Sugar Makes Children Hyperactive
"The common belief that eating sugary food or drinks causes children to become wild, restless, or unable to concentrate."
The link between sugar and hyperactive behaviour has been tested directly and repeatedly, and it doesn't hold up. The landmark study is a 1995 meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association, led by Mark Wolraich, which combined 23 separate double-blind, placebo-controlled experiments from 16 published reports and found that sugar had no measurable effect on children's behaviour or cognitive performance across 14 different behavioural and cognitive measures. Wolraich had also run a direct trial the year before, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1994, feeding children, including some whose parents specifically described them as "sugar-sensitive", diets high in sucrose, aspartame, or saccharin in turn, and tracking 39 behavioural and cognitive measures. It found no meaningful differences either. What actually seems to drive the belief is expectation rather than sugar itself: in a separate study, mothers who were simply told their child had been given sugar (when none actually had) rated their child as noticeably more hyperactive than mothers who were told the truth.