History, it turns out, is also a nutritionist. British researchers examining the long shadow of post-war sugar rationing have found that children whose earliest years were shaped by scarcity grew up to carry measurably lower rates of several cancers into old age. The natural boundary drawn by wartime policy — ending abruptly in September 1953 — created two distinct cohorts whose diverging health trajectories across six decades suggest that what we consume in our first thousand days may quietly author much of what follows. It is a reminder that the body keeps its own ledger, and that early rest