Chen Zhu's team found liver cancer incidence about 69 per cent lower after early-life sugar rationing
In Chen Zhu's PNAS study of more than 64,000 people born between 1951 and 1956, liver cancer incidence was about 69 per cent lower. The exposure window is early life, not adulthood.
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Liver cancer incidence was about 69 per cent lower in the PNAS sugar-rationing study
Wartime sugar rationing ended in September 1953, and a study in PNAS covering more than 64,000 people born between 1951 and 1956 treats that abrupt change as a natural experiment: those whose earliest months fell under rationing later showed about 69 per cent lower liver cancer incidence and about 36 per cent lower breast cancer incidence. Chen Zhu and colleagues also report reduced incidence of prostate, rectal and lung cancer, and telomere lengths corresponding to roughly 2.2 years of slower biological ageing. The design compares people born a few months apart, which removes much of the usual confounding by family income or region, but it cannot separate sugar from everything else that changed as rationing ended, and telomere length remains a marker rather than a patient outcome. The exposure window is early life, so the finding says nothing about cutting sugar in adulthood.[1]
Working memory held up in the Yale medium-chain triglyceride trial
In people with type 1 diabetes put through controlled hypoglycaemia, a diet enriched with medium-chain triglycerides supplied the brain with ketone bodies and preserved working-memory performance better than the standard diet. A Yale-led team reports those findings in the journal Diabetes. The idea is metabolic substitution: when glucose runs short the brain can burn ketones instead, and medium-chain fats raise ketone levels without the strictness of a ketogenic diet. Raimund Herzog and first author Domenico Tricò frame this as protection during hypoglycaemic episodes rather than a way of preventing them. The report does not give the number of participants, so the size of the effect and who it applies to cannot be judged from it, and continuous glucose monitoring — which would identify the people at risk — is still not available to everyone who needs it.[2]
Putting the indigo band back into indoor lamps, Richard Lang's team slowed eye elongation in tree shrews
Daylight carries wavelengths between 419 and 446 nanometres that ordinary LEDs, peaking near 450 nanometres, largely leave out; adding that band back to indoor lighting slowed the eye elongation behind myopia in tree shrews. A Cincinnati Children's and University of Alabama at Birmingham team reports those findings in Cell Reports Medicine. Richard Lang and first author Rafael Grytz propose the missing band as one explanation for the spread of short-sightedness as childhood moved indoors; projections put half the world's population, roughly 5 billion people, in the myopic range by 2050. The animal is a near-primate whose eye grows much like a child's, and laboratories use that likeness; it remains an animal. Nobody has yet shown that indigo-enriched lamps prevent myopia in children. The group's next step is to install the lighting in daycare centres and follow what happens to the children's eyes.[3]
