Breathalysing kids — for sugar

Thousands of schoolchildren are set to take experimental breath-tests in a sprawling study to reveal a littleunderstood sugar’s role in New Zealand’s childhood obesity epidemic.

The study, kicking off next year, will investigate how well Kiwi kids absorb fructose. While fructose is the least understood sugar in our diet, studies show it’s likely a major contributor to metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes.

The study’s leader, Professor Peter Shepherd of the Auckland Universitybased Maurice Wilkins Centre, said there had been much recent debate around how sugar was harming the health of children, but so far there had been surprisingly little hard research on its biological effects on the body.

This was particularly true for fructose — a substance that made up half of the white stuff we know as sugar.

“We do know that there is a wide variation between individuals in the amount of fructose that can be absorbed from the gut into our bloodstream,” Shepherd said. “Those who are good at absorbing fructose are going to retain more of the calories from sugar in our diet than those who don’t absorb fructose well.”

While this could explain why some kids were more at risk than others, there wasn’t any real data on how fructose uptake varied in school-age children — and how this related to metabolic problems like obesity.

“If our hypothesis is correct, the information will be important in identifying those most at risk from the modern food environment which will allow targeted interventions,” he said.

“I think it might allow us to focus more effort on those who are at most risk rather than spreading our limited resources thinly across everyone.”

In the study, targeted at schools with high proportions of Maori and Pasifika students, researchers will use a simple breath test that measures hydrogen gas to record fructose absorption rates.

The research, involving about 2000 students in its first year, would be done in partnerships with the schools, with teachers and students doing some experiments themselves.

The tests would be linked with specially designed teaching material about nutrition and health.

Shepherd said the study was unique, and Cambridge University researchers were now interested in replicating it in Europe.

The effort comes as Auckland researchers begin a separate study to test whether large-scale interventions targeted at sugary drinks in several Auckland school communities will help bring down rates of obesity.