, such as Halloween, Christmas, and birthdays. Some kids become wired at these festivities because the environment is novel and exciting, not because they’re eating chocolate. “They’re playing games; there’s music or decorations up that are different,” Cook said. “All of those things can feed into a child being more hyperactive.”

Parents may also expect kids to become hyper when they have sweets: In one study, mothers who were told that their kids had consumed a large dose of sugar rated their children as significantly more hyperactive than mothers who were told that their kids had received an artificially sweetened placebo—even though all of the kids had actually ingested the placebo. (This expectancy effect was stronger, the study authors said, for “cognitively rigid mothers.”) When kids eat sugar, parents may be more likely to interpret their behavior as wild, and attribute it to the sugar. So the myth lives on.

I also think parents persist in believing that sugar makes kids rambunctious for the same reason they believe in so many other dubious child-rearing fallacies. Parents long for an explanation for their kids’ inexplicable behavior and for a sense of control over it. If sugar really explained why kids became manic and naughty, parents could create peace by banning Skittles and soda. But sugar isn’t to blame, which leaves us to accept our kids for the frenzied, irrational beings that they are.