[nessup]

While I am all for reducing sugar consumption, this one sentence lead me to completely distrust this paper:

> The study found no link between sugar intake and new mood disorders in women and it is unclear why. More research is needed to test the sugar-depression effect in large population samples.

There is literally no further comment on why this effect was not observed in women. Why? To me, this means it's possible that some confounder is at play here.

I'm also with Xeoncross (another commenter here) who observed that this study took place from 1983 to 2013. Quoting him:

> Sugar consumption has gone up, so has US inflation, less overall exercise, social media consumption, and a variety of other possible negative factors.

So you're telling me that the link was not observable in women, AND that many social/economic realities changed in the course of the study, and we're supposed to believe there was little room left for confounders? This reeks.

[stevenwoo]

IIRC the study that led to people carbo loading for endurance events was first only done with males and that follow up studies found no effect in women. So we don't know the reason for the gender response difference but it exists. For a separate semi tangential on gender differences, the presence of testosterone in males appears to increase the red blood cell count and oxygen carrying ability slightly (versus testosterone deficient or females who doped in a prior era without testing versus clean females) so there is definite precedent for there being a difference in response to diet/ability due to gender/gender specific hormones.

[nessup]

I'm with you there -- it's possible there could be some gender difference and it could be environmental/genetic/etc. But the author spent no more than a single sentence on what is a very glaring issue. That's sketch.