The " sugar rush".

I have seen 3 small boys at a family party sitting on the stairs giggling helplessly after having unaccustomed fizzy drinks, and am quite convinced that a sugar rush exists! It took ages for them to come down from it too.

I think they get over excited and it leads to the appearance of the 'sugar rush'. They can run around and be silly whilst blaming sugar.

I wish I could have a rush of some kind. I drink coffee with 2 sugars all day, and haven't had one yet. I must have built up my immunity..

You're quite right Daddima any healthy child with a normal pancreas will not have a sugar rush.

Children will be boisterous and excited when at parties or playing with pals.

If you tell a child sugar will affect him, advantage will be taken! But anything that reduces sugar consumption may be classed as a harmless white lie, I suppose.

I cut out sugar some years ago, then caved in to temptation one afternoon when a friend brought a battenburg round and I turned into Miss Trunchbull. It certainly wasn't an enjoyable high, I felt very tense and irritable.

There no is such thing. However, some children have allergies to coloured foods (yellow or green) and that can be passed off as a sugar rush to those who don't know this... most, if not all children get super excited for any kind of party.

While I accept that scientific tests have proved that the so-called 'sugar rush' does not exist, I know that my DGC, if given sweets or cake, will runup and down the garden (or the living room if it's wet) like the Duracell bunny... No particular reason - and she's not like it if she hadn't had sugary food (& she's alone, so not excited by others). I have no explanation for this - but her behaviour really does seem linked to sugar intake.
I've also know a child who was definitely very badly affected by E numbers - he was always lively, but his behaviour turned 'nasty' if he'd had sweets etc containing E numbers; without them he was a delightful handful...!

Have to watch the sugar intake of my 5 year old dgd. If she has too much, and that could be a fizzy drink, she is uncontrollable to the state of hysteria. She is getting better but it's still something we have to watch.

I overindulged one evening on cakes and I couldn't get to sleep for hours so.....YES there is such a thing as a sugar rush.

If you eat sugar then your body produces more insulin. I think that every person is different in how they experience this. so it seems that sugar rush is a sudden and brief burst of energy supposedly experienced after the consumption of food or drink with a high sugar content.

Probably if a child is given a spoonful of sugar (or two) it won't cause a rush but when combined with other ingredients in fizzy drinks and sweets it certainly can have an effect.

Don't know if there's a sugar rush, but I do know that if I'm really tired on the way home, a couple of sweets or a sugar cube will give me enough energy to shop and get home.

I am trying hard to stick to a low carb diet, but the sugar thing is the hardest. I guess that I (we all) were brought up eating a lot of sugar, home baked cakes, biscuits, drinks, etc. It was brought home to me a few years ago, when I brought home some strawberries for my grandchildren and my mother said "mash them up with some sugar". That´s the way we nearly always had fruit. With sugar. And it would have been unthinkable to just drink plain water, the way my grandchildren drink now. We always had orange squash. I always get a yearning for sugar late of an evening and usually have a small chocolate bar. Feel dead guilty but can´t help myself.

'Sugar rush' is an American invention and just an excuse for bad behaviour management. Unless you are diabetic, within 15 minutes of absorption of sugar in any form, your body will have restored the blood to a normal level of glucose. If it did not, you would rapidly suffer damage to vital organs, and that is what happens in uncontrolled diabetes. Of course, it's really a very bad idea to have a lot of sugary things, but the notion of 'sugar rush' is at best just a psychological condition brought about by expectation. If you continue to eat and drink sugary things, you will end up with insulin insensitivity which is characteristic of Type 2 diabetes, but NO SUGAR RUSH!

Whether it is sugar, E numbers and the like, or a combination, I have seen how some foods affect children. Notably, one child I taught was always 'good' in the mornings and 'horrid' after lunch and his packed lunch was full of processed foods and sugary drinks. I did suggest to his parents, who were nice people, but clearly struggling with him, that they might want to think through his diet and possible sensitivity to food colourings in particular. Despite being anxious, they were completely unwilling to consider this.

Riverwalk
Haven't we all craved for a tea/coffee with sugar to give us a 'lift.' I do not normally take sugar in tea or coffee
how ever in my employment days when working over my normal hours I would finish that day with a tea or coffee and a spoon of sugar.
It saw me through my journey home in other words energy. I didn't go to sleep and miss my stop.
Energy is 'catching' where children are concerned You only have to watch them in groups in playgrounds
Stand a child alone in an empty playground what does he do but stand.
I do not consider it dangerous to give a child sugary drinks in moderation as with anything else he/ she eats or drinks unless diagnosed with a medical condition
The danger is premature tooth decay which is on the increase.

I don't think sugar causes 'high' behaviour, but my daughter (who was a very quiet and reserved little girl) reacted very badly after eating a tube of Smarties, including the much hyped (at the time) blue ones. She was leaping about, giggling, jumping on and off the sofa, and became very loud and confident; all behaviours she never normally exhibited. She was never allowed to eat Smarties again, and she reverted to her normal, rather reserved self by the next day!

Incidentally my children very rarely ate sweets of any kind, but she received the Smarties from a birthday party she had attended, and we allowed to eat them all in one go as we believed it was better for her teeth that wasy.

Several years ago they ran a test on Supernanny where half the children were given snacks full of sugar and the parents had to guess whether their child had had the sugar. Most of the parents turned out to be completely wrong and whatever was turning their little darlings into monsters it wasn't the sugar

Sugar causes high activity in some and not in others. I do not like the feeling, for myself. I limit all sugar to those in my home.

Masses of sugar is bad to teeth, rush or not.

Quite right Deedaa. People often confuse correlation with causation. After all, it is true to say that shoe size has a strong correlation with reading ability. Seems strange at first, but when you think about it, children of 4 take a small shoe size and usually cannot read, whereas 16 year olds take a large shoe size and can usually read very well. Does anyone think that foot growth causes good reading? No, of course not, the underlying factor is development and exposure to education! Little girls who go to parties get over-excited and often observe behaviour which they then 'try on' at home. The fact that they drank fizzy pop and ate Smarties or cake is incidental. Maddy - is it not the case that your daughter was testing the boundaries and found that her new behaviour was not welcome, so reverted to normal thereafter. There are proper studies of this, and there is nothing in it, although families still like to cling to the idea that there is, perhaps because it externalises the problem. A statistical technique called regression analysis is very useful for partialling out something that's likely to be causative. Unfortunately, our emotional brains go for the 'quick and dirty' route and can sometimes lead us to wrong conclusions. Of course people should strive to eliminate sugary items from their diets for very good reasons, but 'sugar rush' is not one of them

The scientific evidence is that thee is no such thing. One research group used double blind tests with children and parents.

The children were all given a flavoured sugar free drink. Some parents were told their child's drink had sugar in it. The majority of parents told their children had had a sugary drink perceived 'sugar rush' symptoms in their children during the afternoon. None, told their child had not consumed a sugary drink, did.

The same applied when the children were given a sugary drink and some parents were told it was sugar free. Only those parents told their child had been given a sugary drink though their behaviour after consuming it was hyper. Those told the drink did not include sugar, saw no change in their child's behaviour.

All kinds of things make children veer to over-excited behaviour, artificial flavourings, lots of attention, unfamilar places, having friends round, knowing parents are on edge. But sugar?, no.

Now, I don´t know about "sugar rush", the contributors on this page seem to be split about half and half. But my point was that sugar and especially sugary carbonated drinks are addictive. My son, who is in his 30s and works very long hours is weaning himself off sugary drinks, I know because whenever he comes to me, I hear him going to the pantry where I used to keep the odd bottle of pop. Don´t buy them any more. My grandchildren (2 and 4) don´t even know what they are yet.