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  • Sugar makes children hyper”. Weve all heard this before and maybe youve even

  • observed it in kids. But actually it's a misconception. There are lots of widely

  • believed misconceptions about science that are just plain wronglikeYou only

  • use ten percent of your brain”. You really use one hundred percent of your brain. I hope

  • that doesn’t surprise you.

  • These are few misconceptions about sugar that I’ve noticed in the past few months.

  • Sugar Makes Children Hyperactive

  • At least a dozen studies have looked at how children behave on diets containing different

  • levels of sugarboth natural sugars you find in fruit and added sugars you find in

  • chocolate or candy and lollies. None of these studies found significant differences in behaviour

  • between kids who had sugar and kids that didn’t. And in another study, parents who thought

  • their kids had just consumed a sugary drink, rated their kidsbehaviour as more hyperactive.

  • Even though that drink was really sugar free.

  • Often it’s kids surroundings that influence them to be hypertheyre excited, with friends

  • or at a birthday party. And parents often attribute this behaviour to sugar.

  • Sugar rots your teeth

  • It is correct to say that sugar can cause tooth decay, but technically it doesn’t directly rot

  • your teeth.

  • In your mouth you have 500 to 1000 different types of bacteria, kind of gross. And a few species of these

  • are thought to cause cavities. The main culprit is Streptococcus mutans. S. mutans loves to

  • feed on the carbohydrates left on your teeth as residue, from sugars or from starch in

  • bread or potatoes. From this S. mutans produces high levels of lactic acid, which diffuses

  • into the tooth and your enamel begins to dissolve.

  • Of course, the more sugar you eat, the more residue you have left on your teeth.

  • Certain areas on your tongue sense different tastes

  • You may have seen this well-structured Tongue Map before, but there’s no one area for

  • different taste receptors on your tongue.

  • This myth is thought to originate from one study in 1901, but it wasn’t debunked until

  • 1974.

  • Really, your taste buds are all over your tongue. They live in your papillae, the tiny

  • bumps that give your tongue its rough texture. In your taste buds there’s different cells so

  • they respond to sweet, sour, salty, bitter or umami tastesumami being the taste

  • of glutamate that gives meat and delicacies like Vegemite their savory flavour. Your taste

  • cells have 50 to 150 receptors for each taste, when theyre stimulated they send messages

  • to the brain, where those specific tastes are perceived.

  • Now, the reason I noticed these misconceptions is because I actually believed a couple of

  • them myself. You may have seen the episodes I did last month on sugar – I did quite a lot

  • of research for them and even had someone fact check my scripts. But, I'd still included

  • a couple of things that weren’t entirely correct.

  • DeluxeFlame and some others pointed outWhen you talked about sweetness receptors on the

  • tongue, you showed an image that highlighted the tip of the tongue. Correct me if I’m

  • wrong but isn’t that a myth proven busted? The whole tongue senses all tastes.”

  • And youre totally right, it does.

  • rdizzy pointed out, “Studies have shown recently that it’s not sugar at all that causes tooth

  • decay, it’s lactic acid produced from bacterium eating sugar that stays on the teeth for too

  • long.” Yes and yes! But keep in mind that sugar is pretty central to that loop.

  • What I find most concerning is that the tongue map myth was busted in 1974.

  • When I was in high school, which wasn’t all that long ago, the tongue map was in our textbooks,

  • and, after that, when I was teaching, the tongue map was in our teaching materials. I never questioned

  • it and I still believed it years later.

  • As Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you

  • are the easiest person to fool."

  • So I just wanted to say a big thank you for all of your comments, I definitely appreciate them, I read all of

  • them and this show wouldn’t be what it is without you guys and what you have to say.

  • See you next week.

Sugar makes children hyper”. Weve all heard this before and maybe youve even

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