In this episode, Greg Dickens and I discuss recent news on how a child’s exposure to interparental violence is linked to their risk of cancer in adulthood. We talk about the effects of early life sleep deprivation and sugar restriction on the risk of dementia, and then review a paper on the skills required for children to stay home alone. We then talk about frustration tolerance - what it is, why it’s important, and why we might try avoiding modelling frustration behaviours for children. Finally, we talk about how we try to set children up to not want sugar.

For more information on how to reduce parental frustration, see this article: https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/making-children-unfrustratable-part

For more information on helping children to not want sugar, see this article: https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/raising-children-who-dont-want-sugar

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in bi-weekly articles and podcast episodes.

Everything is free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Leave a comment

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Topics covered

• How does exposure to interparental violence affects a child’s later cancer risk?

• How does early-life sleep deprivation affect a mouse’s risk of dementia?

• How does sugar restriction in infancy affect later brain health?

• Why should we raise children who aren’t easily frustrated?

• How can we reduce our own frustration?

• How much sugar do our own children eat?

Recent episodes

Notes

“Long-term impact of childhood exposure to interparental physical violence on cancer risk in adulthood: a prospective cohort study” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/20008066.2026.2708407

“Effects of early adulthood chronic sleep disruption on late life cognition, brain pathology, and microglial reactivity in the PS19 mouse model of tauopathy” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-63866-5

“Association of Sugar Restriction in Utero Through Age 2 Years on Dementia Risk Later in Life” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42525901/

“Home alone: aligning childhood supervision guidelines with child neurodevelopment” Full article here: https://academic.oup.com/pch/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/pch/pxag059/8732036 and commentary from the author here: https://theconversation.com/when-can-your-child-stay-home-alone-neuroscience-suggests-were-asking-the-wrong-question-288575

Suddenly, the bowman, Patrick, tensed and pointed. Vincent, the steersman changed course and accelerated towards the bank, trying to scare the caiman up the bank rather than underwater.

But, despite Patrick’s repeated reminders to do so earlier in the evening, he hadn’t accounted for the strength of the stream.

“More left! More left!” hissed Patrick.

To my surprise, following a truly spectacular leap from our friend in the bow, we did catch the caiman.

But something had surprised me even more.

The whisper of frustration in Patrick’s voice.

That had been the first time I’d seen any Amerindian adult show any signs of frustration. Not just in Patrick, not just in his village, but in his entire culture: frustration just didn’t seem to be a thing.

What is frustration?

Before its recent GenZ upgrades, the Oxford English Dictionary defined frustration as ‘the prevention of the progress, success, or fulfilment of something.’ Often, we use the term (as does the OED. See definition 2!) to also refer to the feeling of being upset or annoyed when we are prevented from progress, success, or fulfilment.

Because we modern humans are lingual processors* (i.e. we think in words - leading to, amongst other things, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is awesome - you should look it up), if we use the same word for two things, we can find it very difficult to pull apart our emotional responses to those things. When we’re young both make us mad. We get frustrated at being frustrated*.

As we grow up, however, the event should lose its sting. We should experience less and less emotional response to frustrating situations. We should develop ‘frustration tolerance’.

Our quality of life as adults is dependent on handling many sorts of setbacks, difficulties, and hardships without experiencing a counterproductive emotional outburst. Eating healthily, sleeping well, keeping moving - none of these are without their frustrations, and none of them (for most of us) give immediate reward. If we can tolerate that and do the thing anyway, we’ll benefit in the long run. Frustration tolerance sets us up for a healthy life.

Frustration tolerance also sets us up for a successful life. A person who is unfrustratable can take a scattershot approach to success - trying a thousand approaches to find the one that works, and then sticking with it until fruition. But, without the opportunity to learn through trial-and-error, an adult who can’t deal with frustration will be a difficult colleague, a short-term friend, and an impatient and angry parent.

So, helping children learn to manage their emotional responses to frustration sets them up for better long-term health, happiness, and achievement. How do we do that?

What do children need in order to learn tolerance for frustration?

Learning frustration tolerance is a simple two step process:

1. Learn frustration tolerance by watching adults deal with frustrating events calmly and easily.

2. Practice what you’ve learnt during your own frustrating events and experience the joy of having things work out better for you because you’ve been calm and measured.

Sounds straightforward enough.

Apart from the first part, because it’s harder than ever to find an adult who reliably reacts to frustrating events quietly, calmly, and with unreduced determination to succeed. Some people might like to blame this on our media culture, which strongly rewards loud outbursts and grand drama, but it’s more realistic that this is due to the ever increasing amount of stress and ever decreasing amount of sleep new parents in Western countries get.

And also the second part, because children don’t have many opportunities to practice against frustrating events any more. Many of the unstructured, difficult play environments are gone, replaced with play equipment or games that are carefully engineered to give A Satisfying Play Experience - Every Time!™

So what can we do?

Keep calmer and carry on? Looks great on a poster. Doesn’t work in real life. Look, I don’t know about you, but hearing “Don’t be frustrated with your children!” is a sure-fire way to get me to grit my teeth and make fists until my knuckles go white.

We can learn to be calmer, better parents (and there are many excellent writers on this subject: Aleksandra at Curious and Capable Kids, Dorota Talalay, Saima Durrani, Laura Dimler, Emily Edlynn, Michaeleen Doucleff, and more), but changing your own behaviour in a given situation is really, really hard. It’s much, much easier to change the situation.

And, as an intrinsically lazy human being, I like ‘easier’!

So, what are we aiming for here?

Children need an environment that does three things:

1. Reduces parental frustration

2. Provides the right amount of child frustration at the right times

3. Doesn’t teach babies to feel frustrated

These are big topics, so I’m covering them over the next few weeks. Let’s do the hard one first.

How can we set up environments that reduce our own risk of frustration?

• Look for opportunities to let other people guide our children – How can your children spend time being guided by other adults? Maybe you’re lucky enough to have family close by. Maybe you can set up an informal childcare exchange, where one parent looks after a few children one night a week, and this is reciprocated. Maybe you have an open door for neighbouring children of different ages. And welcome other adults parenting and guiding your children. Children need to know that adults do things differently, and no one adult can meet all of a child’s needs alone.

• Create environments that allow children to contribute as much as possible: low-level labelled boxes for children’s clothes, floor induction hob, water dispenser within reach. More ideas here, here, and here.

• Get your children to help you out: When we see frustration behaviour in adults all around us, there isn’t any cultural pressure to moderate our own behaviour. However, we can set shared expectations of frustration behaviour in our own families.

• Get your friends to help you out: You’d be amazed how helpful mates and colleagues will be if you give them a simple goal and a heartfelt plea. Something like “I’m trying to break a habit of getting frustrated so I can help my kids with X (name something that any other parent will identify with. Like “maths homework” or “glitter art”). If you see me getting stressed, just call my phone / send me a 🙀emoji / nudge me [delete as appropriate]”. It doesn’t have to be everyone. Just one or two people can make a huge difference.

• Get more sleep: This sounds like behaviour, not environment, right? Wrong. Sleep is another one of those behaviours that is environment-driven. Leave your phone charging downstairs? More sleep. Colder bedroom? More sleep. Finally putting up darker curtains? More sleep. It all adds up to everything feeling easier to deal with the day after. Including frustrations.

Look. I get that this is difficult. And embarrassing even. I do.

A few months ago, I realised that I was the most frustratable person in my family. When I felt frustrated, I got more emotional than did my partner or any of my three children.

Which, given that my youngest is only four, was an upsetting realisation.

So I did what any sane parent would do: I sat on it for a couple of days.

And then I swallowed my pride and I asked my children to help me.

• First, I asked them what I should do when I felt frustrated. “Laugh, sing, or jump up and down!” they recommended.

• Second, I asked them if they could make a hand signal if they thought I was getting frustrated. Something that I could see without needing to be interrupted or even if I didn’t give them space to talk. They picked a loose ‘OK’ sign.

• Third, I promised that if they made the sign, I’d think about whether I was frustrated. If I was, I would do one of those three calming behaviours. If I wasn’t, I’d explain what I was feeling.

The first time my child held up her hand with the signal, it took me a moment to work out what she was saying. I’d just been saying that we were running out of time for a bedtime story. But that pause for thought was enough for me to: disagree with her hard in my head, pause, gather myself, realise that she was right - I had been getting frustrated by their behaviour, laugh unconvincingly hysterically, and then rephrase in a calmer way.

By a few days in, I had a default song. The singing seemed to work better than the manic laughing, and it seemed to settle my brain more quickly.

The more I practiced, the faster I felt calmer. Within a week, the hand signal didn’t feel confrontational or patronising. I also could use the hand signal for them, allowing them to practice what I’d been modelling.

Sometimes, the children were wrong. When I was coming across as frustrated when I wasn’t feeling it. It gave me the opportunity to explain to the children how I was feeling. It was easier to identify if I was feeling tired, hungry, or hormonal, and to see how it affected our communication.

I’d love to put some sort of ending on this, to wrap it up in a neat bow, but the truth is that I’m still in the process of learning to be unfrustratable right now. I’ll get there. Come with me! We’ll get there together.

So in this article, I’ve discussed how we can set up our own environments to reduce our own frustration. This is the vital first step. And, in parts 2 and 3, I’ll share ways to set up the environments for our children and our babies to give them what they need to grow into unfrustratable adults.

See you soon!

* - What? Don’t blame me for the irritation you’re currently feeling with the English language. I didn’t name both cause and effect the same thing!

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in bi-weekly articles and podcast episodes.

I’d love to hear from you!

Subscribe now

You might also like:

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Notes

“Findings indicated that each of perceived stress and distress, emotion dysregulation, and frustration intolerance uniquely predicted parent-child aggression risk after controlling for demographic factors.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10826-017-0764-y

“An analog task was designed to evoke parenting-relevant frustration: the task involved completing an unsolvable task while listening to a crying baby or a toddler’s temper tantrum; time scores were generated to gauge participants’ persistence in the task when encountering such frustration. Across these studies, low frustration tolerance was associated with increased physical child abuse potential, greater use of parent–child aggression in discipline encounters, dysfunctional disciplinary style, support for physical discipline use and physical discipline escalation, and increased heart rate.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014521341500068X

“Negative parenting positively predicted poorer mental health (β = 0.20, p < 0.001), while positive parenting and frustration tolerance were negative predictors (β = −0.49~−0.08, p < 0.01). Ideal level and frustration tolerance demonstrated a chain mediating effect (21.35%) between positive parenting and mental health.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673843.2026.2681126#abstract

“Analyses here suggest strong relationships between elements of childhood resilience, constant access to trusted adults and different sources of personal adult support. While the eradication of Adverse Childhood Events remains unlikely, actions to strengthen childhood access to trusted adults may partially ease immediate harms and protect future generations.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40359-021-00601-x

In this episode, Greg Dickens and I discuss recent news on how outdoor play in preschoolers predicts their risk of mental health problems in later childhood. We talk about biological aging in different generations, and how that influences people’s risk of disease. We then talk about toddlers falling over - why it’s so vital for body and brain health and why toddlers don’t fall down as much as they should. We talk about how we can set toddlers up to fall more in early life so they fall less in adulthood. Finally we talk about tree climbing - why it’s important, and what simple rules support safe climbing.

For more information on how toddlers learn from falling, see this article: https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/dont-stop-your-child-falling-over

For more information on helping children develop upper body strength, see this article: https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/why-hanging-by-the-arms-helps-children

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in weekly articles and podcast episodes.

Everything is free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Topics covered

• How outdoor play in early life affects children’s risk of mental health problems

• Why different generations age at different speeds, and what affects this

• Why falling over is so important for toddlers

• Why toddlers don’t fall over enough

• How to help toddlers fall over more

• Whether children should climb trees

Recent episodes

Notes

Early outdoor play predicts trajectories of child mental health in a population-based cohort: https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.70175

Biological aging and generational shifts in early-onset cancer risk: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04448-w

Chasing a ball is hard when you’ve only just got control of your legs. Especially when the floor is slanted and uneven (and when intermittent chickens wander into the benab to distract you). Each time they fell, the two players would look around, clamber back to their feet, and set off again.

The big sister was supporting the game - running off to collect the ball when it escaped them, hoisting toddlers back to their feet when they couldn’t work it out, and occasionally cuddling or tickling them if a fall had been particularly surprising. But there was one thing she never did.

She never stopped them falling over.

In the eighteen months we were invited to live in tropical traditional communities, I watched many children fall over in many ways. Especially toddlers. My own littlest one seemed to have permanent bruises and scrapes, always on her knees, often on her face. My goodness, I’d never seen toddlers fall over so much.

But it seemed I was the only one surprised. My friends in the Amazon, like those in Central Africa, reacted to many things about my kids - from their white blonde hair, to their hesitance when confronted with spicy food - but never once to them falling over. Adults rarely reacted at all when any children or toddlers toppled. Parents didn’t try to catch them. They didn’t rush over to help. They didn’t praise bravery after the event. They barely showed that they noticed at all.

And while I saw a lot of toddlers falling over, I saw a lot of older children who didn’t.

What do bodies need?

All over the world, babies and toddlers fall over. A lot. Both from sitting and standing. It’s important to learning balance and, as long as they do their falling early, while they’re still pretty light, they don’t seem to mind. They haven’t yet learned the skill of reacting to destabilising forces and shifting their weight to withstand them. In short, they haven’t learned how to balance.

Learning to balance has three parts. Children need to:

1. Calibrate the balance sensors (consisting of the accelerometers in the inner ear, the stretch-sensitive spindle sensors in the body’s tendons, and the pressure sensors in the skin),

2. Use those calibrated sensors to learn how far they can lean without falling over,

3. Use that experience to start to avoid movements that are going to push you beyond that point.

As you will have spotted, steps two and three require falling. That’s one of the reasons it’s much easier to learn this skill when you’re small: You are lighter and closer to the ground, so falls don’t hurt as much (and they provide useful training in coping with everyday pain: more on the benefits of that here).

There are two other reasons to learn balance when you’re as tiny as possible:

1. You’re really motivated to practice.

2. You tend to move in a very wide variety of ways.

When children don’t learn how to balance well in early childhood, they often don’t catch up, retaining a worse sense of balance into adulthood when, if they can’t balance well and are no longer motivated, they can just choose to avoid those movements. Who needs to slack-line anyway?

But great balance isn’t really an optional skill. As we get older and our bodies get weaker, balance becomes more and more important. The better our balance was to begin with, the longer it will last. If you had good balance skills when you were ten, you’ll be less likely to fall and fracture your hip when you’re eighty.

Why doesn’t it happen?

OK, so learning to balance in childhood is a fundamental movement skill that will protect those children that manage it well into adulthood.

But W.E.I.R.D. (i.e. from communities that are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and at least a bit Democratic) children’s balance skills are deteriorating. Why?

A large part is just that W.E.I.R.D. children move less. They walk less (more here), use their upper bodies less (more here), sit on the floor less (more here), and go outside less (more here). And if you’re moving less, you’re less likely to fall down. Which means you get fewer chances to learn how to avoid it.

Childhood inactivity has worsened for many reasons - COVID, screen time, societal intolerance of outdoor play, car dominance, and many others. And, at the same time, we’ve got much more risk averse. Our communities have gone to extraordinary lengths to remove discomfort and risk from everyday life (more on our cultural infantilisation of children here). And falls, being both uncomfortable and risky, are an obvious thing to prevent. Scare stats like “falls are the most common cause of serious injury in toddlers” mean that parents are pushed to pay much more attention to the short-term toddler comfort benefit, rather than the long-term detriment to their fitness and health.

But that statistic is misleading. The vast majority of falls that result in serious injury are falls from a height. Sure, occasionally a toddler (like one of mine did) will be unlucky and fall over and cut their face on a gravel path, but ‘falling over’ is not the same as ‘falling off of’. It’s a whole different form in A&E.

Nevertheless, WEIRD baby environments are engineered to prevent falling over (think backed seats, baby bouncers, and parents diving to intercept before a wobble can become a topple). Nurseries and childcare facilities are designed to reduce the risk of children falling. The Health and Safety Executive, a UK Government department, says “Children can be seriously injured from falling over common household items like floor brushes, shoes and clothing. Toys and books are also a tripping and falls hazard. Keep floor surfaces, corridors, passage ways and stairs clear.” All of which is true. In theory. But completely misses the much bigger risk that’s waiting for them if they never fall over.

Given how much we WEIRDos love risk-reducing devices, I wasn’t surprised to also find a paper describing an ‘early-warning childcare system to monitor fall-prone behaviours of toddlers at home.’ The authors write, “It is extremely important to trigger an alarm early so toddlers are alerted to stop behaving dangerously and caregivers have time to intervene to avoid accidental falls.” Stop behaving dangerously. Avoid accidental falls. Hmm.

We’ve got really good at preventing children from falling over. Great for reducing their small risk of short-term injury, terrible for increasing their large risk of long-term inactivity.

What can we learn from traditional cultures?

Before we travelled, I’d never lived anywhere where I looked really different. But living in countries across South America and Africa made me appreciate how observed you feel when you’re more noticeable than everyone else. And my goodness, EVERYTHING I did was noticed. “What is the white woman feeding her child?”, “Why is the white child crying?”, and, when it came to falling, “Why does that white woman interfere with her child’s learning?”.

In the villages in which we lived, parents didn’t interfere with children’s activities nearly as much as we do in the UK. There was much less guiding, instructing, encouraging, and discouraging. They believed that it wasn’t their right to tell children what to do.

Instead, parents let children learn.

And certain aspects made it easier.

• Time outside: Homes were small and mostly a place to sleep. This meant that toddlers were outside a lot of the time. And when compared to the inside of a WEIRD home, the outside parts of a Traditional village (all over the world) often have fewer edges, grippier ground, and fewer high steep edges from which you can fall badly. However, they also often have more uneven ground, more trip hazards, and more obstacles to avoid. All of which mean that early falls are more likely but less consequential.

• Being looked after by older children: Older children who’ve learned how to look after toddlers can be motivated, caring, committed caregivers. But they are rarely quick enough to anticipate simple falls. This means that toddlers supervised by older children have many more opportunities to fall down and get up again. And older children don’t empathise with toddlers as much as adults try to. They certainly don’t coo and swoon and rush about if a little’n falls over. Toddlers, therefore, don’t learn that falls are scary and something to be avoided.

• Unstructured time: Toddlers were not deliberately entertained. That was not a job that parents felt they had to do. Instead, they had a lot of time to learn and explore - and this meant that they moved a lot. They had the time and motivation to spend hours practicing falling over every single day.

How can we help our toddlers to fall down?

You’ll notice a certain familiarity to this section. This is one of those rare articles where there really is a solution for every challenge!

• Get toddlers outside as much as possible! Outside is:

  • more interesting (so children move more);

  • less predictable (so children have to learn to react and adapt).

  • inherently impossible to make entirely harmless (so we as adults have to make the conscious decision to stop fretting and let them get on with things).

• Supervise like a child:

  • Don’t react.

  • Reframe falls as learning, not as failure.

  • If you can’t do that, don’t watch! Let children spend time with adults who aren’t so reactive (got a clueless relative who doesn’t have kids? Now is their time to shine!).

• Don’t try to fill a toddler’s time. Children need time to learn how to balance. When we structure every minute of a child’s day, we don’t give them the opportunity to find joy in surprising movement, in unexpected wobbles, and in repeating a difficult movement until they succeed.

And they really do find it, you know? Joy in unstable movement and skating the edge until they fall over, and then getting up and doing it again. We forget. Decades will do that to you. And falling over isn’t anywhere near as bad for them as it is for us! More pro, less con.

It’s really hard watching a child fall down, especially when you know that you could have prevented it. You feel guilty. You shouldn’t. Framing falls as failures means that we don’t recognise them for what they are - critical moments for learning the extent of the body’s capacity to react.

Children need to fall to learn how to not fall.

During my veterinary training, I thought I understood how bodies worked. Ten years ago, I discovered the work of Katy Bowman, a visionary biomechanist, and I realised that I hadn’t got a clue about how bodies moved. I love all her books - but ‘Move your DNA’ shows you what movements your body has evolved to need, ‘My Perfect Movement Plan’ helps you work out which movements are missing, and ‘Grow Wild’ is written for parents with so many amazing ideas to help children move more. I’ve just found her on Substack here - if you haven’t come across her before, go check out her work. It’s life changing.

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in weekly articles and podcast episodes.

Share

Subscribe now

You may also be interested in:

Prefer a podcast episode?

Notes

“Poor static balance at age 10 was strongly associated with worse balance ability at age 46.”

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/150/1/e2021055861/188250/Stability-of-Balance-Performance-From-Childhood-to

In contrast to fall detection (detect after lying down) [2–7] and pre-impact detection (detect descending in just a few milliseconds before the first impact) [8–11], we propose an early-warning system to identify fall-prone behaviors, assess fall risks, and predict potential fall dangers in the relatively long-term future (a few seconds). “ https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/13/12/16985

Pre- and post-COVID balance assessment in Japanese children. “Children in the after group had a higher body fat percentage (p = 0.037), shorter single-leg standing time (p = 0.003), and a larger number of falls per month (p < 0.001) than those in the before group.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8466877/

In this episode, Greg Dickens and I discuss recent news on how children’s willingness to take risks during play affects how they take risks when crossing the road. We talk about air pollution and about the recently renamed ‘PCOS’ (now Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome). We talk about how ultraprocessed food reprograms taste preferences, and how certain probiotics affect that. We then discuss our recent article on satiety - helping children to feel full. Finally, we discuss what to do if your toddler doesn’t want to consume anything other than milk.

For more information on how to set children up to recognise when they are full, see this article: https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/how-do-we-help-children-stop-eating

For more information on picky eating, see this article: https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/why-arent-all-children-picky-eaters

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in weekly articles and podcast episodes.

Everything is free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Topics covered

• How children’s risk willingness affects their ability to cross roads

• When air pollution affects children most, and what we can do

• Why PCOS has been renamed

• How ultraprocessed food affects taste preferences in children, and what probiotics do to this

• How children learn to feel full

• How to help older babies satisfy their hunger with food rather than milk

Recent episodes

Notes

The developmental importance of risky play: A cross-national virtual reality study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494426001635

Prenatal and early life exposure to air pollution and lung function development aged 8-24 years: The ALSPAC study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935126006080

Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, the new name for polycystic ovary syndrome: a multistep global consensus process: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(26)00717-8/fulltext

Early Exposure to High-Sucrose Diet Leads to Deteriorated Ovarian Health: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8092397/

Bifidobacterium longum and prebiotic interventions restore early-life high-fat/high-sugar diet-induced alterations in feeding behavior in adult mice: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-68968-2

“You can finish the food. Here!”

I reached for my partner’s plate. He moved to hand it to me, then stopped.

“I don’t think I want any more.”

“Are you ill? Is the food horrible?”

He shook his head.

“I just feel like I’ve… had enough.”

In all the time I’d known him, my partner had never turned down food. I used to joke that he was the human form of a Labrador (a dog breed that’s been selected to lack a key “fullness” gene, which makes them always hungry and easier to train, and more relevant when marketing toilet paper). Together, they only ceased eating when the food ran out.

But a few days earlier, he’d stopped eating sugar. And now, it looked less like he was a Labrador, and more like something interesting and biochemical was afoot: for the first time he could remember, he felt full.

Why hadn’t this happened before, and what should have been going on all along?

What do our bodies need?

Let’s start with the basics. If we want children to learn how to eat according to their bodies needs, they need to learn how to

• Eat when they are hungry

• Stop eating when they are full.

The first of these sounds very obvious, but we know that some children who are very selective eaters stop recognising hunger signals, and can become dangerously undernourished even in a high-food environment.

However, that is a subject for another article. If you’re interested in how picky eating varies between cultures, and how some cultures help children to avoid picky eating behaviours, more here.

In this article, though, let’s focus on how our bodies stop us eating when we have had enough food.

Most of us know the feeling: we’ve enjoyed an incredible Sunday lunch, considered further crispy potatoes, and decided not to, instead deciding to go for a walk in the sunshine, or getting crafting, watching the football, or even taking a nap. The key part is that we’ve got a warm, full, satisfied feeling, and we don’t want more food.

That feeling is called ‘satiety.’

Our brains create this feeling by weighing up and integrating signals from our gut, fat stores, and reward centres. Our gut communicates what is in it and how full it is. Our fat stores communicate how much energy they have stored already). And our reward centers communicate how delicious the food was.

What affects these processes?

• What type of food you’ve eaten - How tasty was it? What was it made of? How beautiful was it? How much do you want to impress the person who has made it?

• The amount of food you’ve eaten - Obviously, there is a physical volume constraint (i.e. it is possible to rupture your stomach by eating too much, but the bar is high and the stomach wall is strong), but the major influence of the volume of food eaten is a neural one. There are stretch receptors throughout the digestive system. When stretched, they stimulate the nerves that drive normal gut movement. They also send information to our brain telling it about whether there’s room to eat more food: Little stretch means ‘there’s room for more, turn on hunger!’ Some stretch means ‘stop now please, turn off hunger!’ Lots of stretch means ‘something’s gone wrong, turn on nausea!’ (n.b. These stretch receptors are why people talk so much about the ‘energy density’ of food: if your hunger stops after the same volume of food, then the number of calories in that volume makes the real difference. A half a kilogram of celery and a pint of Häagen-Dazs fill your stomach the same way, but one has much more energy in it. And one requires a lot more chewing, which also helps the body recognise fullness).

• How much fat your body already has stored - Fat is our body’s incredible way of storing energy to ensure we have enough food and water to survive harder times (Water? Yes! That’s why camels do it. The chemists amongst you will already know this, but if you burn fat (metabolically, or in a fire) it releases usable energy, CO₂ and water). However, there’s a Goldilocks amount of fat: too little, and you haven’t got resilience against hard times; too much, and it gets in the way of normal body processes and locomotion. To help regulate this, fat releases a hormone called leptin which (amongst other jobs - have a read. It’s a fascinating little hormone) reduces the appetite. Little body fat = little leptin = undamped appetite. Lots of body fat = lots of leptin = appetite reduction. It’s a great system, when it works.

So what do children need in order to learn how to react to feeling full?

• Sufficient nutritious food: You can’t learn without feeling full, and you can’t do that if you don’t have enough food. Similarly, certain aspects of food (the protein and fiber content especially) stimulate the satiety signals more than others. It takes a few minutes for the body to recognise satiety, which means that children need to be eating foods that make them eat slowly. If they’re only eating high-energy/low-effort foods, they’ll likely repeatedly miss the normal point of fullness, and overeat while their body is trying to process their satiety signals.

• Choice over when to stop eating: To learn when to stop eating, you have to be the one making that decision. And to make a choice, you need to have the time and space to pay attention to your internal feelings and decide when to stop.

• Nothing interfering with their leptin system: Our bodies have an amazing system to help us store fat if we’re likely to be approaching a time of low food availability. They use the signal fructose, present in fruits, because most trees fruit at the end of the summer or wet season. Fructose helps us store fat in many ways, one of which is by blocking part of the leptin system to make us eat more.

• No rewards for overeating: Ever seen Man v. Food? Or done an eating challenge? If so, you’ll know that brains are able to override virtually any satiety signal if the reward is big enough.

Why doesn’t it happen?

Let’s think back to that post-Sunday-lunch feeling. You’re sitting back in your chair. You chat with your friends. You probably help to clear the table (my children, please take note).

And then your friend brings in home-made apple pie.

And you realise, suddenly and unexpectedly, that you’re not full at all. Far from it! You’re actually ravenous.

Your body doesn’t need more food. But it can eat more food, given the right motivators.

There are various aspects of our Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures that make it hard for us to instinctively know when to stop eating. Putting aside food advertising, snacking habits (more here), and metabolic problems that make it hard for us to sense fullness (more here), these are some of the big contributors:

• Not enough nutritious food: In WEIRD cultures, we often give young children a lot of autonomy over their food choices, which means that picky eating is very common. Most children eat very little fiber, which reduces their body’s ability to feel when they are full (for tips on how to get children to eat more fiber, see here).

• Lack of choice over when to stop eating: Anything that influences a child’s psychological or physiological capacity to stop eating gets in the way of recognising your body’s signals. Being told that you need to finish your plate alters your psychological capacity to stop eating. Sugary foods interfere with the body’s hunger hormones, altering your physiological capacity to stop eating (more here). Unfortunately, both of these aspects are very common in our WEIRD cultural environments.

• Something interfering with the leptin system: Fructose is half of the molecule we call table sugar. When we take sugar out of plants and put it in everything else, we hijack the body’s hardship-sensing system. People who eat a lot of sugar don’t feel full at the right time.

• Rewards for overeating: With the best will in the world, if there’s something sweet at the end of the meal, it’s hard not to use it as a motivator. Whether it’s as a punishment, “if you don’t eat your vegetables, you won’t get dessert,” or as a reward, “if you try this broccoli, you can have some dessert,” the effect is the same. When we incentivise a behaviour, we reduce a child’s motivation to do the behaviour when the incentive isn’t present.

Dessert (i.e. reserving something sweet for the end of a meal) is a problem for children for several reasons.

1. It encourages us to either undereat the more nutritious food or eat beyond our feelings of fullness. Our desire for sweet tastes is partially disconnected from our appetite, which makes sweet foods hard to resist even when we’re full. Sweet foods also contain sugar, which, over time, increases our appetite (the ‘separate stomach for ice-cream’ is metaphorically very real!).

2. It devalues the food that comes before it: Having really palatable food at the end of the meal alters how we perceive everything else. Adults who are anticipating dessert make less healthy food choices in the rest of the meal, especially if they usually try to eat healthily.

3. It sets up an expectation of having something sweet after meals. If you feel like a meal is unfinished without something sweet at the end of it, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And that craving is really hard to break. When we frequently eat dessert, we start to outsource the feeling of fullness from an internal signal to an external cue.

For adults, enjoying the occasional dessert is absolutely fine. If our hunger-hormone system is functioning normally (i.e. if we don’t eat much sugar most of the time), then our appetite on the next day will regulate. We’ll feast on one day, fast on the next, and take a week to reset our hormones. Our bodies have evolved to do that - an amazing way to make sure we take advantage of food that’s available.

But for children, it’s not that simple. Dessert is habit forming. Children can learn that they need sweet food to feel full. Read that again slowly and consider the consequences. That’s setting them up for a lifetime of sugar consumption and overriding their bodies’ normal satiety signals. So, both habitually dosing themselves with an addictive appetite stimulant and habitually over-riding whatever satiety remains. That sounds like a potential problem.

Growing up with desserts makes it hard for children to learn when to stop eating.

What can we learn from other cultures

Before we lived in South America and Africa, I hadn’t really thought about cultures where dessert didn’t exist.

But the more I lived in places where dessert wasn’t a thing, the more I started to think about the consequences of no-dessert culture. Of children learning to value food as a way to satisfy hunger. Of children not developing a sweet habit at the end of every meal. Of children learning how to eat when they were hungry and stop when they were full.

So what were common elements in these cultures?

• All the food was available at the same time. Sometimes, there was just one dish. Sometimes, there were multiple dishes, some sweet, some not, but there were social conventions over how much of any one you could take (i.e. eating all of one dish was frowned upon).

• The only consequence for not eating food was hunger later. Without dessert, parents didn’t need to make any decisions based on what the child had eaten. No “you didn’t eat this, therefore that.” Children had freedom to choose whether to eat the food or not eat the food, and the only consequence they’d experience was hunger.

(Some of you might be thinking, “Hang on, the French eat lots of dessert and they don’t have the same degree of metabolic problems that we do. Dessert’s not the problem here. To which I say yes, some cultures with long-standing dessert traditions, such as Italy (famed for gelato) and France (profiteroles, tarte tatin, macarons), are less likely to be overweight or obese (which I’m using as markers of metabolic damage because it’s very difficult to get hold of direct metabolic or DEXA scan data) than do the US and UK (~45% in Italy and France vs ~65% in the UK and ~75% in the US). But, while their numbers are better than ours, a one-in-two risk still isn’t great odds. We can do better. Creating daily routines around eating sugar leads to a whole host of health problems (more here).)

What should we do?

Look, I get it: for many of us, desserts are the best part of a meal! It’s not just about the taste, it’s about the work and love and novelty that goes into some of those confections! And it’s completely normal to want to share special things like that with our children.

But, this is one of those biological systems, where delaying just a couple of extra months buys a few years of benefits on the other end of a child’s life. The occasional dessert during adulthood or adolescence? A metabolic problem, but not really much else. Introducing the concept of dessert to a baby? Both biochemically and behaviourally habit forming, determines taste preferences for the rest of life, gets in the way of learning to listen to your body’s satiety signals, and a metabolic problem.

So what can we do to help them learn? In contra-clickbait fashion, ‘Neither 1 nor 2 will surprise you!’...

1. Don’t give young children desserts. Obviously, we’re all following the WHO recommendations that children under two don’t have any added sugar anyway, but even if you want to give fruit or yoghurt, don’t give it as dessert, serve it with the rest of the meal. This sounds *so* minor, but is an important psychological difference and teaches a totally different relationship with food. Give children a little bit of everything, and if they are still hungry after they’ve eaten it all, then give them a little bit more of everything. This helps them to learn how to eat lots of different foods and ensures that there’s no excessive reward to over-riding their bodies’ fullness signals.
   

2. Think nutritious, not delicious: If you finish a meal and the children are still hungry, go for primarily nutritious (vs. primarily delicious) extras. You can see it as an opportunity to get some more building blocks of protein or healthy gut fibre onboard! Go for foods that will fill them up, and preferably ones that aren’t tasty enough to encourage them to ignore their feelings of fullness.

We saw all sorts of novel sweet foods and fruits in South America and Central Africa, but in a year and a half, we didn’t see a single ‘dessert’. In the nearly-two-years since then, we’ve not had desserts at home. It’s been a funny shift, psychologically, especially for that partner I talked about (you remember him? Human labrador?), trying to work out when a meal actually ends. But it got so much easier. Now, home meals are dictated by actual hunger rather than imposed externally. A little act of self-imposition and rebellion with every mouthful. You can’t tell me that’s not what kids need? A bit more revolution?

And, before that sounds too silly to everyone, we need to remember that dessert is a really WEIRD thing. Recently, I was chatting with a friend who grew up in China. I asked him about what he found surprising about UK food.

“It’s the food culture!”

“Like, the fact that we have chips with everything?”

“No! Brits have this strange obsession with dessert. Why do you need something sweet after every meal? It’s like you feel that every meal deserves a reward!” He paused.

“Do you deliberately leave space for dessert? If yes, how do you know how much? Or do you just plan to overeat?”

I didn’t have an answer for him then. Do you now?

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in weekly articles and podcast episodes.

Everything is free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

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Notes

The situation is slightly different if children eat selectively from a plate of food, and the volume of food means that they can eat enough to feel full without eating all of the different foods. When children eat selectively and can choose to not eat vegetables, providing desired fruit alongside undesired vegetables makes children less likely to eat the vegetables. If your child is a picky eater, this is something to bear in mind: Just dessert: Serving fruit as a separate “dessert” course increases vegetable consumption in a school lunch https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0950329315002554

When dessert comes close: The effects of anticipating indulgent consumption and dietary restraint on healthy food preference at restaurants https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278431920301663

Desire for Sweet Taste Unchanged After Eating: Evidence of a Dessert Mentality? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07315724.2015.1117956

Expected satiation alone does not predict actual intake of desserts: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666317314745

For more information on how to do laundry in a way that reduces harms to health, see this article:

https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/weird-laundry-habits-can-increase

For more information on how often to wash children, see this article:

https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/how-clean-should-children-be

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in weekly articles and podcast episodes.

Everything is free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Topics covered

• Why are environmental effects in early life so important to a child’s risk of future disease?

• What mediates the link between low socioeconomic status in childhood and chronic disease in adulthood?

• Why is muscular strength important for brain health in old age?

• Why do we do laundry, what are the health effects, and how can we do it better?

• How should we weigh up the risks of environmental toxins with the risks of washing clothes and skin?

Recent episodes

Notes

Understanding environmental exposures in early life for lifelong health (Nature Comment paper): https://www.nature.com/articles/s44360-026-00130-0.epdf

Breastfeeding may lessen socioeconomic disparities in child health through differences in the infant gut microbiome: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666379126001722

Kicking Back Cognitive Ageing: Leg Power Predicts Cognitive Ageing after Ten Years in Older Female Twins https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4789972/

The Association between Lower Extremity Muscular Strength and Cognitive Function in a National Sample of Older Adults https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6239135/

Investigating the mediating effect of myokines on exercise-induced cognitive changes in older adults: A living systematic review and meta-analysis https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40998287/

And if, like me, you don’t want to wear clothes in sticky, sweaty, muddy, dank jungle for more than one day at a time, then you need to do a wash every day. For more than a year. By hand. Sometimes in a river, sometimes with buckets of well water, today next to the village tap.

I stared at the red dust and mud on the laundry in the basket I had carried from our hut. It didn’t disagree with me.

But, next to me, my little washing machine was excitedly preparing. Standing next to the laundry tub, my two-year-old had kicked off her shoes and trousers. Ready!

As I soaped and scrubbed; she trod and stamped and jumped, having a fantastic time and forcing water through the fibers to remove dirt and soap*. And then, together, we hung the next day’s five tops and five bottoms out to dry with our ten prized pegs.

I have spent hundreds of hours of my life doing laundry by hand. And that’s solely because I value having clean clothes. Why?

What do we want to achieve when washing children’s clothes?

Why do humans all over the world spend so much time and money removing dirt from things we wear?

In approximately importance order, we do it to:

• Remove visible dirt and stains: We wash garments that are visibly dirty because it signals that we are clean people, people with disposable time/moment, and people who follow social convention. In many cultures, dirty clothes are stigmatised: people who appear clean receive better engagement from their peers than those who don’t.

  (In some cultures, dirt specifically on work clothes has a different connotation and receives a different response, more here).

  (And while these social rules are somewhat relaxed for children, the rate at which they gather dirt is so much higher that in reality the social pressure to wash them is the same. And, while they all come with a handy wipe-clean surface, we like to cover that up with various pretty, absorbable materials that are much harder to clean. Go figure).

• Remove unpleasant odors: This is another major reason to wash clothes. However, because humans don’t start producing oil-laced, fermentable (i.e. gets stinky if you leave it) sweat until puberty, this is an adults-only problem.

  (Yes, I’m well aware that occasionally children roll in something stinky. It’s an almost-adults-only problem).

• Prevent the spread of disease: Laundry-detergent manufacturers love to talk about this as if it’s utterly critical, but in reality the risk of transmitting disease via unwashed clothes is very low.

  Sure, if a child has a stomach bug or an active skin infection, then killing microorganisms in the laundry is important, but most of the time it is not.

  (Not that killing microbes is useless. It can be an effective way to delay the onset of body odour in clothes on adults. But that’s nothing to do with keeping you safe from disease).

So, we want clean clothes. To achieve that, laundry involves mechanical, chemical, and physical processes that remove all sorts of ‘stuff’ from clothes.

• Mechanical: Laundry involves flexing the fibres of clothing to release ‘gripped’ particles and moving a fluid through to move those out of the fabric. In almost all cases, this means agitating the clothes in water.

• Chemical: The water (or, occasionally other fluid if the label tells us to and we don’t ignore it) also acts as a chemical solvent - dissolving many types of dirt so it can be washed away. The active ingredients in laundry products extend this chemical breakdown to insoluble dirt. Detergents for the fats and oils (including the oils that keep microbes alive), and often enzymes for the proteins and carbs.

• Thermal: All of those cleaning processes go quicker if it’s hotter, so many people wash clothes in hot water. It’s also another way to sterilise them.

So far, so familiar. We all know this if we pause to think about it. We also know how we produce these effects:

• Washing machines provide heat, water, and effort-free agitation (for which, since returning from travelling, I am thoroughly grateful).

• Laundry liquid or powder provides the detergents and enzymes (and other magical ingredients that do all the other little jobs. Optical brighteners (things that make whites look whiter), antifoaming agents (so you don’t get foam going all over the floor), preservatives (so you don’t get mould growing in your pretty liqui-tabs), and fragrances (so that you can tell something is freshly washed, even if it wasn’t dirty enough to notice in the first place)).

• Fabric softeners add lubricants and modify the surface of fabrics to make them feel softer.

• Tumble dryers put in more heat and agitation to remove the water again.

So far, so good. We’ve got some incredible technology that allows us Westerners to wash clothes more effectively and time-efficiently than humanity has ever done before. That’s freed up a huge amount of our time and is part of the reason we can have so many nice outfits!

But it’s come at a cost.

What are the risks?

In Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (i.e. WEIRD) cultures, children spend virtually all of their lives with their skin in contact with freshly washed textiles.

(I’m not just talking about clothes here, but pyjamas if you sleep clothed, and sheets if you do not. No judgement here! You do you, little nekkid napper).

Which means, if there were anything harmful on their clothes, it would be on their skin continually. And given that they sleep on freshly washed pillows, and that every move they make flushes air around inside their freshly washed t-shirts and up towards their faces, it would be in their lungs too.

So. Is there?

When I started working in this area, I assumed there’d be plenty of science on the topic. Common things are commonly studied and everyone does laundry. Turns out, I was wrong.

First problem is: Most of the evidence around the effects of laundry chemicals are in adults (because it’s hard to get approval for studies involving children), or in children with pre-existing problems, like eczema.

Secondly, most of the evidence comes from comparing different types of chemicals, rather than different doses of chemicals. And very few studies have control groups that are people who are not using a laundry chemical.

This makes it very hard to work out exactly what is going on and how to reduce the risk of harm.

But you don’t need to know exactly what is going on to see that something is. There is convincing evidence there are some health harms that can result from the WEIRD laundry process:

(You’re about to read a list of detriments caused by laundry chemicals. If you’re like me, your first thought will be “Yeah, sure, but they’re all rinsed off, aren’t they? That’s what the ‘Rinse’ part of the cycle is for!”. And to you, and to past me, I say: sniff them. If you can smell the fragrance chemicals on clothes fresh out of the machine, then it hasn’t all been rinsed off, has it? (There are other, more sensitive tests you can do at home, but this makes the point)).

• Skin irritation - Many chemicals in laundry products are irritant and can lead to dry or itchy skin, especially where the skin is thinner and more sensitive (e.g. inside of elbows and backs of knees).

  Interestingly, metal ions cause these chemicals to fix more strongly to clothing, meaning the effect is worse in ‘hard water’ areas. One of the reasons that more children have eczema in hard-water areas than soft-water areas.

  Also interestingly, this effect isn’t limited to what we might consider the ‘active’ ingredients in laundry products. In one study, children exposed to only artificial fragrances (of which laundry detergent was the most significant contributor) were 40% more likely to suffer from dry skin.

• Allergy - Ok, pay attention to this, because it’s really two issues:

  • First, if laundry products damage your skin barrier (which looks highly likely) then they will likely get through said damaged skin barrier. And that means we might develop allergies to them. However, because few people with contact allergies are tested for the range of chemicals present in consumer products, most of the evidence here comes from individual case studies. The risk of allergy developing specifically to laundry products seems fairly low. The second issue may be bigger.

  • Second, if something (like, say, the residue of a powerful laundry surfactant) simultaneously damages a bunch of skin bacteria and the skin barrier itself, we can become allergic to anything else that happens to be on the skin at the same time. In a nutshell, the current strongest theory of allergy (the so-called epithelial barrier hypothesis) says that pieces of damaged bacteria can penetrate a damaged skin barrier and fire up the immune system. This activated immune system then starts to produce antibodies against some innocent bystander substance that just happened to be in the vicinity at the time and voila!: We have an allergy to that substance. Forever.

  (I think that’s one of the most insidious risks on this list. Unlike irritation, allergies don’t just go away, they add up. Allergy rates in the Western world have skyrocketed. It now looks likely that this is because we are constantly exposed to things that damage our skin barrier and bacteria. Laundry detergent yes, also soaps, shampoos, household cleaning products, dishwashing detergents, and more. Never in human history have we been so exposed to things that break down fats and oils. It’s just a shame that our body barriers are made of fats and oils. Full podcast episode on this here).

• Breathing problems - There’s good evidence that inhaling the various volatile chemicals in laundry products damages the lungs. Our lungs are able to heal after occasional injury, but when that damage is all day, every day, then our biological defences are overwhelmed and we may develop permanent damage that we carry for the rest of our lives.

  (For data nerds like me, you should know that the research here is observational not interventional. Turns out it’s hard to get ethical approval to expose children to different types of laundry detergent to see how it affects their lungs. However, if we look at children who have chronic wheezing, they are more likely to be exposed to fabric softener and certain additives. And, children whose parents used additive-free detergents had lower airway resistance, meaning their airways were less inflamed. I’m happy to debate the direction of causality on this, but I think you can probably see what’s most likely).
  (I also wonder, given the effect of laundry detergents on lung surfaces, whether they may also harm nasal passages in the same way. This doesn’t appear to have been studied, but if they do, they might contribute to the epidemic of mouth breathing in children. More here.)

• Risk of ingestion: I’m including this mostly for completeness, but it is true that when laundry detergents look like sweets (such as pods and capsules), young children eat them. In the UK, thousands of children have now made that mistake. Fortunately, the risk of serious harm is rare, with only one death reported in almost 5000 ingestions.

That’s quite a list. It’s hard to believe that just washing clothes can affect children’s bodies and their adulthood health in so many ways.

What can we learn from traditional cultures?

Doing the laundry for a family of five by hand for a year was educational. Before I left, I thought that a ‘clothes brush’ was for brushing mud off coats, and certainly hadn’t brought one with me. In the first Amerindian village we lived in, a kind woman called Lesley noticed my incompetence and showed me how to wash clothes. I learned how to soak, to soap, to lather, to scrub (with a brush every time), to knead, to rinse, and to wring. Properly.

And, slowly, spending so much time and energy slowly changed my perspective. Laundry changed from a habit into a string of decisions. I started to consider what I wanted to achieve from cleaning each item. Was it to remove harmless-but-visible dirt? To prevent illness? To remove odor? How else could I achieve this aim?

And as the environment changed, different challenges arose. In the dry season, water was scarce and valuable. In the rainy season, drying could be almost impossible - the only way to dry garments was to wear them. I started to assess clothes, balancing the required benefits against the potential harms - with my eyes, with my fingers, and, yes, with my nose.

I spent a lot of time thinking about laundry. (Can you tell?).

In this article, I’ve focused on the long-term physical health effects because that’s my personal interest, but the cost of laundry isn’t just the effects on children’s health. Laundry uses energy, water, and polluting chemicals, increases mould in homes, and inevitably damages clothes. It is also time consuming and (being one of the world’s most gendered chores) worsens gender opportunity inequality.

Fortunately, as you’re about to see, the solutions that reduce the harm laundry does to children’s long-term health also make it better for women, the environment, and everyone’s health.

So what should we do?

• Wash clothes less frequently. Check clothes before you wash them. Are they visibly dirty? Could they be spot-washed** instead? If yes, is it an easy spot-wash that a child can do for themself? Do they smell bad? (The clothes, not the child doing the spot wash). At home, for children, clean-enough clothes can be worn again; dirty clothes go in the basket. My sister’s children see a dirty t-shirt as the next day’s ‘eating top’. Spares a few more T-shirts from food stains.

  Striking the right balance here requires children understanding that there’s a personal cost to washing clothes. I found that getting children to help with the laundry, say every wash for a month, helps them understand how much washing clean clothes increases the work for the whole family and that changes behaviours in the long term.

• Use less detergent. Laundry products that come in pre-specified doses, such as pods and tablets, usually contain far more detergent than is needed in an average wash. The manufacturer is incentivised to ensure that no matter how dirty the wash is, the result is still perfect, so they overdose most washes. Pre-specifying the dose also means that the manufacturers get more profit, because we laundry-doers can’t use our own judgement to alter how much we use.

  I use a small amount of an unfragranced, bio washing liquid. Roughly a quarter of the recommended dose. Still get clean clothes. Magic.

• Consider a water softener if you live in a hard water area.

• Don’t use fabric softener. Feels nice, but over time, makes it harder to clean clothes (both dirt and soap stick more), builds up in washing machines, and can be another irritant. Drop it. You’ll be fine. Five minutes of movement and even the stiffest cotton softens right up anyway.

• Wash at cooler temperatures, and pick the program for the load size: Washing clothes slower and at lower temperatures obviously reduces energy use. Running full loads also uses less water and energy per item of clothing, but it takes longer to let the water soak through and clean everything. So, if you have a full load, pick a low-temperature cotton eco wash (takes a long time, so I set them overnight). If you want to run small loads of washing, then a low-temperature 30-min cycle should be effective and will use less energy.

  I wash clothes at 20°C. Some things just need a rinse and spin, others need a short wash (which are usually low temperature), and if I’m washing a lot of dirty clothes, I use an overnight cotton eco program.

• Dry outside if possible, not only to reduce energy usage, but also to avoid the tumble dryer special trick of releasing microplastics directly into home air. Other outside drying benefits include ultimate odour removal and a UV blast to kill surface microbes. If you can’t dry outside but want to reduce the mechanical damage to your clothes, consider a heated airer or a dehumidifier. I have a Dutch airer with a dehumidifier high up in the corner of the kitchen.

And a bonus tip for those of us who wash the whole family’s clothes together:

• Consider changing your deodorant if you want your own clothes to smell less. A colleague of mine told me that she’d stopped using soap and deodorant on her armpits several years ago, and just used liquid perfume. I switched from antiperspirant to water washing and a refillable deodorant stick and found that I no longer smelled bad even if I didn’t put the deodorant on frequently. A friend swears by her probiotic deodorant. Antiperspirants (sprays or roll-ons with aluminium salts that block sweat pores) seem to alter the underarm microbiome more than deodorants and select, ultimately, for more stinky species. Maybe try something else?

I honestly enjoy laundry, and not just because I’ve spent so long doing it. I like getting outside, I like the upper body movement, and it’s really satisfying to have a load of clean clothes.

But no matter how much I enjoy it, I don’t want to do more when I don’t have to!

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in weekly articles and podcast episodes.

Everything is free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Subscribe now

Share

* - Luckily for our skin, this was hand soap serving triple duty as laundry soap and dish soap. It worked just fine in all roles.

** - Spot washing is exactly what it sounds like: just washing one spot. Generally a (very) wet cloth +/- a dot of hand soap does the job in most cases.

You may also be interested in:

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Notes

Children with chronic wheezing have greater exposure to laundry softener chemicals than healthy counterparts. Additive-containing products were associated with increased airway resistance, whereas soap-based detergents had no detectable impact on respiratory function. These findings suggest a potential link between chemical laundry products and impaired respiratory function in preschool CW. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S108112062500345X

Barrier impairment resulting from the interaction between hard water and surfactants is a contributory factor to the development of AD. Installation of a water softener in early life may be able to prevent AD development. An intervention study is required to test this hypothesis. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X1732938X

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11882-023-01094-x Mechanistic studies suggest that detergents disrupt epithelial barrier integrity through their effects on tight junction or adhesion molecules and promote inflammation through epithelial alarmin release.

Surfactant formulas in detergents, household cleaners, dishwashers, hand sanitizers, disinfectants, toothpastes, and many types of air pollution, microplastics, and food additives can damage epithelial barriers, which is the body’s first line of defense.² Once injured, these cells release alarmins, increase barrier permeability, and initiate cascades of inflammation and immune dysfunction and cause microbial dysbiosis, all of which together contribute to allergic and inflammatory diseases.^3,4 Among these exposures, laundry detergents and softeners contain a complex array of chemical compounds, including surfactants, bleaches, fragrances, and enzymes, that can cause epithelial injury and trigger inflammation in both respiratory and dermatologic systems. https://www.annallergy.org/article/S1081-1206(25)01230-X/abstract

This national study demonstrates that pediatric laundry detergent packet exposures are more severe than laundry detergent nonpacket and dishwasher detergent (packet and nonpacket) exposures. Pediatric exposures to laundry detergent packets increased by 17% during the study period nationally and should be closely monitored to assess the effectiveness of the newly adopted voluntary safety standard; this standard should be strengthened if the number of exposures does not demonstrate a substantial decrease. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Henry-Spiller-2/publication/301645651_Pediatric_Exposures_to_Laundry_and_Dishwasher_Detergents_in_the_United_States_2013-2014/links/57d69f3608ae6399a3956979/Pediatric-Exposures-to-Laundry-and-Dishwasher-Detergents-in-the-United-States-2013-2014.pdf

https://cdn.mdedge.com/files/s3fs-public/CT111004172.pdf Although many patients and physicians consider laundry detergent to be a major cause of ACD, there is limited high-quality evidence to support this belief. Contact allergy to laundry detergent is probably much less common than is widely supposed. Although laundry detergents can contain common allergens such as fragrances and preservatives, evidence suggests that they are likely reduced to below clinically relevant levels during routine machine washing; however, we cannot assume that we are in the “free and clear,” as uncertainty remains about the impact of these low concentrations on individuals with strong contact allergy, and large studies of patch testing to modern detergents have yet to be carried out.

“Especially when antiperspirants were applied, the microbiome showed an increase in diversity. Antiperspirant usage led toward an increase of Actinobacteria, which is an unfavorable situation with respect to body odor development. These initial results show that axillary cosmetics modify the microbial community and can stimulate odor-producing bacteria.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00403-014-1487-1

In line with Callewaert et al.’s (2014) comparison of individuals, we observed a larger change (i.e., increased community richness) in the armpit microbial community when regular product users stopped wearing and then resumed use of antiperspirants, compared to those asked to stop then resume use of deodorants. As such, we expect that our results represent a general effect of antiperspirant use. We can only speculate as to why effects of stopping long-term deodorant and antiperspirant use might have such disparate effects, though note that the particular antiperspirant products (i.e., brands) our participants reported to us all contain aluminum salts. These compounds may alter the underarm habitat (in a manner that deodorants do not), and provide a selective advantage to bacteria not historically common in the human armpit habitat. https://peerj.com/articles/1605/

Fascinating study of energy use on different settings: https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/house-stuff/how-much-more-energy-efficient-is-eco-mode-on-a-washing-machine.html Wish they’d tested a 20 degree eco. One of the things it doesn’t mention is that the manufacturers recommend much smaller loads for the shorter duration washes - might be worth testing your own to see how well it cleans!

In this episode, Greg Dickens and I discuss recent news on how hanging and swinging from the arms affects the length and strength of our upper body muscles. We discuss how SSRI antidepressants alter gut function, and how new drug targets may better help new mothers. We then talk about the links between sugar and metabolic syndrome, and how the scientific understanding is evolving.

We then discuss children’s independent mobility and exploration - what it is, why it’s important, and why it’s hard to provide in our culture. We then talk about how we navigate this, and how we reassure other adults in our community.

Finally, we talk about what movements are important for setting up abdominal muscles that are the right length and strength.

• For more information on childhood exploration and independent mobility, see this article:

  https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/children-love-to-get-lost-what-happens

• For more information on how sucking in your belly affects your health, see this article:

  https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/should-kids-suck-their-bellies-in

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in weekly articles and podcast episodes.

Everything is free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Subscribe now

Share

Topics covered

• How does hanging and swinging from the arms (or ‘brachiating’) affects the length and strength of our upper body muscles?

• How do SSRI antidepressants affect gut function in babies, and how can we reduce the risk of depression in mothers?

• What do we know about sugar and metabolic syndrome?

• Why do children need to explore, and why is this hard to enable in our culture?

• How do we reassure other adults in our community?

• What movements are important for setting up abdominal muscles that are the right length and strength?

Recent episodes

Notes

“This theoretical paper proposes that brachiation-based movements—particularly unilateral hanging with oscillatory perturbation—may offer a biomechanically optimal approach for addressing Upper Crossed Syndrome and related postural dysfunctions by restoring muscle activation patterns consistent with our evolutionary heritage.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1360859226000148

“These findings provide fundamental insights into how the gastrointestinal tract modulates emotional behaviors, reveal a novel gut-targeted therapeutic approach for mood modulation, and suggest a new link in humans between in utero SSRI exposure and DGBI development.” https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(24)05751-2/fulltext

Guardian article on Barnardo’s and baby boxes to reduce stress on families: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/apr/09/four-in-10-uk-parents-struggle-to-afford-newborn-babies-essentials-study-barnardos

“Under modern conditions of overnutrition, chronic excess fructose drives features of metabolic syndrome. Emerging evidence further links fructose to cancer and dementia.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-026-01506-y

1. I’m going to set the scene with a true story to illustrate the issue,

2. then describe what our bodies need to develop,

3. then I’ll explain why it doesn’t happen in a Western (or W.E.I.R.D. - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) culture.

4. Finally, for solutions, we’re going to look at the core science and what we can learn from traditional cultures,

5. and I’ll do my best to bring it all together into specific descriptions of actions and what we should do.

I’m going to try to stick to these five sections mostly, but, obviously, this is biology and biology hates uniformity, so there will occasionally be a little bit of freestyle and, you know, making up structure to fit the science.

Let us begin…

Story

I blinked against the sudden, bright sunlight. After the tunnel of vegetation we’d been following had taken three lefts, two rights, and crossed a small stream, it had suddenly burst out into a clearing. There were two small huts here, long abandoned, and a grove of coconut trees.

“See?” my four-year-old son said proudly. “So many coconuts!”

He was not wrong! Under each of the old palms, some already with shoots emerging, were piles of unwanted coconuts. And while the local village might have gone off them, we were too hungry to refuse! Cockroaches and ants scattered as we collected a bagful, shaking each to check if it was still good. Eventually, when we couldn’t carry any more, we turned for home. I headed back to the path.

“Not that way. This way,’ said my six-year-old daughter. ‘This way is quicker!”

This path was even smaller than the last. I hadn’t even noticed it. It was a tiny strip of sand, maybe 10cm wide and occasionally it was entirely obscured by a single fallen leaf. It was clear that it had been made by smaller feet than mine, and for a while I wondered if my daughter had led us down an animal track by mistake.

But, sure enough, it brought us home.

What our bodies need?

Throughout history, humans have learned to navigate through exploration, mostly by walking. The action of walking actually releases chemicals in our brain that improve our spatial memory (more on the benefits of walking for children here). Exploration helps our brains to tie features of the landscape together, so we can make assumptions about how parts of the environment are connected without having to return to a place that we know.

And this process starts early. By the age of two, children can recognise landmarks and start to remember paths they’ve taken so they can work out where they are. As they get older, they start to form mental maps. Once they have identified landmarks, they then start to develop route knowledge (e.g. turn right at the playground), and then develop survey knowledge (a mental map of the area).

Children start to form mental maps when they travel with adults, but they populate them when they travel alone. When children travel through an environment on their own, they spend more time exploring different routes, finding dead ends, and have time to notice landmarks that adults don’t perceive. They learn how to locate and orient themselves in unfamiliar environments. They learn how to get lost and find themselves again. The term ‘childhood independent mobility’ is used by scientists and policy makers to describe the freedom of children to travel around in their neighborhood or city without adult supervision. Certain countries, such as Japan, Germany, and some of the Nordic countries get it. (As writes here.)

But children don’t learn natural navigation if they don’t have independent mobility. Adults who are familiar with an area have already mapped their own routes and follow them. As anyone who has ever been driven somewhere as a passenger will know, if you’re not the one working out the route, you won’t remember it. Following along doesn’t let a person experience the reward that comes from finding out that you made a good decision at that last junction. If children only travel with adults, their understanding of, and connection with their environment is much more limited.

Becoming better at navigation is a nice skill in itself, but there are four real life-changers that come from it. These are ways that navigation manifests as a healthier childhood:

• More movement: children who can travel independently (e.g. walk to school with siblings, go to the park with friends) are much more likely to meet physical activity guidelines.

• Feeling better: Knowing how to get unlost increases a child’s sense of capability, resilience, and confidence in dealing with the unexpected. That’s why one of the elements of risky play is risk of losing your way.

• Human interactions: independent movement increases the likelihood that children interact with people (and not just ones they know, see here) and helps them see how they fit in their community.

• Skill development: travelling alone, or leading a group, improves spatial awareness and allows children to develop their road safety skills.

But these aren’t just articles about being healthier as kids. The point of Growing Up W.E.I.R.D. is to show how improving a Western childhood will boost adulthood health as well, and navigation is no exception:

Firstly, there’s the basic effect of skill formation. An adult that has learnt independent mobility in childhood and has happy memories of exploring as a kid will feel confident and happy exploring new places. Which means they continue to get all of those above-listed benefits that they did as children: Movement, Confidence, Interaction, and Spatial Awareness.

But there is a second, later, adulthood specific benefit that is important: hippocampal volume. The health and size of the region of the brain that handles wayfinding (ie. the hippocampus) is a major determinant of how much neuroplastic recovery we can achieve after injury (or, for the less lucky amongst us, how much neurodegeneration we can withstand before debilitating symptoms during the onset of dementia). It is a buffer. The hippocampus is larger and contains more connections in people that have been allowed to build a skill of self-navigating. And when do you think they did that?

Why is this hard?

So, the benefits are obvious. And, when the benefits are obvious, Nature normally sets us up for success, right? A nice example is eating: we humans need to learn to eat at around 6-12 months, so we’re pre-programmed to start putting things in our mouths early to prepare us with the skills we need.

That idea of starting early is half of the developmental concept of ‘critical windows’. Remember them from a few articles ago? This not-something-you’d-see-on-a-computer’s-blue-screen-of-death-but-sounds-like-it concept states that children go through important time periods (i.e. ‘critical windows’) during which certain inputs are most important to their development. For example, it’s only after we’ve got teeth that we can start chewing on tough food to grow a big enough mandible to later fit in all our adult teeth (more here).

But, the other half of the ‘critical windows’ concept is that the ‘window’ closes. Chewing hard to get a bigger jaw and avoid going to the orthodontist (or getting our wisdom teeth pulled out) doesn’t still work if we do it at 22. Similarly, there’s a critical window for learning to navigate: it’s while you’re building your home range and before socialising becomes biologically important. If you know what I mean.

Luckily, as I mentioned, Nature likes to set us up for success and has crafted a nice little set of passing obsessions to drive us into doing the behaviours that help us meet our critical windows. Learning to navigate is no exception. Children become incredibly keen to go exploring between the ages of about 7 and about 12. Just the right age. And, just like the chewing example, if they miss that little wave of obsession with exploring, it can be hard to motivate the behaviour to learn the skill later in life.

And the challenge is that Western culture really doesn’t want to let children explore between the ages of about 7 and about 12. News agencies profit from attention and nothing generates more attention than scaring people. Childhood abductions* are perfect fodder for them to scare parents witless. You can’t go exploring if everyone terrified that you’ll get taken away. Next up there’s the epidemic of enormous lumpy SUVs with reduced visibility and their proven child-flattening effect. Then the loss of walkable infrastructure. Then the loss of clean air while walking that non-walkable infrastructure. And the longer distances that most families live from their school or local park (although, as points out here, this is more of a thing in the US than the UK). Over the past few decades, we’ve set up a Western world that conspires against children learning navigation skills during their critical window.

There’s another way to illustrate this loss of freedom. The distance within which children were/are allowed to roam has been recorded in the UK for a while now. Want to know what that data says?

• In our grandparents’ childhoods - 8-year-olds had a 6-mile radius to walk or cycle unaccompanied by adults. That’s about 113 square miles.

• In our parents’ childhoods - 8-year-olds roamed about 1 mile, walking to school and local areas. That’s about 3 square miles.

• In our own childhoods - 8-year-olds travelled unsupervised in their immediate neighbourhood. Normally about a quarter of a square mile.

• In our children’s childhoods - 8-year-olds are rarely allowed to roam beyond their own street or garden. I’m not even going to describe that in square miles, but it’s about one ten-thousandth as much room to explore as our great-grandparents had. Roughly.

But that’s not an issue, is it? It’s ok that the West is pushing us to incarcerate our children! It’s fine if they don’t learn to find their way, we tell ourselves. “Why will children ever need to find their way? Every phone has a map. They don’t even need to look at it - they can be told or cued when to change direction.”

And so, without even noticing the door closing, we limit our children’s independent mobility until they are too old to find joy in exploration. Excitement turns to anxiety, and they drop into the bucket labelled “too scared to try”, inside of which are increased risks of lifelong mental health problems, and from which few people ever climb out.

So, what can we do?

What can we learn from non-Western cultures?

Living in South America and Africa, we saw first hand how children learned about their environments. We saw them patrolling the circuit of wild fruit trees in the surrounding forests and hills keeping tabs on the ripening of their favourite fruits. We saw them visiting litters of kittens at friends’ houses in nearby villages, watching wasp nests grow on the underside of bridges and fallen trees, and spending hours watching other adults in other parts of the village, building, cooking, weaving, and fixing. And then, after a breakfast time, or a long lunch break spent exploring, the school bell would sound and children ran as fast as they could to lessons from wherever they were. An inverse super-nova of sub-adult particles to which not one adult raised any objection.

What made it easy for children to move independently around their environments?

• Moving in groups: We did see children moving around alone occasionally, usually when running an errand or going to school, but most of the time children were in pairs or groups. All adults fear for the safety of children, but it’s a lot easier to rationalise it away if you know that if one gets in trouble, the other can run for help. Whether that’s true in practice or not.

• Modelling by adults: Children copied what adults did. Adults walked everywhere, so children walked everywhere. (Obviously, much easier in a walkable neighbourhood: as writes here). Since walking is adult transport, the children are doing adult transport too. Which is much easier to accept.

• Practicing: Children started to run small errands with their siblings from about two years of age (which help children to learn their responsibilities to the family, as writes here). By the time they were four, they were confident in their local environment so walked to school alone or with siblings. And once they were at school, break times meant exploring.

How can we do it?

Letting children start to travel alone is nerve-wracking. Even once you have helped them to minimise or mitigate all the reasonable risks (ie. learning how to deal with road safety and checking that they can do it in practice, or learning which places are known to be unsafe and checking that they know to stay away from the old haunted sawmill, or dynamite-strewn quarry, or whatever). And even when you understand, logically, how small the remaining risks are, it still takes courage to let children out alone because our culture is both terrified and terrifying.

What can we do for them and us to make it easier? Following the traditional cultures checklist is a good place to start:

• Don’t go alone: It’s much easier when children travel together. They can consult each other, they can regulate each other, and they can help each other feel safe. If your child doesn’t have a sibling, can they go with a friend?

• Run errands for adults: Errands are a great way for children to start moving around unsupervised (more here). You’ll be amazed how much less trouble a child can get into if they have a purpose! However, in order for us to model running errands, we need to change our own mindset. Where is a place that is a good distance to walk? Do you have a neighbour or friend who is happy for you to drop by? A shop? A library? Take your child with you and help them practice any skills they need to learn. When our children were learning how to go to the local shop, we practised with them, we talked to the shop staff (to learn what they needed to see from the children in order to be comfortable with them shopping unattended), and even went so far as to follow them (out of sight, dashing from cover to cover like secret agents) the first few times they went just to be completely sure they could handle it.

• Practice: In our culture, unsupervised time for children almost never “just happens.” We have to carve out and protect time. Carving out is easier on a schedule. So, is there an afternoon each week that belongs to your children outside? We have a plastic-covered map on our wall, by the door. It was printed to show a 5km radius with our home at the centre. The kids’ friends’ houses are marked on. They know when there’s time to go where. And, ultimately, there’s a big line around home within which they can plan expeditions. It gets bigger every year.

• Reassure: Not children. This isn’t about reassuring children. They’ll be fine. Kids are brave and, as I mentioned, obsessed with exploring. But local adults, especially those who have been most affected by sensationalist news stations, can get very concerned. If you encounter this, you might think a good place to start is to share the UK government guidelines, which say that there is no legal minimum age at which your child may explore outside without an adult, but that the parent can be prosecuted if your child is left alone before an age that is appropriate for them. But, in our experience, it’s easier to just show that your child has had some form of road safety training, and knows how to call 999 (or 911) if they’re in trouble, and leave it at that. We have spoken to leadership within the UK police** about this, and had their reassurance that (so long as the kids know how to stay out of obvious danger) no crime is being committed.

It all sounds a bit daunting doesn’t it? In closing, let me explain why it’s worth dealing with all the fear and the freaked out neighbourhood-watch-types:

Last week, my daughter and son went to the playground on their bikes. They had strict instructions to be home by half past five. At 17:31 they screeched up the path to the house, flung their bikes down and opened the front door, flushed with success. They’d realised that they were running a bit late and had cycled hard all the way home to get in before the deadline. They were proud that they’d made it.

Later that evening, I heard them talking.

“That was great, but I knew the whole way. Next time, let’s go on the path past the pond and GET REALLY LOST!”

If you’re interested in what it’s like to use this approach in practise, come join me and my partner Greg in this podcast episode as we talk about our choices and our experience. We also discuss how hanging and swinging from the arms affects the length and strength of our upper body muscles. We then talk about the links between sugar and metabolic syndrome, and how the scientific understanding is evolving.

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in weekly articles and podcast episodes.

Everything is free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Subscribe now

Share

* - Author Lenore Skenazy ran the numbers on this using data from the centres for crime control in the US and came up with the now much reported “750,000 years of outdoor play per abduction by a non family member” figure. I’m not going to check her maths, but the Atlantic re-reported it and they’re normally pretty good at checking sources. The risk is much decreased since 1990, but the fear is much increased.

** - American police, on the other hand, appear to be…different…in many ways to the ones we’re used to over here. I don’t know how they’d react, but maybe sending them an email and stating what they can expect from your kids is useful? I don’t know. Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a cop wrangler. More on this from here.

You may also be interested in:

Prefer a podcast?

Notes

“This systematic review highlights the potential role played by moderate- and high-intensity walking as a lifestyle intervention that can be utilised through the built environment to promote adaptive brain changes, through the sustainable regulation of the BDNF.” https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/15/3/254

“Moreover, this review shows that psychological benefits of childhood independent mobility for children have been under looked in the literature and highlights that children’s cognitive abilities (ex. spatial cognition) and socio-emotional growth (ex. social interaction skills) may be enhanced through this activity, emphasising the need for more empirical research on this topic.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140524000835

“Age-related differences in spatial behaviour” Hart, Roger. Children's experience of place. Irvington, 1979. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roger-Hart/publication/232568424_Children’s_Experience_of_Place/links/59654adb0f7e9b2a367cdf36/Childrens-Experience-of-Place.pdf

In this episode, Greg Dickens and I discuss recent news on risk factors for food allergies in babies and children and on the cost of raising children in the US. We then talk about bellies - what they are, how they shape our health, and why we need to avoid sucking them in. Finally, we talk about sunscreen - does sunscreen increase the risk of cancer more than sunlight does? And what other risks might we want to consider?

• For more information on setting children up for better belly health, see this article: https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/should-kids-suck-their-bellies-in

• For more information on setting children’s guts up for better long-term health, see this article: https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/gut-feelings

• Interested in why children need enough sunlight? https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/throwing-shade

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in weekly articles and podcast episodes.

Everything is free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Subscribe now

Topics covered

• What factors in a child’s early life increase their risk of food allergy?

• How much does it cost to raise a child in the US, and at what point do parents spend that money?

• What are bellies and why should we care about their size?

• How can we set children up for better relationships with their bellies?

• Does sunscreen increase the risk of skin cancer more than sunlight does?

Recent episodes

Notes

“In this meta-analysis, the most credible risk factors associated with development of childhood food allergy are a combination of major and minor risk factors, including early allergic conditions (atopic march/diathesis), delayed allergen introduction, genetics, antibiotic exposure, demographic factors, and birth-related variables.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41661638/

“Average per-child investments from birth to age 18 total $502,152 (2024 USD), with overall disparities by household income and race/ethnicity of 6% to 15%. Early childhood shows the largest gaps—often over 50%—driven mainly by housing and child care.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-70316-3

Possible Explanations for Rising Melanoma Rates Despite Increased Sunscreen Use over the Past Several Decades: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6694/15/24/5868

In the outside world, near a creek in Guyana, my partner split open a huge jackfruit with his machete, and dropped a slice in each of the bowls that the children immediately thrust at him. He passed one to me too.

As soon as the sweet, musky fruit slid down my throat, I knew I had a problem. I dived for the bushes and retched, retched, and retched again, my abdominal muscles straining to their limit. The pain of moving my abdomen was indescribable.

I didn’t yet know it, but inside, my body was failing.

The day before, I’d spent 13 hours doubled up in a tiny minibus (the one on the left).

With two seats for the five of us and our kit, I had been packed between and beneath luggage and children (see that face?! That’s the face of a squashed woman). My belly had been compressed so much, and for so long, that my appendix had been injured.

That bus journey had given me appendicitis.

Our bellies need to regulate the pressure inside them

I’m going to come back to what happened to my appendix in a minute. But to understand it, we need to think about two things: pressure, and the miracle that is our abdominal cavity.

Bounded at the top by our diaphragm, underneath by our pelvis and pelvic muscles, at the back by our spines and spinal muscles, and at the sides and front by muscles of the belly, our abdominal cavity is the industrial district of our bodies - it’s where we house the organs that do the complicated chemistry of keeping us alive:

• Four, very different, parts of our digestive system (i.e. the stomach, for sterilising and storing food, the small intestine, for digesting and absorbing food, the large intestine and its appendix, for housing billions of microbes to break down the foods we can’t, and the rectum, for shipping and dispatch).

• The spleen, which (through a number of neat tricks) keeps your blood working perfectly.

• The pancreas, which lets you digest things and then metabolise the things you’ve digested.

• The liver, with its roughly 600 different jobs, all utterly critical for the immune system, the blood, and the growth and metabolic health of every other tissue in the body.

• And the gall bladder, which is also there.

And, like in any industrial district, these occupants rely on common utilities being provided. For them, the most important provisions are blood and room to flex and move past each other as they squeeze food around to process it. Both blood flow and flexibility are controlled by the local abdominal pressure. This control of pressure is so important that if, for example, you increase the pressure around an irritated appendix for too long, you can end up with appendicitis. Which, as well as being often fatal, hurts. A lot.

Within a contained system like the abdominal cavity, you can control the pressure in two ways: change how much is in there, or change the overall size.

Changing how much is in there is easy enough. Too little? Drink something, eat something, or stop expelling the gas generated by the microbes. Too much? Throw something out of either end. Done.

But these modifications aren’t anywhere near enough to achieve the control that the body needs. Sometimes, our abdomen needs to expand to create space for a big meal, a baby, or a really deep breath. Sometimes, it needs to contract to generate pressure changes for coughing, vomiting, or giving birth.

So, what does the body use to change the overall size of the cavity? Mostly the muscles of the belly.

As well as helping us do sit-ups, the rectus abdominus, external obliques, internal obliques and transversus abdominis (or, you know, ‘abs’ if you’re trying to save 23 syllables) contract or relax to regulate the pressure in the abdomen. They need to be strong enough to do the job, sure, but they also need to be long enough to allow reduced pressure when the organs need that, and to be able to relax at a moment’s notice during things like indigestion. This means that we need abdominal muscles that can work at different lengths and that only engage when we need them to.

• We don’t want abdominal muscles that are too long and loose. If our abs are too loose, they can’t provide the force to drive movements, and they can’t adequately support the spine.

• We also don’t want abdominal muscles that are too short and tight. If our abs are too tight, they restrict our spinal movement, and, if they don’t relax as they should, they can create high pressures within the abdominal cavity.

This doesn’t sound like a massive ask. I mean, the intestines aren’t *that* heavy and these are pretty big muscles. Why (excluding the event of a child and a big bag crushing you for 13 hours) is there ever any problem with abdominal pressures?

What gets in the way?

Ok, I have to come out here and say something entirely off-brand: I find fashion interesting. Not the runway nonsense, with overpaid designers and supermodels (who, according to Edna in the Incredibles, are “spoiled, stupid little stick figures with poofy lips who think only about themselves” (harsh!)), but the overall idea of sexual or social selection based on difficult-to-achieve, not-inherently-useful, traits.

Humans are not the only animals that do fashion. Far from it! It’s all over the animal kingdom. From Australian jumping spiders needing to dance their best fashionable little jig so their potential partners don’t eat them, to Egyptian vultures and their edible…er…make-up because everyone knows the ladies love a yellow face and legs.

But the entire point of fashion is that whatever is difficult becomes attractive. Carrying the feathery legs needed to pretend you’re an arachnid Michael Flatley makes it much harder to catch food. And the edible make-up the vultures use? That’s cow-dung. Famously of low nutritional value and high disease risk. We animals do damaging things to get noticed.

Amongst the animals, humans appear to be the most susceptible to fashion’s barbed tendrils. We can fashionise *anything*. Birds might have a single fashionable skin pigment (or a very famous fascination for collecting blue things). Humans can have fashions about: hair, clothes, shoes, speech pattern, living location, fingernails, and a million other things, and still have time to argue about skin pigment. Anywhere that things can be either ‘easy’ or ‘difficult’, fashion has invaded our lives. We’re obsessed.

And bellies are on our pile of a million other things. Quite near the top.

In many cultures, and at different historical timepoints when starvation was easy and eating enough was difficult, fashion dictated that large bellies be perceived as more beautiful. Throughout history, carved figurines of idealised women (which people have always seemed to create in their spare time. What can I say? We’re very carvable) have been fatter during times when famine was more of a risk - a bigger belly was harder to achieve and fashion made it more sought after. Certain African, South American, and Polynesian cultures (traditional and long-memoried as they are) still favour heavier male and female bodies.

By contrast, current WEIRD technology and government subsidies mean that it’s easier than ever in Earth’s history to eat enough to walk around with a big belly. Hence, fashion dictates that a small belly, which normally requires money (for, say, gym memberships or better food), and free time (to, say, use those gym memberships and cook that better food), is the pinnacle of attractiveness.

(NB. A recent development on this, now that GLP-1 drugs have made it “easier” to reduce belly fat, even significant weight loss doesn’t necessarily lead to a fashionable belly. The term ‘Ozempic belly,’ has been created to stigmatise reduced-fat bellies. I don’t mean to blame anyone for this. Fashion is a group effect).

Ok, so far, so ‘Evolutionary Behavioural Economics 101’. How does this hit physiology?

The logic goes:

1. People, like all other primates, want social or sexual bonds.

2. Fashion is one way to get social or sexual bonds.

3. Minimising belly size is one way to get fashion.

4. So, many people try to minimise their belly size.

In any way they can.

Things like corsets (or ‘Shapewear’ if we’re being euphemistic); diets; drugs; and surgery are all common. But there’s one thing that’s even more common and much more hidden…

I was a child with “puppy fat”. When I started at secondary school, I was very conscious of the fact that my belly was bigger than other children. But one of my new friends told me her solution.

She sucked her belly in.

And when I tried it, it was so effective! My belly vanished!

I was committed. My belly was going to go. I followed my friend’s regimen and tricks for ways to remember at all times. Over the next months, it got easier and easier to suck it in.

Then when I started doing sport and grew out of my puppy fat, my belly was even flatter. And, thanks to all the sucking-in, I had abs of steel. Not particularly strong, but very tight.

Because I’d rarely relaxed my abs, they’d become tighter, not stronger. Strong muscles are able to generate a lot of power. Tight muscles are muscles that have been shortened because they are always held at a certain length.

Now, even if I turned off the muscles, my abs would not relax and stretch out. I didn’t see this as a problem. Like an internal corset I’d made myself. Cool!

When I was pregnant, I prided myself that I was barely showing. When people were surprised how far along I was, I took it as an accolade. Other mere mortal mothers started hanging out, but I still looked sleek and streamlined.

I managed to ignore the reflux and the terrible bladder pressure, but I couldn’t ignore the pain down the middle of my abdomen. My linea alba, the white line of connective tissue between my abdominal muscles, was being slowly, inexorably, torn apart.

And then the pelvic girdle pain came.

I tottered to the physiotherapist. She talked about my shoes, my posture, and also my belly.

“Your abs are very tight. No wonder you can barely walk. You need to practise letting your belly out.”

I started consciously relaxing my abdominal muscles. Letting things hang out. Breathing using my diaphragm and feeling how my belly expanded when I breathed in. Noticing when I was sucking in. Turns out, I was squeezing my abdomen virtually all the time.

And I’m not the only one. Sucking in your stomach, or ‘stomach gripping’ leads to ‘hourglass syndrome’, in which your upper abs are very tight and your lower abs weaker. As we saw earlier, this affects your breathing, your pelvic floor, your spine, and how your guts function.

Those muscular habits, formed in childhood, shape how my body moves now. I still have to consciously relax my belly. To let it hang out. But, you know, the weirdest thing happens when I do: everything starts feeling so much more comfortable. My guts, my bladder, my breathing. Even my back stops feeling so tired from always fighting to pull me back against the tension. Everything*.

What should we do

Look, I get it. Fashion affects social bonds too. Even in childhood. And none of us want our children to be shunned or bullied because they are unfashionably the ‘wrong shape,’ and yet that is a very real risk in WEIRD culture with its social stigma of obesity. *Something* needs doing.

But teaching children to suck their bellies causes other problems.

What can we do instead?

• Model belly acceptance (i.e. change the fashion) - Children see images of adults with flat stomachs all around them. Parents can choose to normalise those images as an ideal (by complaining about their own bellies or commenting negatively on others’, for example), or can choose to give children an alternative perspective (by commenting favourably on their own belly and talking about what bellies need to be able to do).

• Certainly don’t tell children to suck their stomachs in - Not only does this reinforce the flat-stomach ‘ideal,’ but it also creates habitual movement patterns that will affect long-term health and comfort.

• Help children avoid depositing fat around their organs (visceral fat): A child’s body deposits fat around their organs if they eat a high-sugar diet. This process starts from about five years of age, and often becomes more visible by the time a child is nine (usually slightly earlier for girls and slightly later for boys). Visceral fat pushes the belly out. Avoiding visceral fat deposition means that children are much less likely to feel that they need to suck their bellies in.

  • (By the way, we should know two things about visceral fat. One bad. One good:

    • Bad - Visceral fat is significantly worse for health than is subcutaneous fat.

    • Good - In children, it rapidly disappears if they stop eating sugar.)

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No one wants children to be picked on because of their body shape, but teaching them to suck in their bellies is not the answer. The real answers range between screaming “ACAB!” at the Fashion Police, modelling a more health-giving relaxed set of abs yourself, and setting up kids to not have much to worry about in the first place.

There are hundreds of ways to do these things that will fit your life. Do what feels right.

Go with your gut.

If you’re interested in how we do this at home, come join me and my partner Greg in this podcast episode as we talk about our choices and our experience. We also discuss recent news on risk factors for food allergies in babies and children and on the cost of raising children in the US. Finally, we talk about sunscreen and factors to consider when choosing when to use it.

My veterinary degree taught me about mammalian body systems.

My career in health research taught me about Western health and Western bodies.

Spending 18 months living with my three children in remote African and South American communities taught me about human health and human bodies in other cultural environments.

I share what I’ve learned about child physical health and development in weekly articles and podcast episodes.

Everything is free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

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Notes

* - And, if anything, my partner thinks I look even more…ahem…fashionable.

12th century belly ideals: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/medieval-belly-fat-diet

“Figurines are less obese as distance from the glaciers increases. Because survival required sufficient nutrition for child-bearing women, we hypothesize that the overnourished woman became an ideal symbol of survival and beauty during episodes of starvation and climate change in Paleolithic Europe.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oby.23028

“Short-term (9 days) isocaloric fructose restriction decreased liver fat, visceral fat, and de novo lipogenesis, and improved insulin kinetics in children with obesity.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016508517356858

For more information on how to help children care for their microbiomes, see this article:

For more information on setting children’s guts up for better long-term health, see this article: https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/gut-feelings

Topics covered

• How young men’s experiences shape their own and their partners’ health behaviours during pregnancy and beyond

• How early-life stress affects IBD, GERD, and other disorders of the gut-brain axis

• How fecal microbiome transplants affect symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder

• Why microbiomes are important

• How to help children care for their microbiomes

• How we understand repetitive disorders in children and animals

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Some of my subscribers have been urging me for a while to turn on the paid option to increase my Substack visibility. I’ve quietly turned on the paid option for this newsletter. Everything stays free, but you’d like to support my work, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Notes

“Across biological and behavioural research, young men's early life course experiences have been shown to shape their own and their partner's preconception physical, emotional, and behavioural health.” https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(26)00148-0/abstract

“In humans, significant associations between maternal mental health problems and pediatric disorders of gut-brain interaction (DGBI) were observed in both cohorts, mirroring preclinical findings.” https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(26)00205-2/abstract

“This novel hydrogen nanobubble water–based FMT method was safe and effective, reducing both core and peripheral symptoms of ASD and suggesting broad benefits via the gut microbiota–brain axis.” https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pediatrics/articles/10.3389/fped.2026.1767346/full

“While most often described in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID), stereotypies can also present without developmental delay and persist into adulthood.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5370241/

My son had wandered off the path again. Normally, I’m not a stickler for kids sticking to paths. If they get muddy, they get muddy. But in the Amazon, on ground crawling with bullet ants, venomous snakes, and wandering spiders, not being able to see where you’re putting your feet can be a recipe for disaster. Each time my four-year-old son ‘forgot’ about my request to stay on the trodden path and stepped off it to look at a brightly coloured beetle or a tree frog glued to a leaf, my heart rate went through the roof. Terror was eroding my patience with him very, very quickly.

But, before I could lose my cool with the boy, our friend stepped past me and crouched down in front of my son. His voice was barely more than a whisper. He stared into the forest behind us with his eyes opened wide.

“My child. Come quickly! I hear the Kurayara!”

He instantly had my son’s attention.

“What’s a Kurayara?”

“The Kurayara is a hunter. It moves like the shadows of the trees. It listens for the sound of human footsteps, and slowly starts to drift towards them.”

My son was whispering now too, looking into the dark forest behind us. “What does it do if it catches them?”

“Nobody knows. But there’s one thing we do know: the Kurayara needs shadows. It can never go onto paths.”

He didn’t need to say any more. Without any complaint, and with no more nagging, my son stepped back onto the path and happily followed it all the way back to the village.

Later that evening, my son was snug in his hammock.

“Please can we have a story about the Kurayara?”

What do our bodies need?

We’re going to come back to the Kurayara in a minute. And even meet some of its horrifying family. Hold it in your mind.

But first, we need to take an abrupt left turn and talk about humanity’s onboard ecology: our bodies are home to some incredible ecosystems. We each carry trillions of other organisms on and in our bodies, which rely on us for their shelter, warmth, and food. If we ignore the occasional parasites like ticks and worms, the rest of these amazing organisms are our microbes, and the ecosystems in which they live in different parts of our bodies are called our microbiomes*. Our microbes work together with our body to create strong body barriers (on our skin, gut, lung, etc.) and to otherwise reduce our risk of infection and illness. (If you’re new to the wonders of the microbiome, this paragraph isn’t nearly a good enough introduction, please go and read about it on Wikipedia or similar. Come back to this when you’re done).

But our human microbiomes are under threat. On the skin, we attack them with cosmetics and skin hygiene products, and in the gut we starve them by not eating enough of the varied plant matter they need to survive. We then add injury to insult by occasionally throwing antibiotics and food preservatives at them at them, and deny them the population reinforcements that might otherwise be available if we spent more time outside rolling about in the mud and, as a final generational kick in their tiny innumerable teeth, we don’t even pass many of them on to our children (C-sections and formula feeding don’t give babies the gift of their mother’s microbes).

The damaged, weakened microbiomes that this sets up are bad news. When we harm our microbial ecosystems, we lose species that are crucial for maintaining our health. We then end up with ‘dysbioses’ - modified microbial communities that harm rather than protect our health. We talk a lot about ecosystem destruction at a planetary level, but there’s ecosystem disruption at a human body level too.

Why don’t we, as a culture, take more care of our microbiomes? Mostly because we don’t all understand how important they are. Twenty years ago, when I was at vet school, the only microbiome we learned about was the one in a cow’s stomachs. Nowadays, the word ‘Microbiome’ is everywhere you look, but still, if we haven’t grown up with the concept of microbiomes, we find it hard to intuitively look after our own.

Food is a good example of a way we can look after our microbiome. It’s not the only example, but it’s the best understood and probably the most powerful.

Why doesn’t it happen?

One of the biggest challenges to children’s microbiomes is that children don’t eat enough of the foods that feed lots of different good microbes. Our gut microbes need lots of fibre - the bits of plants that are not absorbed by our small intestine, and that pass into the large intestine, the home of our microbiome.

So what exactly is fiber? Fiber describes any carbohydrates that reach the large intestine. Fiber is usually formed of long carbohydrate chains that are hard for the body to digest - either because our body doesn’t have the enzymes for it (like cellulose), or because the carbohydrate chains are packaged in a way that makes it hard for our enzymes to attack it.

Think of the difference between plain flour and a wheat kernel. Plain flour has had everything but the starch removed (bye bye husk) and has been ground into very small pieces (lots of surface area for enzymes to attack). This means that virtually all of it will be digested and absorbed in the small intestine, meaning very little for your microbes to eat.

By contrast, if you eat a whole grain of wheat, you need to chew to disrupt the outer coating (but you won’t disrupt it much), then there’s less space for enzymes to get in, and so digestion takes a really long time. This means that you’re unlikely to have digested it by the time the wheat kernel gets into your large intestine, so your microbes can have their own feast.

And as we can see from that example, fiber is important not only in its own right, but also because of what it does to the food around it. These long-chain carbohydrates are the structural carbohydrates in plants, so when we eat those plants, the fiber structures (cells, tissues, etc.) carry within them lots of other nutrients to feed the microbiome. Maybe they carry other carbohydrates, like the wheat kernel. Maybe they carry interesting fats, like a nut. Maybe they carry proteins, like pulses. All of these nutrients provide a diverse range of foods for the microbes. (Incidentally, this is why fiber supplements aren’t nearly as good as eating chunks of plants - because they no longer have the structure that contains other nutrients within it).

OK, so microbes need fiber. Problem is, most of us don’t get nearly enough. The recent UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey found that fewer than one in ten 11–18 year olds eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day - one of the reasons that only 4% of teenagers eat the recommended 30g fiber per day. Children who don’t eat enough fiber have a higher risk of constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, allergies, and immune-related disorders in childhood, and a higher risk of metabolic disease and chronic disease in adulthood.

(If you’re wondering what a 30g-fibre-day looks like, the British Dietetic Association gives an example of: (https://www.bda.uk.com/resource/fibre.html)

• Breakfast Rolled oats with frozen raspberries, yoghurt, and nuts on top

• Lunch: Baked potato, baked beans, and tinned sweetcorn

• Dinner: Wholemeal spaghetti with pesto, broccoli, and cherry tomatoes

• Snacks: 2 slices wholemeal bread with peanut butter, 1 apple.)

We have microbiomes. Healthy microbiomes keep us healthy. Healthy microbiomes need plenty of fibre. Children aren’t eating enough fibre, which sets them up for worse health in adulthood.

So, growing up respecting our microbes and their immense (but hard to understand) power over our lives leads to us obeying their needs and, as a result, gives us improved health and longer life. But nobody does that. Clearly, microbes need a rebrand. If only there were something else that people grew up respecting and obeying, even though they don’t really understand how it works…

What can we learn from traditional cultures?

One of the many similarities between the traditional cultures of the communities who invited us to join them in South America and Africa, was the monsters. Monsters that snatched children who spoke too loudly in the forest, who strayed from the path, or who went near the rivers. Monsters that had to be placated, left undisturbed, or hidden from. Not all of them were evil. But all of them were powerful and difficult to understand. They were things to be respected.

The magic of these monsters was that they helped children to make good decisions around how they should behave even when no one else was around. Michaeleen Doucleff, in her excellent book ‘Hunt Gather Parent,’ talks about how she applied some of the story-telling techniques she learned from traditional communities to parent her child.

A child’s microbes make excellent monsters. Microbes live happily inside your body as long as they are well looked after. But feed them the wrong foods or hurt them, and they become savage. Not only do they start to eat your gut rather than your food, but also they send signals to your brain to make you feel angry, frustrated, and lonely.

And, like all good monsters, their needs are very simple.

• Eat lots of plant: Whatever your own dietary preferences, your microbes need to eat mostly plant material, as unprocessed as possible.

• Eat lots of types of plants: The more diverse your gut microbiome** the better it is for your health. Each type of plant material will support a different type of microbe. Diversity in one will cause diversity in the other.

• Don’t poison them: Antibiotics are the obvious one, but other proven microbiome-damaging chemicals include: food preservatives, sugar, artificial sweeteners, some washing-up products, alcohol, and large quantities of meat or free oils.

What should we do?

Let’s introduce children to their monsters! Stories about microbes are one of the best tools we have to help toddlers navigate through their pickier eating phase and out the other side (more on this here).

What does this look like in practice?

• Talk about microbes as an accepted household monster, blending facts with fiction. For every fact (“Did you know that you have lots of tiny animals in your tummy? They keep you healthy and they eat fruits, nuts and vegetables!”), find a useful fiction (“Shhh, shh. Listen! I can hear them! They’re saying “Thank you for eating that carrot!” I can hear them crunching on it! Can you hear them?”)

• Play call-and-response sorting games. “What do your microbes say when you eat carrots?” “WE LOVE CARROTS!” “What do your microbes say when you eat lettuce?” “WE LOVE LETTUCE!” (Useful incidental affirmations here!). “What do your microbes say when you eat sweets?” “YUK!”

• If a toddler doesn’t want to eat their fruits or vegetables, try pulling a sad face and saying, “But what are your microbes going to eat?” Or use some reverse psychology. “I’m so sorry microbes, I know you love eating spinach, but Sam doesn’t want you to have any.”

• If a toddler is doing something that you don’t want them to do, try worrying about the microbes. “Sam, if you swallow your toothpaste, it will hurt your microbes.”

• If you want your toddler to drink more (this is especially useful when they are ill), listen to the microbes. “Wait a moment, Sam. Your microbes are saying something. Stay very still so I can hear them. Oh no. They are saying, “WE ARE TOO DRY! WE NEED WATER.”

As parents, we’re not aiming to have children who obey us whenever we’re present, we’re trying to raise children who have the mental frameworks to make good decisions when they are on their own - to make good decisions second nature.

Introducing children to their microbes at an early age sets them up to recognise the power of their microbiomes and to feel their responsibilities to the trillions of microbes that call them home. Feeling able to determine their own health comes along for the ride.

And, finally, when the inevitable time comes when their monsters are tidied away with the toddler toys, you can surprise them once again! My four-year-old wanted me to listen to her microbes during a meal. My eight-year-old rolled her eyes. “I’m too old to believe in microbes,” she said.

It doesn’t take long to find a good video of real-life microbes on a microscope slide on the internet. Real-life monsters! With all the immense power and shrouding mystery of the Kurayara that had followed them through the Amazon rainforest! Living inside her! Her eyes lit up.

Some of my subscribers have been urging me for a while to turn on the paid option to increase my Substack visibility. I’ve quietly turned on the paid option for this newsletter. Everything stays free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

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Notes

* - Technically, these populations are called our ‘Microbiota’ and the word ‘Microbiome’ refers only to the collected genes of all of the microbes. But, about 20 years ago both scientific journals and the normal press agreed that ‘Microbiome’ was a better word and now everyone uses that for everything. I will too.

“ A lack of fibre in the diet has been associated with several disorders in children including constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, allergies and immune-related disorders.” https://adc.bmj.com/content/107/11/973

“Well-conducted studies [on the adult health effects of a high-fibre diet in children] reported improvements in body weight, blood lipids and glycaemia. https://dom-pubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dom.14176

For more information on how mattresses affect child health, see this article:

Topics covered

• How do melatonin supplements affect a child’s development?

• Why does breastfeeding older children at night increase their risk of dental disease?

• What’s the deal with mattresses and health?

• Do co-sleepers give the same sleep-synchronising benefits of co-sleeping?

You may be interested in these other episodes:

Some of my subscribers have been urging me for a while to turn on the paid option to increase my Substack visibility. I’ve quietly turned on the paid option for this newsletter. Everything stays free, but if you find these episodes useful, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Notes

“Exclusive breastfeeding for up to six months is associated with reduced ECC risk, while prolonged and nocturnal feeding after eruption of primary teeth elevates risk.” https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/13/1/102

“Our data suggest that the consumption of an HFCS-sweetened beverage increased breast milk fructose concentrations, which remained elevated up to five hours post-consumption.” https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/10/6/669

https://www.colorado.edu/today/2023/11/13/melatonin-use-soars-among-children-unknown-risks

“Due to a number of concerns regarding inappropriate use, lack of efficacy and safety data across pediatric populations and variability in actual content, melatonin should be used with caution in children and only under medical supervision.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12519-025-00896-5

“These findings suggest a global rise in prescriptions without efficacy data on use in children with typical development, underscoring the need to identify strategies to prevent and reduce melatonin use in young children, as well as to improve adherence by pediatricians to evidence-based practice standards.” https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2843284

I followed an elderly lady under the roof of the roadside shelter. It was like a long, low barn. Reaching into her generous handbag, she pulled out her hammock, slung it in seconds, and was asleep before we’d even managed to tie our first knot. By the time we had all five hammocks hung, we were the only ones in the barn awake. And there was silence other than the cicadas and crickets in the dark.

What do our bodies need?

Famous American psychiatrist Dr Allan Hobson once said, “Sleep is of the brain, by the brain and for the brain.”

He thought that because he only studied sleep in the brain.

If you look outside of the brain, you see sleep for what it really is: a frantic (and unavoidable) scramble for every tissue in the body to get repair and growth done before the trials of daytime life begin again. Every tissue has its own processes that can’t get done while it’s being used during the waking period (ie. the day for most of us humans), and so every tissue has its own set of sleep processes to recharge, repair, and reset.

The musculoskeletal system is primed during the day. When we’re awake, and out in the world, it needs to be ready at a moment’s notice to catapult us away from danger or toward food/potential mates/the tills in Tesco, so we keep it running in high-power mode and reduce the weight by moving water out of the tissues. To repair the damage this causes, we reduce the power consumption and flush blood and tissue fluid back into these tissues overnight.

To do this effectively, each piece of muscle, bone, cartilage, etc. needs to be physically unloaded (i.e. have the tension taken out of it). How does the body do that?

1. It adopts a different position - ever tried sleeping sitting up? Harder, less restful, and much more uncomfortable.

2. It alters muscle tone - during sleep, most of our muscles have lower tone (with the exception of the muscles around our airways). This prevents us from acting out our dreams, but it also allows our bodies to relax and stretch in ways that we rarely do when awake.

3. It moves - on average, in healthy adults, we move our large muscle groups almost seven times per hour when we’re asleep, for about twelve seconds each time. This avoids compressing any tissue for too long. Moving too little increases the risk of skin damage, like bed sores, and moving too much reduces sleep quality.

So, to enable our musculoskeletal system to repair itself, our bodies need to lie down, stretch, and move during sleep. If we achieve this, our musculoskeletal systems recharge and reset effectively overnight, leaving us feeling limber, pain-free, and ready in the morning.

Watching a barnful of seasoned hammockers sleeping soundly, I saw that this is exactly what they achieved. Even my elderly hammocking neighbour hopped out of bed with a spring in her step. Waking up with a sore back, or a ‘crick in the neck’ is almost unheard-of outside of a few W.E.I.R.D. (i.e. Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic) nations. Why? What is it about Western sleep that doesn’t quite scratch that musculoskeletal itch?

Why doesn’t this happen?

The habit of sleeping on mattresses on raised beds originated in Northern Europe. The raised beds kept us out of the coldest drafts and away from the cold, cold floor*. And the mattress (originally stuffed with straw, or horsehair, or (if you were fancy) with feathers) was vital to keep the heat in from underneath. The architecture of modern Western sleep was designed by lack of a heating system.

Over time, we’ve figured out how to insulate and safely heat our homes, so the insulating function of a mattress has become less important (in fact, ‘cooling’ mattresses have become common, to try to reduce the major problem of having a mattress!). Instead, the major motivation is now comfort. Sleep is generally more fragile in people with WEIRD cultures (see here), sleep disorders and pain are more common (see here), and people love a proximate cause, so they turn to innovations in mattresses trying to find better sleep quality. And, for adults with pre-existing musculoskeletal pain, this is very sensible.

However, let’s go back to what the musculoskeletal system needs the body to do so that it can get the type of sleep it needs: lie down, stretch, and move.

Mattresses are all about lying down, so we can cross that off. But the other two need specific conditions to happen, and, as I’m about to show you, modern Western mattresses might get in the way of that.

Let’s think about stretching. During sleep, most of our muscles are paralysed and relax. The parts of our bodies that are unsupported, for want of a better term, ‘sag’. During the moving periods, we shift about to get more comfortable and change which parts of our bodies are unsupported. The night becomes a repeating pattern of shift’n’sag.

In order to sag, we need those parts of our body to be unsupported. That means we need a sleep surface that doesn’t fully conform to our bodies. We need space to sag. That’s very hard with supportive mattresses that are designed to maintain alignment of our body.

How about the shift, then? What makes us move?

Pressure on the skin is uncomfortable. Lots of pressure is immediately uncomfortable. But moderate pressure is uncomfortable after longer time periods, sometimes 20-30 minutes. This is a sensation that your sleeping body is still responsive to, and shifts your position to alleviate it. It’s the specific trigger that leads to stretching and movement.

However…

Figure 1 shows the peak contact pressure on soft, medium, and hard mattresses. It’s clear to see that on the hard surface, most of the body is unloaded, and there are key pressure points. The areas with no contact pressure have maximal blood flow and zero compression of the muscles and soft tissues, so they can regenerate fully overnight. The areas of high pressure are boney points that don’t need to regenerate, but are able to signal to the body to shift position.

On the soft surface, these pressure differences are removed by the conformable material. Areas that need no pressure get some. Areas that need high pressure get the same some. When the trigger signals are hidden by a soft sleep surface, the body doesn’t stretch and move much during the night.

Ok, so the muscles will be unhappy about the medium pressure loading and not getting a chance to move, but surely the joints love the designed position, correct?

Incorrect. Quite aside from the stiffness that comes from waking up having not moved for the past 8 hours**, the sleep surface doesn’t even seem to have a big effect on the loading of the spine. The diagram below shows how the spine is loaded under different conditions when a person is lying on their back. The differences between the sleep surfaces are minimal, but this does highlight how much the neck vertebrae are loaded when you use a pillow, especially if you have a soft mattress (which loads them much more).

Why aren’t mattresses better?

Mattress-making is a multibillion dollar business, and you would expect something with that much money behind it (and that you’re going to cuddle for an estimated 27 years during your life) to be designed based on some sort of logic or evidence beyond just “feels nice”.

A recent review concluded that new mattress designs strive for customisation, for regional features, and active control to adapt to different body builds and postures. “However, the suggested threshold or target values for desirable spine alignment and body pressure distribution during sleep cannot yet be justified in view of the lack of sufficient evidence.”

So mattresses make it easier for children to stay warm in cold houses in the winter, but there’s no evidence that providing mattresses to sleep on improves children’s health or children’s sleep in any other way. And as I’ve written about before, making sleep easy in childhood may make sleep harder in adulthood (here).

And with that minimal benefit to kids, comes a pile of downsides:

• Mattresses are huge. They take up, accordingly, a huge amount of space in a home.

• They’re hard to wash and harbour dust, parasites, and allergens.

• They are (by design) full of air pockets, making them excellent fire-lighters, which in-turn means that there are laws requiring that they be doused with (proven toxic) flame retardants.

Of course, all of the above are magnified risks against, say, cuddly toys, because, as I think I mentioned: We. Sleep. On. These. Things. For. Years. Right up next to our faces.

So, minimal benefits and significant risks to musculoskeletal and lung health. There’s got to be another way…

What can we learn from traditional cultures?

As I mentioned, sleeping on a mattress on a raised bed is a post-European thing. People all over the world sleep in many other ways. Sometimes these ways are still raised: on packed-mud platforms in West Africa, or on snow shelves in the far North. Sometimes, people have traditionally preferred to sleep close to the ground. Not only because they had to, but also because of beliefs about the health or philosophical benefits of simplicity and connection with the earth. In Japan, for example, beds are only there when you need them. People lay out thin futon mattresses on tatami floor mats at night, and store them away during the day.

These cultures show some similarities around what the human body benefits from in a sleeping surface, and that points us towards some overall aims:

1. Aim to get kids sleeping on a harder surface as early as possible.

2. Aim for a harder surface, not necessarily a ‘hard’ surface. Just something that isn’t comfortable forever.

3. Aim to maintain ventilation.

What does that mean for those of use starting from mattress sleeping?

If you’re used to mattress sleeping, thinking about change can be daunting. A For babies and young children who are still learning how to sleep, you may be surprised at how easily they learn to sleep on firm surfaces. With older children, you may need to get them on board and transition slowly. A couple of tips…

• If you want to test it out - put some thick cardboard under the sheet (with an extra towel underneath if you want to transition even more gradually)

• If you want to get rid of the mattress - consider tatami mats, thin futon mattresses, or yoga mats. These can be put on the floor or on a raised surface. With less insulation, children’ll find it easier to stay cool when it’s warm.

• If you want to get rid of the mattress but keep the bed - put a harder sleeping surface, like a sheet of plywood on top of the slats. You can then put one of the above softer surfaces on top of the plywood. You need slats for mattresses because there is so much material that they can get mouldy if not ventilated. However, when the sleeping pad is much thinner, mould isn’t a problem (at least in climates like the eastern UK).

• If you want to get rid of the mattress but you’re worried about the cold - put more insulation underneath. This could be a foam layer, a wool pad, or even an animal skin if that’s your vibe. Consider an electric mattress topper. Much cheaper than turning up the central heating, and there’s something particularly glorious about a bed that heats itself.

• If you’re wondering about bedclothes - Our set up is a yoga mat, an electric mattress topper in the winter, a waterproof sheet in case of accidents, and a sheet. You can see the children’s bedroom here.

Imagine never, ever, waking up stiff or sore after an otherwise good night’s sleep. Imagine hopping out of bed feeling limber, flexible, and ready to go. Imagine being able to sleep pretty much anywhere. Now imagine if you’d had this skill since childhood.

Kids who learn to sleep on firm surfaces stretch their bodies in different ways every night. Additionally, they’ll develop the ability to sleep anywhere. Lounge camping becomes a thing. It’s easy to stay over at friends’ houses. Sleepovers suddenly become no problem.

And, best of all, they’ll never wake up with a crick in the neck.

Some of my subscribers have been urging me for a while to turn on the paid option to increase my Substack visibility. I’ve quietly turned on the paid option for this newsletter. Everything stays free, but if you find my work useful and would like to show your support, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

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Notes

* - And the fleas, to some degree.

** - Who am I kidding? We live in an industrialised society: 5.5 hours.

“The review demonstrated that mattress designs have strived for customization, regional features, and real-time active control to adapt to the biomechanical features of different body builds and postures. However, the suggested threshold or target values for desirable spine alignment and body pressure distribution during sleep cannot yet be justified in view of the lack of sufficient evidence.” https://peerj.com/articles/6364/

Effects of mattress support on sleeping position and low-back pain https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41606-022-00073-x

Effect of mattress and pillow encasings on children with asthma and house dust mite allergy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091674902912674

Are Sleeping Children Exposed to Plasticizers, Flame Retardants, and UV-Filters from Their Mattresses? Answer is yes: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.5c03560

“The suppression of muscle tone in sleep is not merely the result of a loss of excitatory input, but is very much an active process characterized by robust inhibition of motoneurons. This pattern of muscle regulation, in tandem with electroencephalographic markers, is fundamental so as to be the basis of conventional sleep scoring criteria. However, sleep-specific motor suppression is generally regarded as an epiphenomenon of reduced neural activation of the musculature, while a putative role for influencing muscle physiology has not been explored in any great detail.” More detail here: https://www.proquest.com/openview/10150d6bab812cc754bcf71f1ef0bc53/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750

Upper airway muscle activity is elevated during slow-wave sleep (SWS) when compared with lighter sleep stages. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.00872.2016

Children who don’t sleep well appear to be at higher risk of developing later musculoskeletal pain (though the evidence doesn’t completely agree), and appear to be at higher risk of sports injuries: Exploring the Associations between Sleep Problems and Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain in Adolescents: A Prospective Cohort Study https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1155/2014/615203

Large muscle group movements during sleep in healthy people: normative values and correlation to sleep features https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/46/8/zsad129/7147736

This study concludes that varying pillow heights are linked to neck muscle activity and sleep comfort. These findings underscore the importance of an appropriate pillow height to maintain a healthy cervical spine and promote restful sleep. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11325-024-03219-6

The ergonomic theory (that believes there are single best positions, rather than that the best position is the next position) is shown in this paper, which recommends that the best position for sleep means “The lateral decubitus right or left, with a pillow in the head / neck height of the distance between the shoulder and the neck of each participant, a pillow between the knees and a pillow between your arms or; ii - The Supine, with a low pillow (5 cm) below the head / neck and a pillow or high roller (15cm height) below the knees. Phew! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235197891500757X

This paper suggests that pillows are necessary to support cervical lordosis - at odds with the diagram of spinal disc loading shown in the main article: “A factor critical to a suitable pillow is proper support for cervical lordosis. The main role of a pillow during sleep is to support the cervical spine in a neutral position, which prevents loss of cervical spine curvature and waking cervical symptoms by minimizing end-range positioning of the spinal segments.” https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jongeun-Yim-2/publication/275242065_Optimal_Pillow_Conditions_for_High-Quality_Sleep_A_Theoretical_Review/links/579800db08aeb0ffcd06e714/Optimal-Pillow-Conditions-for-High-Quality-Sleep-A-Theoretical-Review.pdf

For more information on the long-term health effects of industrialised sport in childhood, see this article: https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/do-children-need-protection-from

For more information on why childhood cruciate ruptures are up 2000% since the year 2000, see this article: https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/cruciate-ruptures-are-up-2000-in

Topics covered

• How does in-labour antibiotic prophylaxis for Group B Strep affect the baby’s long-term health?

• How does your brain continue to develop into your early thirties?

• How do astringent flavours affect learning?

• How do adverse childhood experiences affect adult physical fitness?

• What’s good and bad about industrialised football?

• How does salt contribute to metabolic syndrome?

These other podcasts cover related topics:

Some of my subscribers have been urging me for a while to turn on the paid option to increase my Substack visibility. I’ve quietly turned on the paid option for this newsletter. Everything stays free, but you’d like to support my work, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Notes

Intrapartum Antibiotic Prophylaxis and Child Health Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Observational Studies: https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1471-0528.70015

UK recommendations on GBS testing: https://www.rcog.org.uk/for-the-public/browse-our-patient-information/group-b-streptococcus-gbs-in-pregnancy-and-newborn-babies/

“In the United Kingdom, where universal screening is not currently implemented and the background rate is much lower than it was in the United States before screening was implemented, it is estimated that 440 women need to receive IAP to prevent 1 case of EOD, and 3000 to prevent 1 case of EOD leading to death or severe disability.” https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(22)00622-6/fulltext

Brain not sealed until early thirties: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65974-8

Astringent FLAVOURS help you learn: http://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2665927125002266

Another big "ACEs cause adulthood dysfunction" study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400839476_Adverse_childhood_experiences_and_ad[…]e_Brazilian_Longitudinal_Study_of_Adult_Health_ELSA-Brasil

High salt intake causes leptin resistance and obesity in mice by stimulating endogenous fructose production and metabolism: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1713837115

This makes it the best time to build a house, or anything else that you don’t want to be washed away before the roof goes on. We had seen endless construction sites pop up throughout Accra, which were now adding cement dust and diesel fumes to the fried air.

Our friend was running one of them, and (during a break in construction) he showed us his half-finished house (and fed us incredibly good, incredibly spicy omelette - Thanks Kamaka!). There was nothing dangerous on the site yet, so the children were off exploring and catching lizards. Or…or at least they had been… we hadn’t seen them in a while.

We found the three of them with their faces pressed up against a gap in the garden wall, watching the single most enthralling event to be found anywhere in the world: a game of football.

Whether it’s £130 of branded high-tech wonder-leather, or a pile of old plastic bags tied into a rough sphere with twine, there’s very little in the world that can capture kids’ attention like a football. We’re semi-predatory primates that need to get good at both targeting projectiles and capturing elusive prey. A football is easy to launch at things, escapes your grasp readily, and can be surprisingly hard to recapture. It ticks all of the little play boxes that Nature has wired into us.

But there are more reasons that football is the world’s most popular sport. It provides companionship, social allegiance, achievement, reassuring ritual behaviours, and an extremely motivating way to get children moving more. Millions of children around the world dream of being the next Kylian Mbappé*, of receiving adulation and dollars like the top pro footballers.

This means that for many of us, getting children into football seems like a no-brainer, right? It’s like a pre-programmed cheat-code to get them outside, moving around, getting fitter, making friends, and building up a little confidence. What’s not to like? Almost nothing.

*Almost*.

Child bodies need variety

Let’s take a step back for a moment. What do children’s bodies need for healthy growth and development?

In general, bodies need variety. They need variety in the foods they eat. Variety in how they move. Variety of light intensity. Variety of interactions. Variety of play.

Why is variety so important? Because of how bodies get strong. Bodies, effectively, ‘over-repair’. Bones that are stressed in one direction, over-repair the damage and become even stronger in that direction. Muscles that are tested in one way, over repair the micro-tears and become even stronger in that one way.

Why am I being so pedantic with my language, because the body is also pedantic! This over-repair process is specific. Over-repairing a bone against stress in one direction does basically nothing to reinforce it against stress in any another direction. The same is true of muscles, and ligaments, and tendons, and protective reflexes. Even the social skills needed to get through normal interactions are learned specifically and not as transferable as many people believe. The result of this, if you think about it, is the need for a large variety of different stresses and movements, to produce a mind and body that are strong in all sorts of directions and resilient to all sorts of impacts and injuries.

See where we’re going with this?

Where we get to is: children shouldn’t specialise in any sport at a young age for health reasons. And (before anyone wonders if they need to trade off adulthood health for sporting greatness) it turns out that early specialisation is rarely good for elite sports performance either: bodies that are built to play a single sport tend to fail early. Athletes who specialised earlier tend to suffer more injuries, more burnout, and worse mental health. In contrast, broad movement training in childhood and specialisation in late adolescence is linked with more elite achievement in most sports**. Including football. (And it’s not just football: this article by explains how the lack of early specialisation in Norwegian children sets up Norwegian adults for sporting dominance.)

We all know most of the above. Now things get interesting!

In the West, just like we have industrialised food, and play, and health, we’ve started to industrialise sports. By pouring money into the game of football, we’ve created huge rewards and enormous social standing for the key players. With that comes massive competitiveness, and with that competition (just like in all industrialised processes) comes specialisation through drills, repetitive training, and uni-functional roles.

How does this affect the players, and the kids intending to be players?

Industrialised football provides less movement variety

Spending a lot of time playing industrialised football (i.e. in football clubs) alters a child’s growth and development more than playing non-industrialised football.

• The pitch: Football pitches are flat and smooth. This means that children get less variety in the loads on their legs and feet.

• The ball: Footballs are spherical and inflated to the same extent. This makes them more predictable in a game, but means that legs and feet are exposed to more repetitive loads and more repetitive movements.

• The boots: Football boots are very tight and have studs for extra grip. This is great for ball control and rapid changes of direction, but results in higher-than-normal loads on immobilised feet and legs. This makes them less able to cope with the abnormal loads, increasing the risk of injury.

• The headers: The FA recommends restricting headers for children under 13. This is because evidence suggests that repeated head impacts increase the risk of degenerative brain disease later in life.

Industrialised football can affect children’s motivations

But there are wider unintended consequences of early football exposure.

• Children can forget how to play without footballs. Footballs are so motivating that if they are constantly available, children have no reason to play with anything else. Anyone who’s ever had a ball-obsessed dog will have seen similar symptoms - a dog that can’t think about anything else when the ball is around, that is visibly sad when the ball is not, and that becomes overexcited and finds it hard to disengage when play stops. And this compulsive-type behaviour is encouraged by environments that give them very few other opportunities. For more on this, listen to Caroline Criado Perez’s Visible Women podcast on playground spaces that are used equally by both boys and girls (here).

• Football is a gateway into football gaming and screen time: From a profit perspective, organisations like FIFA profit from people watching football on television or playing football video games. In 2020, FIFA earned more money from video games than it did from football itself. This means that the sport is a very useful gateway to turn children into consumers of the screen-based products that the organisations sell. And sadly, many children who started with a love of playing football end up with a love of playing football games, rarely playing physical football at all.

• Football matches and gaming normalise gambling and ultraprocessed food consumption: Predatory advertising of ultraprocessed food and gambling is common. Football matches are often sponsored by ultraprocessed food companies and betting companies. Footballers and teams often have their own sponsorship deals and promote products to their young followers (with some occasional exceptions - thanks Cristiano Ronaldo!). In addition, gambling-like features, such as loot boxes in football video games, expose children to gambling concepts and normalize them. Gambling and professional football go hand in hand in many countries, and especially in the UK.

Industrialised child football is led by adults

Children’s football matches are very different to games we saw being played in the villages we lived in.

• Adult supervision: In the vast majority of games that we saw played, there were no adults involved. Children self-organised and self-directed the matches. Children who didn’t play by the rules weren’t welcome, but they weren’t forcibly excluded or penalised, they just weren’t included as much. This child-led approach meant that there was much less angst and conflict than we notice in child football games in the UK.

• Adult coaching: In any youth sports club, coaching is provided to improve children’s performance, skills and fitness. Good coaches motivate and inspire children. But the motivations of children and coaches are almost never the same. Coaches who prioritize individual improvement, effort, and skill development (“creating a mastery climate” in motivation jargon) create children with stronger motivation and lower stress. Coaches who emphasize winning, comparison, and outperforming others (“creating a performance climate”) reduce a child’s long-term motivation and increase the risk of anxiety and burnout. But the effect of coaches on a child’s motivation for sports is not nearly as strong as the influence of a child’s peers.

• Adult observation: In the UK, parents influence football - unsurprisingly, as often they are paying for the privilege. Our culture of ‘turning up’ for children on paper looks great, but it often comes at the cost of parents becoming too invested in the lives of their child and their child’s team. This is very stressful for children. Adults may also model bad behaviour, such as taunting, challenging, and even verbally abusing players, coaches, and other parents.

What should we do?

Look, we understand that football is magic. It can be, as we said before, a pre-installed cheat-code for getting kids outside playing, having fun, getting fit, and making friends. But, there’s a line that gets crossed for many kids between football benefit and football detriment. And in many cases that line is only visible in hindsight. There are some things that we can do to prevent the fixation with the beautiful game turning into worse lifelong health. Here’s how:

• Avoid deliberately introducing a football.

  • Young children need lots of time in environments that encourage them to move in lots of different ways. This means playgrounds, forests, wild areas, or welcoming urban areas.

• Restrict time playing football.

  • At home, rotate toys to encourage children to play in a variety of ways inside and outside the home.

  • At school, ask if football during playtime is restricted. My children’s school changed their policy when they realised that football meant that 90% of the playground was used by 10% of children. They now have football played on the field in rotation - each class gets a day a week where they can play football at lunch.

• Think carefully about whether to involve a child in a football club.

  • At a young age, children are better off developing foundational movement skills (sprinting, jumping, throwing, and agility). Young children are much better off in a gymnastics class where they use their bodies in many different ways, than in a club that is training a particular sport.

  • As children get older, football clubs can be fun, motivating, and challenging. But make sure that children are still getting time to move in a wide variety of ways to strengthen their growing bodies.

  • If you decide to involve your child in a football club, be aware of how this may affect their motivation for football-related video games, their exposure to predatory advertising, their exposure to toxic behaviour from coaches or other parents, and their motivation for other forms of movements that their bodies need. Having conversations about these risks from the beginning can set children up to recognise how they are being manipulated by people in positions of power.
    

And here’s the big one:

• Allow children to play football unsupervised.

  • Adults don’t really help kids play. Child-led football games enable children to learn a range of life skills that aren’t taught in clubs, and enable them to be positively influenced by their peers.

Children love football and it’s easy to see why. But industrialised sport is different from non-industrialised football in a number of ways. Recognising the specific risks of sports specialisation and involvement in industrialised sports means that we can set our children up to experience the benefits of sports participation without incurring the harms.

Notes

* - Don’t give me that look. I know footballers! I do! I didn’t have to google him or *anything*.

** - There are exceptions to this rule. In general, sports where the best competitors are adolescents (such as ice skating, gymnastics, skateboarding, and dance) reward early specialisation. It’s still a bad idea from a health point of view, to be clear.

Some of my subscribers have been urging me for a while to turn on the paid option to increase my Substack visibility. I’ve quietly turned on the paid option for this newsletter. Everything stays free, but you’d like to support my work, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

You may also be interested in:

Prefer a podcast episode?

Notes

Football positively affects body composition and bone mineral content, especially in the lower limb: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-022-01726-8

Football improves physical fitness in 9-10yo boys https://research.usq.edu.au/item/q3qq5/recreational-football-training-improved-health-related-physical-fitness-in-9-to-10-year-old-boys

Why is football so popular? An evolutionary perspective: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1517295/full

Revisiting Early Sport Specialization: What’s the Problem? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/19417381211049773

Youth Sports Specialization and Its Effect on Professional, Elite, and Olympic Athlete Performance, Career Longevity, and Injury Rates: A Systematic Review

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23259671221129594

Intensive soccer playing (not necessarily leisure soccer playing) during the growing years can promote the development of bowlegs (genu varum) and, in turn, increase the risk of knee arthritis. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6050431/

Data suggest that heading frequency and concussions are associated with higher risk of developing CTE in (retired) soccer players. However, based on this review of only 14 players, questions persist as to whether or not heading is a risk factor for CTE or long-term cognitive decline. https://journals.lww.com/cjsportsmed/fulltext/2024/01000/chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy_in_soccer.10.aspx

Conversely, participation in individual sport compared to non-sport participation was associated with 16% higher anxious/depressed scores, 14% higher withdrawn/depressed scores, 12% higher social problems scores, and 14% higher attention problems scores. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0268583

Sport specialization is associated with both overuse and acute injuries as well as burnout and compromised mental health as consequences of this pattern of athletic participation. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2768276524008332

Child spending in football video games: https://assets.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wpuploads/2019/10/CCO-Gaming-the-System-2019.pdf

“Particularly concerning is the subtle and pervasive normalisation of gambling through unnoticed exposures such as online advertising, sponsorships, and gambling-like features embedded in young people’s daily activities, that would not have happened to their parents.” https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/report/young-people-and-gambling-qualitative-research/what-new-learning-has-this-research-brought-to-the-gambling-commission-young

Addressing the relationship between gambling and professional football in England: a response to Smith et al. ‘Gambling, sports psychiatry, and disciplinary sanctions in English professional football’

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14660970.2024.2336396#abstract

In practice, these novel results suggest that peers have the greatest positive influence on participants’ life skills development in sport and all three social agents should be encouraged to create a mastery-climate to help promote participants’ life skills development. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02640414.2021.1939980

A shift in our conceptual thinking about muscular fitness is needed because established levels of physical inactivity will become more difficult to change without interventions that recognize the foundational importance of resistive skills right from the start. https://journals.lww.com/acsm-csmr/fulltext/2023/12000/may_the_force_be_with_youth__foundational_strength.7.aspx

For more information on salt consumption in babies, see this article:

https://guenbradbury.substack.com/p/how-bad-is-salt-for-babies

Topics covered

• How does eating sorbitol affect the liver, and how do your microbes help?

• Does early-life adversity affect later-life health, and how does this differ in different cultures?

• What does salt do in the body?

• Why is too much salt bad for babies?

• What foods do we need to limit for babies?

• Do babies still roll in cultures in which they are never put down on the floor?

These other podcasts cover related topics:

Some of my subscribers have been urging me for a while to turn on the paid option to increase my Substack visibility. I’ve quietly turned on the paid option for this newsletter. Everything stays free, but you’d like to support my work, you can now upgrade – completely optional, always appreciated.

Subscribe now

Notes

Intestine-derived sorbitol drives steatotic liver disease in the absence of gut bacteria https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.adt3549

Early life adversity and physical health implications in adulthood: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645302500397X

I was killing time, crouched in the shade of tattered awning, letting the hours before the next bus wash over me. I was watching some men repairing the road with long sticks, bags of cement, and a general level of relaxed self confidence that reminded me of jazz musicians*. As I watched, they took a break for lunch. Out of pockets came bananas, coconuts, handfuls of peanuts. And avocados. But no plates. Or cutlery.

What followed, as I watched the man with the millennial fruit, was a masterclass in manual dexterity: Spin the fruit so the pointed end rests upward. With one deft pinch, pop out the stalk and split the top of the skin. Peel like banana. Eat the top half down to stone. Then by flexing your hand, detach the other half from the remaining skin like you’re shelling an egg. With or without removing the stone, pop in mouth. Bananas, coconuts, and peanuts were dispatched with equally little fuss and mess.

Lunch: done.

Mind: blown.

You can’t do that! some part of me wanted to shout. That’s not a meal, that’s still ingredients! Having grown up in a home where cooking was easy, cold storage was common, and food poisoning was unlikely, virtually all of our food was prepared and processed in some way. Porridge. Sandwiches. Pies. Pasties. Meat and two veg. A meal wasn’t a meal unless the food had been in some way prepared or processed.

But travelling through South America and Africa, I’d had to re-evaluate how we ate. Chopping and preparing food takes time, space, and clean water to wash tools afterward. Then cooking it means fire, and, as my husband will attest, gathering firewood and lighting a fire in tropical heat is an ordeal**. Worst of all, preparing a processed meal from ingredients means that you need to have a collection of ingredients ready simultaneously, which, without refrigeration or access to shops is tricky.

What you really want in an environment like that, where food spoils quickly and the risk of food-borne disease is high, is a food with a fantastic nutrient balance and a great flavour, wrapped in a protective layer, with all sorts of incredible mechanisms to protect it from decomposing before you can eat it.

Some sort of ultra-high-tech sports bar with Ultramino Acid Technology™ and a vapor-barrier film package. Or an avocado.

As this culinary realisation dawned on us in South America and then Africa, fruits, nuts, and peelable vegetables made up an ever-increasing proportion of our diet.

And while that was great for us in terms of fibre, liver-sugar impact, dental health, inflammation (etc. etc. etc.), it meant that we had to think much more carefully about getting enough of one essential nutrient.

Salt.

What do our bodies need?

Let’s start with the obvious. Bodies need salt. Without the sodium and chloride ions that it provides you would die. Instantly. The nerve impulses in your brain - the very thoughts that make you you - are little more than moving ions from salt. The acid in your stomach that protects you from getting food poisoning every time you eat is made out of nothing more than salt, water, and clever biochemistry. It’s also how the body regulates how much water goes to the various possible locations in your body: into your blood, into your tissues, into your bladder, etc. etc. The whole history of life could, without too much argument, be boiled down to ‘some proteins doing magic with water and salt’.

So, salt is so fundamental to our functioning that we animals need to hold it in a tightly-controlled balance. Too much or too little, and we’re in trouble.

We all know that eating too much salt is ‘bad’ for us in various ways, but do we know the specifics? If we exclude acute salt poisoning (which rapidly dehydrates brain cells leading to seizure and coma) there are really four ways in which high salt can be bad for us:

1. Salt enhances a thing called ‘the polyol pathway’ that makes cells convert more glucose into fructose and, hence, drives metabolic syndrome (our major Western nemesis - more on this here).

2. Heavily salting food increases the risk of stomach cancer.

3. It may increase calcium loss and increase osteoporosis.

4. And, this is the one people are familiar with, if you have certain genes or if you eat or drink a lot of sugar, then eating too much salt can also make your blood pressure too high, damaging your blood vessels.

All together (and especially the power of that last one in our sugary times) has galvanised health authorities. In the West, most dietary guidelines now recommend limiting salt to less than 6 g per day. However, in the US, a single restaurant meal frequently contains more than this. More than 70% of American people’s salt intake comes from processed foods (despite these foods providing around 53% of calories).

For babies, whose wee kidneys*** are built to handle the low salt concentration found in breast milk, limiting salt is even more important. The WHO recommends that children under one year old consume less than 1g of salt per day, which (according to a 2011 study) only 30% of British babies achieve. Without the ability to rapidly filter it out, too much salt in babies increases the likelihood of later cardiovascular disease, as well as altering kidney function and salt preference throughout life.

This is why the NHS says “Do not add salt to your baby’s food or cooking water, and do not use stock cubes or gravy, as they’re often high in salt. Remember this [also] when you’re cooking for the family, if you plan to give the same food to your baby.”

All of which can be very sensible advice.

However. However. HOW. EVER.

There are some pretty solid reasons to not follow the zero-added-salt guidelines. Some examples:

• Sometimes access to a specialised low-salt baby diet is out of reach financially or logistically.

• Sometimes there are cultural or traditional reasons to cook food with salt. Breads and pastas for example are very much *not* the same if cooked without salt, and cooking a separate diet for a baby can be infeasible.

• Finally, there’s evidence that allowing babies to wean onto the same food the rest of the family is eating is a tool to reduce the risk of picky eating later in life (more on this here). And removing salt from older adults’ diets isn’t always a good idea.

Luckily, these are public-health recommendations designed for greatest effect for the population as a whole. As with many other public-health recommendations, if parents, nursery workers, and other carers understand the scientific context for the recommendations, they can often use this knowledge to make better, safer individual-level decisions.

So, aiming to enable that, let’s start with the science of where all of this salt is coming from.

Why do only 30% succeed in meeting the WHO guidelines?

There are two major answers here. One won’t surprise you, the other might. It did me.

Firstly, most UK babies eat a lot of processed food. If you’re not familiar with the NOVA classification of food processing levels, I’ll include it in the notes section below. Suffice it to say that a lot of UK ‘weaning friendly’ favourites (think alphabet spaghetti, soups, soft bread, baked beans, etc.) are considered “Group 4 - Ultraprocessed” which tends to bring with it a lot of salt. Have a look at a tin of beans next time you’re in Tesco. Then think about that 1g limit. It’s hard to avoid.

Secondly, the most common unprocessed food UK babies get is surprisingly salty. A healthy drink of milk can’t hurt any baby? Surely? The thing is, and this may shock you, cows are not humans. Calves are born with much more developed kidneys than babies, which means that they can make use of a lot more salt from a very young age. Their mothers’ accordingly make much saltier milk than human mothers do. Roughly 4x as salty. Even formula milk is up to 2x as salty as breastmilk. Again, it’s suddenly very easy to pass that WHO number. Especially in combination with processed food.

But, on the flip-side, armed with these two bits of knowledge, it becomes very easy to avoid the WHO limit, even if the baby is eating the same food as the adult family.

Fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, meat, and potatoes intrinsically contain very little salt. We add salt to season them and to aid cooking, but normally we will come nowhere adding enough salt that the baby’s daily portion contains an entire gram. Nowhere near. Try it yourself! Run the numbers! If babies eat predominantly minimally-processed foods, without drinking much cow’s milk (again, we’re not talking about a dairy-free diet here. Put cream in your cooking if you want to! It’s very unlikely that a baby will eat enough of a food containing milk to get too much salt), then a small amount of salt in home-cooked meals is nothing to worry about. You might even be allowed a stock cube…

What can we do specifically?

So, once we understand the main sources of salt in the foods we wean babies onto, we can then start to make individual-level decisions based on how our babies eat. Specifically:

• If you’re breastfeeding your baby, breastfeed them as long as you can. This means you don’t have to rely on replacement drinks to boost their nutritional intake.

• If your baby takes formula, aim to stop the formula when the baby turns one (there’s no benefit after this, according to the NHS and WHO). You can switch to cow’s milk at that point (a one-year-old’s kidneys are much more developed than a younger baby’s). However, this may be counter-productive, as cow’s milk can fill babies up and reduce their motivation to try a wide range of new foods.

• Don’t give cow’s milk as a drink before a baby turns one.

• If your baby eats sugary foods, or a lot of bread and/or ultra-processed adult foods (baked beans, ready meals, snacks, etc.), then don’t add salt to any home-prepared foods.

• If you can afford to (and have access to them), feed babies mostly minimally processed foods. A general goal (and this is useful for more than just reducing salt, obviously) is to aim for lots of parts of lots of types of plants. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, pulses, etc. Prechewing can help to make certain minimally processed foods more accessible (see here).

• If your baby does not eat much ultraprocessed food, continue to not salt home-cooked food heavily, but don’t worry about small amounts for seasoning or cooking. Enjoy letting baby join in family meals!

There! Hopefully, that’s one more worry off your plate.

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Notes

* Or what I assume jazz musicians to be like. I’ve only seen films, and to be honest, I’ve barely seen films.

** I think that’s what he said…in between shouting about getting stung by the ants living under the aforementioned firewood.

*** 🥁🥁💥

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Notes

The NOVA food classification:

• Group 1: Unprocessed or Minimally Processed Foods - Natural foods (fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, milk) or those altered by drying, freezing, or pasteurization without adding substances.

• Group 2: Processed Culinary Ingredients - Substances obtained directly from Group 1 foods or nature (oils, butter, sugar, salt) used to cook and season.

• Group 3: Processed Foods - Simple products made by adding Group 2 ingredients to Group 1 foods, such as canned fish, cheeses, and freshly made breads.

• Group 4: Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) - Industrial formulations containing little to no whole food, often with additives, preservatives, and dyes (e.g., sodas, snacks, frozen meals).

Salt and metabolic syndrome: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article/378/1885/20220230/23896/The-fructose-survival-hypothesis-for-obesityThe

Salty taste preference, always using table salt, and a greater high-salt and salt-preserved foods intake increased the risk of gastric cancer, though the association was less robust with total sodium intake. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10552-022-01565-y

Salt has notoriously been blamed for causing an increase in the urinary excretion of calcium, and thus is a considered a risk factor for osteoporosis. However, the increase in the urinary excretion of calcium with higher sodium intakes can be offset by the increased intestinal absorption of dietary calcium. Thus, the overall calcium balance does not appear to be reduced with a higher sodium intake. However, the other ubiquitous white crystal, sugar, may lead to osteoporosis by increasing inflammation, hyperinsulinemia, increased renal acid load, reduced calcium intake, and increased urinary calcium excretion.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6140170/

Thus, primary hypertension may result from the overactivation of a survival response triggered by fructose metabolism. Restricting salt and sugar and hydrating with ample water may be helpful in the prevention of primary hypertension. https://academic.oup.com/ckj/article/16/8/1239/7085008

Nova classification system overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

“Foods served at full-service restaurant chains are high in calories, saturated fat, and sodium.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1499404613007082

“In the whole sample, 70% consumed in excess, of 400 mg sodium per day, the maximum UK recommendation for children up to age 12 months.” https://www.nature.com/articles/ejcn2011137

“Sodium content in human milk is not influenced directly by maternal sodium intake” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344466756_Relation_Between_Human_Milk_Sodium_and_Maternal_Sodium_Intake

“Liquid and powdered whole cow milk have high sodium content, and the content per portion is higher in liquid milk than in powdered milk. The estimated consumption of sodium through these products can far exceed the adequate intake for infants from 0 to 6 months old, even when the recommended dilution and maximum daily volumes are followed.”

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9432180/

In 2014, a study in Iran found that most of the baby formula milk contained significantly more sodium than the manufacturers claim https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4500422/

“The mother providing fresh fruit and eating the same meal as the child were protective against later ‘picky eating’, while feeding ready-prepared food was predictive.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019566631830446X

Your Toddler Only Wants Milk? How to Ease a Milk Dependency Habit: https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/toddler/nutrition/Pages/your-toddler-only-wants-milk-how-to-ease-milk-dependency-and-encourage-a-healthy-diet.aspx