In the long aftermath of wartime austerity, a quiet experiment in deprivation may have left an unexpected gift. A study of nearly 47,000 Britons born in the early 1950s found that those who experienced sugar rationing from before birth through their second year of life were meaningfully less likely to suffer anxiety and depression in their fifties and sixties — a gap of years, not merely statistics. The finding does not prove that scarcity heals, but it invites a deeper question about what the earliest nutritional environment writes into the body, and whether modern abundance carries costs we