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Soda Makes Five-Year-Olds Break Your Stuff, Science Finds 287
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Shakira F. Suglia and co-authors surveyed 2,929 mothers of five-year-olds (PDF) and found that 43 percent of the kids consumed at least one serving of soft drinks per day. About four percent of those children (or 110 of them), drank more than four soft drinks per day, and became 'more than twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, get into fights, and physically attack people.' In the past, soda and its various strains have been related to depression, irritability, aggression, suicidal thoughts, and delusions of sweepstake-winning grandeur. Of course, this study didn't find out what types of soda the children had consumed."
Scientists finally discover... (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, no.
http://www.yalescientific.org/2010/09/mythbusters-does-sugar-really-make-children-hyper/
In 1982, the National Institute of Health announced that no link between sugar and hyperactivity had been scientifically proven. Why, then, does this myth still persist? It may be mostly psychological. As previously stated, experimentation has shown that parents who believe in a link between sugar and hyperactivity see one, even though others do not. Another possibility is that children tend to be more excited at events like birthday and Halloween parties where sugary foods are usually served . People may have confused proximity with correlation although the environment is probably more to blame than the food.
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Re:Scientists finally discover... (Score:4, Informative)
The notion of a "sugar high" was a propaganda technique [dukehealth.org] used to manipulate the masses into reducing their sugar consumption during WW2. It doesn't exist. Kids that get hyperactive after consuming sugar do so because they have been trained by an adult into thinking they can act up with impunity because the "sugar" makes them do it.
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The "sugar high" may well be propaganda, but sugar toxicity is not. [youtube.com] (Or if you prefer print over video, this is a pretty good summary.) [nytimes.com]
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So is honey, yet health nuts promote that.
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High fructose corn syrup is anywhere between like 60 to 80 percent fructose.
Actually, high fructose corn syrup [wikipedia.org] is almost always one of two standard formulations: HFCS-55 and HFCS-42 (55% and 42% fructose, respectively).
coloring (Score:2)
I found that even diet drinks make me unable to concentrate after a few days of regular consumption. As an experiment I switched from diet cola colored drinks to a diet clear drink that had even more caffeine. The problem went away. Whatever the chemical is, chai tea (diffuser in water, not the starbucks crap) does the same thing to me after a few days, while black and green tea do not.
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Couldn't the placebo effect be causing this? I bet if you told this to any doctor he'd be thinking that it was placebo in the back of his mind.
spices (Score:2)
I like the rishi 100% masala chai, which is as you say, just spices and tea. I don't know which spice does it, but it is consistent. The tazo bags do it to, but they have essential oils of some spices rather than the dried spice.
Ingredients: Organic and Fair Trade Certified black tea, organic cinnamon, organic cardamom, organic ginger root, organic black pepper, organic cloves.
I can rule out the tea, cinnamon, and pepper because I eat those in many other things. It could be a combination I suppose.
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So, my two-year-old niece, who is normally a delight, only gets atypically pissy, stubborn and reckless when she's consumed sugar in excess because she possesses the cognizance to know she can excuse it based on supposedly false psychological conceptions?
Sure, OK, I guess I should tell my sister that her daughter is some sort of prodigy.
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She eats pure sugar? Or maybe she eats foods (probably processed ones) which contain a lot of sugar, but also lots of other ingredients, some of which may cause that behaviour?
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So you can see what kind of parents kids who are scolded turn out to be. Wishy washy, namby pamby parents, I tell ya!
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Either that, or "experts" in "feelings" guilted them into it.
Sugar High? No such thing. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the existance of the sugar high has been hotly debated, and as far as I'm aware most of the scientific literature [scientificamerican.com] suggests [yalescientific.org] that it doesn't exist [straightdope.com].
Of course I think those observations are mostly about double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trails where neither the child nor the observer knows the child has gotten sugar. I don't know if the results of this survey-based cohort study are due to the placebo effect, spurious correlations, or actual new effect.
(Caveat: I don't know that much about biology/medicine, so take all that with a grain of salt.)
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However the scientific literature in this case is a crock of shit. Those studies were based upon calorie controlled meals ie take a full days calories appropriate for the test subject and divide that into say five calorie meals. Now supply the individual with exactly the calorie limit for that single meal in a high sugar ratio and not one calorie more and seriously is any one going to sugar high. Reality here, those studies are junk science funded by sugar industry Public relations Arse holes.
Children ar
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Re:Scientists finally discover... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Scientists finally discover... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8747098 [nih.gov]
However, anecdotal observations of this kind need to be tested scientifically before conclusions can be drawn, and criteria for interpreting diet behavior studies must be rigorous. ... Although sugar is widely believed by the public to cause hyperactive behavior, this has not been scientifically substantiated. Twelve double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of sugar challenges failed to provide any evidence that sugar ingestion leads to untoward behavior in children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or in normal children.
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Also, perhaps you missed the fact that the paper referenced sourced twelve double-blind studies (double-blind studies being considered among the most reliable of all studies). Do you perhaps have acces
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Go eat a cup of granulated sugar and get back to us on that. (You did know that it was possible to test certain claims for yourself rather than reading studies, right?)
Re:Scientists finally discover... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nope. Tests have shown that sugar has very little effect on kids.
All the "bouncing off walls" is just anecdote.
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Agreed. As a treat I'll get the kids a cinnamon role and there is no difference in their behavior afterwards, with the exception that I can guilt them into doing more chores.
Re:Scientists finally discover... (Score:4, Funny)
And how do they act?
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Cinnamon actually slows the body's uptake of sugar. We put it in cake icing and it keeps down that sugar rush us old fogies can't quite handle any more.
For my kids we won't let 'em have sugar deserts after supper and they are MUCH more well behaved getting to bed. I'm not sure they are any less "bouncing off the walls" but they do go to sleep much easier.
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What else do you let them do after dinner when you also let them have sugar desserts?
Re: Scientists finally discover... (Score:4, Interesting)
The experiment has been done:
A) They took some kids to a party, let the parents see tables full of cake but secretly fed the kids raw tofu beans (or something like that). After dinner they made made the kids jump around to loud music for half an hour. On the way home all the parents swore the kids were hyperactive and it was all down to the sugar.
B) The took some 'problem' kids to a party and showed the parents tables full of raw tofu beans. When the parents left they fed the kids to bursting with chocolate cake, soda, anything with lots of sugar. After that they sat the kids down quietly and read them a bedtime story. The kids were falling asleep in their parent's cars on the way home. The parents put it all down to the tofu and swore to never feed their kids on sugar ever again.
Conclusion: The "sugar" thing is 100% confirmation bias by the parents.
There's a TV program on it somewhere - it's called "The Truth About Food" or something like that (it was one of a series made by the BBC).
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Of course, using an alternate method of making the kids hyper also invalidates the study. If you fed a room full of people decaf coffee, telling them that it was caffeinated, but slipped them meth without telling them, it wouldn't prove that caffeine doesn't make many people jitt
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It's not the sugar; that's an old-wive's tale. It's the caffeine and certain colorings.
It's the sugar and the caffeine. Test by: Give them sugary snacks that do not contain (or only contain minute amounts) of caffeine, observe that they still bounce off the walls and break things.
With caffeine and *not* sugar, they want to spin like a top but they don't have the energy.
Like any wildfire, you need both an accelerant and an ignition source.
Correlation does not imply causation (Score:5, Insightful)
It could be that bad parenting causes both the soda and the bad behavior.
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This seems more likely.
Re:Correlation does not imply causation (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Correlation does not imply causation (Score:2)
Re:Correlation does not imply causation (Score:4, Insightful)
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Also, if you only manage to hit one idiot with a rock here, you're doing it wrong.
The quest for idiot proof rocks leads to hard places at every fork in the road. Trying to kill two idiots with one stone only provides evidence of rock proof idiots.
In other words: Idiots that live in glass houses, are worth two in the bush.
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So a controllable idiot is more valuable then multiple wild idiots.
But of course.
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Many factors may affect both soda consumption and problem behaviors of children. Poor dietary behaviors, such as high soda consumption among young children, may be associated with other parenting practices, such as excessive TV viewing or high consumption of sweets in the child’s diet. Furthermore, parenting practices may be associated with social factors known to be associated with child behavior.
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Re:Correlation does not imply causation (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, it's not a failure, it just isn't enough data to draw conclusions from.
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Re: Correlation does not imply causation (Score:2)
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Yeah, that was odd that they didn't have ANY data on what kind of soda it was-- one would at least want to know if it was caffeinated or not. (The authors sort of apologize for this in their discussion).
On the other hand, really *detailed* information about the kind of soda wouldn't have been useful, largely for statistical reasons. There's a fair amount of literature on the relationship between artificial colors/flavors/preservatives and ADHD. And if you look at that literature, they tend to lump all of
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I agree with you. This study doesn't prove anything and is complete failure. It doesn't deserve to make its way on /. unless it is to discuss how bad studies can lead media to make false conclusions from thin data and no clue.
OK, let's be honest now: did you actually read the effing article? Or just the summary?
If the answer is "yes" to question #1, please be good enough to explain how you would change the study design to make it better.
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I was going to post this, but Anonymous got here first. Those guys are everywhere these days!
Anyway, I agree. It seems highly likely that the soda consumption we're seeing here is a symptom of other parental and social factors rather than a cause in its own right.
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It could be that bad parenting causes both the soda and the bad behavior.
Agreed. Bad parenting is an obvious confounder. The other obvious confounder is low socio-economic status. (Picture a devoted-but-overwhelmed mother who is raising her kid in a food desert, with limited income, bad schools, high crime rates, and no support from Dad... and who is perhaps not too well educated about healthy food choices to begin with).
So let's look at the article: The authors made a valiant attempt to statistically correct for factors like this. They looked at a long list of confounders (
Correlation, causation and all that (Score:2, Insightful)
It could be the soda, though sugary foods have previously been studied in aggregate without finding any significant effect on children.
My suspicion? Bad parenting. Parents which don't care, which are handing their kids soda and an iPad instead of doing their jobs. Then the kids' behavior grows increasingly worse as they act out, attempting to draw the attention they need. In this case two sodas per meal (nobody drinks soda for breakfast) is a proxy that should be screaming "these are really bad parents."
Re: Correlation, causation and all that (Score:2)
So sugar doesn't affect the kids. Maybe it is carbonation. American beer has loads of carbonation and causes anger issues. European beer has less carbonation (and more flavour) causes less anger issues.
Let's ban carbonated drinks. /sarcasm}
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Clearly, you have never been to a European football/soccer game.
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> (nobody drinks soda for breakfast)
Please tell my wife that. She pops a can of Pepsi right after dressing in the morning. It makes my stomach churn a little watching her. (I don't drink sodas at all (green tea is my morning beverage), and can't even imagine having one first thing in the morning.) She says it's caffeine and sugar in an easily handled container -- the perfect food. Gag.
Wife and daughter together average four to six cases a month. It's a chore to get them to police their cans, and wh
Great (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, this study didn't find out what types of soda the children had consumed.
Another study finds that living children are 100% more likely to "destroy things belonging to others, get into fights, and physically attack people" than dead children.
cheez.
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Of course, this study didn't find out what types of soda the children had consumed.
Another study finds that living children are 100% more likely to "destroy things belonging to others, get into fights, and physically attack people" than dead children..
My study shows that kids and parents who lie about their soda consumption also lie about their destructive and aggressive behavior.
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For clarification - soda versus soft drink (Score:4, Insightful)
drank more than four soft drinks per day
Confusingly, in the title and elsewhere, the word 'soda' is used. A soft drink isn't necessarily a soda/carbonated/fizzy drink. In other words, a soft drink may be non-fizzy. That makes the summary at least somewhat ambiguous.
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regionalism (Score:2)
Some areas use the term "soft drink" or "cold drink" to describe what any sensible person would refer to as a "coke". Because these beverages bubbliness has nothing to do with any alkaline with sodium in it, I would argue that soda is no more appropriate than those three terms or "pop". Carbonated drink, or fizzy drink both seem quite reasonable.
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coke. noun -
1) a rocky carbon-rich fuel used in high-temperature furnaces such as for iron-working
2) slang for cocaine
3) a trademarked line of carbonated beverages produced by the Coca-Cola corporation
Only (3) is at all relevant to the discussion, and you'd better believe you'd be inviting no end of trouble if you use it in a generic fashion, especially if you're using it in a potential criticism of the consumption of such beverages.
Certainly the "carnonated/fizzy drink" might be accurate, but would also ap
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Oh it's common here too. But it's still a trademarked name, and hence using it in any formal capacity is asking for trouble. Can you imagine the headlines "Coke consumption increases violence in children!" How long do you suppose it would be before the lawsuits started to fly?
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'Science finds' ? (Score:3)
This article is a troll for scientists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation [wikipedia.org]
The real reason (Score:2)
It's those cheapass parents who bought storebrand sodapops, which taste like santorum. The kids understandably went ballistic 'cause they wanted a drink with some reasonable taste quality.
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It's those cheapass parents who bought storebrand sodapops, which taste like santorum. The kids understandably went ballistic 'cause they wanted a drink with some reasonable taste quality.
Right, because a different label makes them taste so much better. Sorry, they all taste like carp to me. The only difference appears to be in the effectiveness of the advertising.
It isn't the soda. It's the survey. (Score:5, Interesting)
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You just said they weren't the same thing, which is valid, and then went on to specify a culture using race, which is not. Just curious where you were trying to go with that.
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Worst. Study. Ever. (Score:2)
Seriously? You have a bunch of factors which might be relevant, and you don't even fscking MEASURE them?
(OK, "worst study ever" might be a bit of hyperbole, but it's pretty bad as studies that don't smack of Mengele go)
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Given all the problems with the "study", I smell agenda.
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Do you have any information about the scientific quality of Mengele's studies? Of course his studies were highly immoral, but since there's no sign for any immorality in the study this article is about, that's irrelevant for your comparison.
Pure sensationalism (Score:3)
The first sentence of the article is preposterous:
When the US military tested PCP on volunteers in 1984, "some subjects became irritable, argumentative or negative under the conditions of social stress and demanding tasks." Now, a study published by researchers at Columbia, Harvard and the University of Vermont have found not-so-different results in children that do too much Dew.
So soda is just as bad as PCP? Certainly not. Such hyperbole is reason alone not to read any further.
I have an alternative theory: Parents who let their children drink soda have less self-control and discipline, and so do their children. Isn't that much more likely than the proposition that soda has the same side-effects as PCP? But that won't get hits.
Are they saying Coke leads to violence? (Score:2)
Bad parents let their kids drink more pop. (Score:3)
Is this accounted for in the study?
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Some parents are themselves addicted to the stuff. I'm pretty sure that wasn't accounted for either.
As a dentist, my experience with 5 YO patients (Score:4, Interesting)
who drink soda 4 times or more per day is that they are able to do so because of a lack of parental supervision (plus a few because of extreme dental ignorance on the part of the parents). I think that that same lack of supervision leads to bad behavior in little kids. I don't think I'd blame the soda for bad behavior, though caffeine may be contributing to the problem.
WHAT?! (Score:2)
WHAT?! What a pointless, useless study. Blame the sugar? Caffeine? Bubbles? Preservatives? The can or bottle?
Parenting, not biochemistry (Score:2)
Parents who aggressively control their kids' consumption of fizzy drinks will probably control the kid's misbehavior too.
I call Junk Science (Score:2)
I've been a heavy drinker for 50 years. I never went around attacking people or getting into arguments or randomly destroying shit just for kicks.
I enjoy a few liters of diet coke every day. When I was younger, I drank a few 12-16 oz bottles of sugared pepsi, root beer, ginger ale, or cream soda just about ever day. Maybe a couple more in the summer time.
IMHO, they're just poking at shit to see what the gullible will accept so that they can wring out some grant money from politicians pandering to their mind
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I enjoy a few liters of diet coke every day.
Did I read that correctly? 3 liters of diet coke?
More importantly, did you *write* that correctly?
Crap Study (Score:2)
Because it couldn't be that parents with bad habits (ie giving their kids crap soda to drink) wouldn't teach their kids other bad habits (like breaking stuff).
This just in! Breaking news! (Score:2)
Lazy and/or poor parents using a cheap drink like Coke to stretch a grocery budget for their 5 year olds are also likely to be lazy/poor parents in other ways.
There is also higher teen pregnancy, gang crime, teen homelessness, and teen suicide rates in low income neighborhoods/cities. More graffiti and vandalism too.
But you are right - correllation does not equal causation. That phrase is basically a meme at this point.
It should be obvious by now that for every person who falls on hard times because of soci
Vice Versa (Score:2)
It's not the soda, it's the caffeine. (Score:2)
Nearly all sodas contain caffeine. Caffeine, like most psychoactive drugs, has effects proportional to body weight.
A can of coke has about 40 mg of caffeine. For standard 180 lb adult, that gives you a nice little wake-me-up. But put that much drug in a 40lb kid, and you'll see the effects similar to a healthy adult slamming back 2 cans of Red Bull.
Couple that with the lack of self-control of kids, and it's no wonder they're bouncing off the walls.
Let a 40-lb kid have 4 cokes in a day? When's the last time
Stimulation and control (Score:2)
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In a related study, it was found that 97% of mass murderers had consumed bread within 24 hours of having committed their rampage.
Actually - and this is significant - all of them had been inhaling Oxygen in a somewhat diluted form through the process known as breathing. There's no question that there is a connection as it is also a fact that people that don't breathe don't murder anyone, let alone more than one. We have to ban Oxygen and forbid all forms of breathing. That will solve all problems with mass murders - guaranteed.
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Not just Oxygen, but they were also ingesting Dihydrogen Monoxide, which is a chemical known to be favored by virtually all serial killers in the history of man!
Correlation != Causality (Score:2)
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You wouldn't be wrong. Neuter them and take away their oxygen, and they will no longer break things.
Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:4, Insightful)
A bigger problem with the study is that it is based on a survey of mothers. The study could have instead found: (1) mothers who give their kids soda are for some reason more sensitive to bad behavior, (2) mothers "know" that soda causes bad behavior and so they expect it and report their bias, (3) some third factor affects both soda drinking as well as actual or perceived behavior, (4) almost an infinite number of other things.
I'm glad that someone is examining this, but a study like this can only be used to point science in a direction - it by no means implicates soda as a behavior modifier all by itself, all it found was a correlation in a self-reported survey.
Re: Correlation != Causality (Score:2)
Re: Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Insightful)
One option would be that mothers who allow their kids the have so much sugar in their diet is failing in probably more ways than one. So not only is the child getting improper nutrition but also not being taught how to act & respect people or things
The authors agree with you:
Many factors may affect both soda consumption and problem behaviors of children. Poor dietary behaviors, such as high soda consumption among young children, may be associated with other parenting practices, such as excessive TV viewing or high consumption of sweets in the child’s diet. Furthermore, parenting practices may be associated with social factors known to be associated with child behavior. In stressful home environments, for example, a child’s needs are likely to be unmet and unhealthy behavioral practices may be more prevalent. An extensive literature has documented a relationship between stressful home environments and child behavior. For example, children who are victims of violent acts or who witness violence have been found to have more externalizing and internalizing behavior problems, more aggression problems and to show signs of posttraumatic stress disorder [9-11]. Furthermore, caretaker mental health can be a strong contributor to both behavioral and developmental problems in children through its effects, in part, on parenting quality and overall home environment [12]. Children of depressed mothers have been shown to develop more social and emotional problems during childhood, including higher internalizing and externalizing problems [13]. Thus, it is possible that observed associations between behavior and soda consumption among adolescents can be attributed to unadjusted social risk factors.
Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Insightful)
New study shows that parents who lack parenting skills (and can't control their kids) admit to giving their kids more soda than parents who know better
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Maybe people who allow their children to drink 4 or more sodas a day are simply bad parents who do not teach their children any discipline or self control.
There is something to this, but when one of the parents is also addicted to the stuff, the other parent doesn't have a lot of options that don't tear the family apart. (Speaking from experience.) We're not talking "clean up your room" here. Consuming sodas can become a real addiction.