Sugar Intake & Psychiatric Disorders

"....high-dietary sucrose consumption during adolescence is a potential risk factor for the development of behavioral phenotypes associated with psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
The daily caloric intake from simple sugar by teenagers is higher than that observed for other age groups (around 20% of total daily caloric intake).

---Most chronic psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and

bipolar disorder, develop before the age of 30 via complex interactions among multiple genetic and environmental risk factors.
Patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder consume approximately twofold more sugar than age-matched healthy individuals, and patients with schizophrenia who consume more sucrose exhibit more severe symptoms.

Moreover, the odds ratios for mental distress, hyperactivity, and

behavioral disorders are the highest among adolescents who self-
report the highest consumption of soft drinks.........“By combining the heterozygous mice with environmental factors of excessive sugar intake at the age of puberty, we successfully created a novel mouse model exhibiting various mental disorder-like symptoms, including decreased sensorimotor gating function, decreased working memory, hyperactivity, abnormal gamma-band component in EEG.....In other words, this demonstrates a possibility that the excessive intake of simple sugar at the age of puberty could be a risk factor of psychiatric disorders.”
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