Soda Consumption In Children Could Lead To Violent Behavior
August 19th, 2013Via: CBS:
Studies of young soda drinkers often focus on added risk for childhood obesity. But now, a new study suggests the sweet stuff could actually be making kids more violent.
Public health researchers looked at thousands of 5-year-olds, and found the more sugary soft drinks they consumed, the more likely they were to inflict damage and hurt others.
“We found a significant relation with soda consumption with the overall measure of aggression and with the three specific behaviors we felt were most indicative of aggression: destroying things belonging to others, getting into fights and physically attacking people,” wrote the authors, led by researcher Dr. Shakira Suglia, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City, said in a written statement.
For the study, researchers at Columbia University, Harvard and the University of Vermont analyzed about 3,000 kids — mostly black and Hispanic children — from 20 large U.S. cities. They had been enrolled in a study that followed them since birth, in which moms were given surveys about their child’s behavior.
More than 40 percent of the children had at least one soft drink per day, while only 4 percent consumed four or more.
But, the more soda kids drank, the more problems with attention, aggression and withdrawn behaviors were reported.
Even after ruling out other factors that could influence violent behavior — like family income, where kids lived, how much candy they ate, whether they grew up in a violent home or if mom was depressed, or dad was in jail — the researchers still linked soda consumption to increases in aggressive behavior.
Kids who drank four or more soft drinks per day were found to be twice as likely to destroy other people’s property, get into fights and physically hit others.
