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Children, sugar and building good habits early

Children like sweet things, and that is not going to change. What can change is which sugars they eat, and what they understand about them. Dr Coy’s research looks at sugars the body handles differently from ordinary table sugar.

Hidden sugars in food marketed to children

A great many foods and drinks aimed at children contain high levels of sugar, including products presented as the better option. Cereal bars, flavoured yoghurts, smoothies and fruit juices often carry more sugar than parents expect.

Product labels are the most reliable guide. They show both the type and the quantity of sugars in a product, and reading them is the single most useful habit a parent can build.

It is also a habit worth passing on. A child who can read a label understands something. A child who has been told sugar is bad has only been given a rule, and rules about food tend not to survive contact with a birthday party.

Tooth decay

The relationship between added sugar and dental caries in children is one of the best established in nutrition. Dentists see the consequences daily, and tooth decay remains one of the most common reasons for children in the UK to be admitted to hospital.

Weight gain and childhood obesity.

Childhood obesity has risen steadily, and sugar-sweetened drinks in particular have been associated with it. A 2023 study across 107 countries and regions reported an association between soft drink consumption and overweight and obesity in adolescents.

Type 2 diabetes

Type 2 diabetes in children was once so unusual that the condition was known as adult-onset diabetes. It is no longer unusual. Diet and weight in childhood are among the factors associated with it.

The sugar rush and what follows it

There is also the pattern every parent recognises. A sugary snack produces a fast rise in blood glucose. The pancreas responds by releasing insulin, which moves glucose out of the blood and into the cells. Because the rise was steep, the fall can overshoot, leaving blood glucose lower than it was to begin with.

What follows is the dip. Tiredness, irritability, difficulty concentrating, and hunger again soon after eating. It is not the sugar itself causing the mood, it is the fall that comes after it.

Adults experience the same curve. The difference is what happens next. An adult feels the dip and mostly manages it, or at least recognises what it is. A younger child has neither the vocabulary nor the self-regulation, so the dip comes out in behaviour instead.

This is the pattern Dr Coy’s work is built around, and his starting point is that taking sugar away is not the answer. A growing child needs it. The brain runs on glucose, and children need more of it relative to their size than adults do. His conclusion is that the problem is not the sugar but the shape of the curve it produces, and that a sugar arriving gradually never climbs high enough to need a steep correction. No spike, no dip.

Consumption of foods/drinks containing tagatose instead of other sugars induces a lower blood glucose rise after their consumption compared to sugar-containing foods/drinks.*

The sugars Dr Coy works with

Following that reasoning, his research concentrates on sugars that are sweet but take a different route through the body. Two of the three below occur naturally in milk, which he takes as an indication that children are equipped to handle them.

Tagatose:

Almost as sweet as table sugar with substantially fewer calories, because only a small part of it is absorbed in the small intestine. Much of the rest reaches the colon, where gut bacteria ferment it. It produces a lower blood glucose rise than sugar, and can also reduce the rise produced by sugars eaten alongside it.

Galactose:

Found naturally in fermented milk products such as buttermilk and kefir. It is metabolised by a different route from glucose. A 1989 study examined galactose in relation to caries formation, and Dr Coy’s research has looked at how it is handled by the body compared with ordinary sugar.

Isomaltulose:

The same calorie content as table sugar, but broken down more slowly, so glucose is released into the blood over a longer period rather than all at once.

Tagatose, isomaltulose and children’s teeth

Consumption of foods/drinks containing tagatose instead of other sugars contributes to the maintenance of tooth mineralisation.*

This applies where a food or drink does not lower plaque pH below 5.7 during consumption and for up to 30 minutes afterwards.

Using these sugars at home

These sugars can be used in place of table sugar in most of the things children eat at home. Stirred into natural yoghurt rather than buying a pre-sweetened one. In baking. On fruit.

The wider point is about what children learn. Treating sugar as forbidden tends to make it more interesting rather than less, and children who grow up with food framed as a moral question often carry that framing into adulthood.

The habits formed in childhood are the ones that last. A child who learns early what different sugars do, and who is used to the gentler curve rather than the spike and the crash, starts adult life with that as the normal way food feels. That, more than any single meal, is what Dr Coy’s work on children is aimed at.

Our recipes page has ideas for cooking and baking with Dr Coy’s sugars.

View Recipes

* Dr Coy’s sugars are one part of a varied and balanced diet.

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Get in touch with Intelligent Sugar

Got a question about Dr Coy’s sugars? Contact info@intelligentsugar.info

If you have a question about a specific health condition, please speak to your doctor.