[Sugar consumption and prenatal acceleration. I. Studies in the history of medicine on the coincidence and connection of these 2 secular phenomenon].

A comparative historic evaluation reveals an astonishing world-wide relationship between prenatal acceleration, i.e. secular changes of birth-weight and percentage of "large babies", of distinct population groups, and their sugar consumption. They seem to be "connected" as they are regularly "conjoined" (HUME [46]). A statistically highly significant correlation between these two phenomena was established for Switzerland and Germany. The assumption of a causal relationship was confirmed by the abrupt development of growth acceleration together with the rapid increase in the per capita sugar consumption observed in an experiment-like situation in certain Canadian Eskimo populations in recent years.