February 15, 2008 10:02am by Steve | 
Finally I’m vindicated! The Straight Dope tackles my biggest social pet peeve! There is no such thing as a Sugar Rush or Sugar High. It doesn’t exist, so stop perpetuating the myth!
This particular issue is a personal annoyance simply because of the sheer pervasiveness of the myth. On average, I hear somebody mention this myth at least once a day. It’s usually on television, but also quite often in the real world.
So please just stop it. Ingesting sugar does not change your behavior or give you a “rush” of any kind… except for the placebo effect generated from all your years of brainwashing and ignorance.
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Are there any studies where children were fed sugar to see what happens?
I don’t think I’ve ever had plain sugar, so can’t comment specifically on whether or not it creates an artificial high.
I do believe that the food you eat or drink can have an effect on your body, mood, or mental state. I think I live that every day.
I remember one day in college where I ate a whole bag of jolly ranchers. I was definitely a bit loopy in the evening. I have no idea what is in a Jolly Rancher, but I was definitely effected by something.
Yes there have been studies a number of them. I do not have a source right now but in one such study the one test group was given no sugar, and the other test group was given all they wanted.
There was no change in their behavior until parents were introduced into the equation at which time the parents "fearing" the negative effects of the sugar rush and chasing their kids around and talking about it actually induced something like a placebo effect on the kids.
The kids got nervous and began to act out. In reality sugar is not a drug, it does not have drug like properties that would act as an upper. If it did it would be regulated/identified as such.
Caffeine for example is a drug. It is a staple of our diets, it is also a drug. The same would be said of sugar if this were any more than an old wives tale.
Let it go people there is no sugar rush.
The sugar rush myth drives me crazy!!! I work with kids and I’m so sick of ignorant parents talking about it. Makes me want to scream. I could eat a pound of sugar and sleep like a baby.
In 1995 the Journal of the American Medical Association published a review of 23 comparatively rigorous studies conducted between 1982 and 1994. These were your classic controlled double-blind affairs: two groups of kids, one fed a bunch of sugar, the other given a placebo (i.e., artificial sweetener), everyone kept sufficiently in the dark as to who’d gotten what, etc.
The results? No discernible relationship between sugar ingested and how the kids acted. It didn’t matter how old they were, how much sugar they got, what their diets were like otherwise — nothing. The JAMA authors stopped shy of drawing any definitive conclusions, but if there were a legitimate sugar-high effect out there, you’d like to see it turn up in the lab every so often.
Given that so far it hasn’t, why would a sizable chunk of the child-rearing population continue to swear it exists? For a crucial piece of the puzzle we turn to the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology and a 1994 study by Daniel Hoover and Richard Milich, in which they looked at 31 boys ages five to seven and their mothers, all of whom had described their offspring as being “behaviorally affected by sugar.”
The mom-son teams were split into the customary two groups: the moms in one were told their sons would be given extra-sugary Kool-Aid, while the others were told their kids were in the control group and would get a drink sweetened with aspartame. In reality, though, the same artificially sweetened stuff was administered to both sets of kids while the women got a sheaf of surveys to fill out. Mothers and children were then videotaped playing together, after which the moms were asked how they thought things went.
What did Hoover and Milich find? You guessed it: 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.
From there, of course, it’s not too hard to whip up a hypothesis explaining why the sugar-high myth persists. Having always heard that sugar makes kids act crazy, some parents, particularly those hailing from the control-freak end of the spectrum, may go a little crazy themselves when the sugary stuff enters the picture. In situations where sweets are freely available to their children — like birthday parties or other high-stimulation events — they watch worriedly for any sign of obstreperousness, see it even if it’s not there, call it hyperactivity, and attribute it to the cookies and cake. Kids, meanwhile, typically aren’t oblivious to this sort of anxiety; consciously or not, they may well figure out that after taking on a load of candy they’re expected to run amok and happily oblige.
when a parent freaks out because a swig of soda has allegedly made his kid uncontrollable, it’s quite possible he’s not just seeing the behavior he expects to see, he’s helping create it.
— Cecil Adams
I knew that text looked familiar. I love the Straight Dope. Thanks!
Your last comment refers to a “swig of soda” and states that any hyperactivity would be caused by a mindset. In actuality, most sodas contain caffeine and would therefore increase hyperactivity in most children.
there is no such thing as sugar rush!!!!!! its just the excitment that gets you hyper