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Candy Linked To Violence In Study
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Oct 08, 2009 04:29 AM
from the gummy-worms-and-steal dept.
from the gummy-worms-and-steal dept.
T Murphy writes "A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry links daily consumption of candy at the age of 10 to an increased chance of being convicted of a violent crime by age 34. The researchers theorize the correlation comes from the way candy is given rather than the candy itself. Candy frequently given as a short-term reward can encourage impulsive behavior, which can more likely lead to violence. An alternative explanation offered by the American Dietetic Association is that the candy indicates poor diet, which hinders brain development. The scientists stress they don't imply candy should be removed from a child's diet, although they do recommend moderation. The study controls for teachers' reports of aggression and impulsivity at age 10, the child's gender, and parenting style. The study can be found here, but the full text is behind a paywall."
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Organic Food (Score:2)
Re:Organic Food (Score:5, Funny)
Surely a study like this is not funded by the organic food industry?
Organic food is much better than inorganic food.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Organic food is much better than inorganic food.
I guess so - but Candy?? In the BJPsy?? Over here we eat sweets! As far as I am concerned the whole premise is scuppered so the conclusions can go hang!
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know that water is considered food. Its more of a chemical we consume, like oxygen. And maybe calcium. Thinking about that because I've got a broken bone at the moment.
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Re:Organic Food (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, we all know we can't trust any of these "scientific" studies because the organic food corporations are so much more gigantic, rich and powerful than the fast-food corporations.
It's like global warming. It's all a lie. The tree-hugging hippies have soooo much money and power that they bought all the scientists, the media and all the politicians, too. The poor oil corporations don't have a chance.
Parent
Sweeties! (Score:2, Funny)
A British study would be looking at the effect of *sweets* rather than *candy*.
NHS Explains (Score:5, Informative)
For an excellent overview of this story I recommend this critique of the paper [www.nhs.uk] from the English NHS's excellent Behind the Headlines [www.nhs.uk] service. Unlike a newspaper it will tell you who did the study, how it was funded, where the data came from and whether the results are worth anything. In this case the data was severaly limited and had put people into either "eating sweets every day" or "not eating sweets" which is very coarse categorising.It also doesn't report the absolute number of children who went on to become adult offenders. In conclusion
"Overall, this study on its own does not provide strong enough evidence to guide childhood dietary advice, although common sense says that eating too many sweets is probably not good for children. Before the newspapersâ(TM) explanation for a link can be believed there must be studies specifically designed to investigate the issue from the outset."
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..."eating sweets every day" or "not eating sweets" which is very coarse categorising.
This is often done to get a significant test result. A Chi2 correlation test will give different results depending on the "bin" sizes.
So you start with fine grained bins and then start pooling until you get a significant test. If you still don't get a significant result, try other tests that can be used. This of course creates massive problems for the validly of any "significant" result.
DAMN THOSE SOCIALISTS (Score:2)
Hang on a second, are you seriously expecting Slashdots mainly american audience to read something by the socalist NHS? Quite clearly the reason for the NHS denying this study is that they WANT people to get ill to continue their socialist principles.
Next time you hear people decry the "socialist" NHS think on this report and ask how in the US medical system is focusing on prevention.
candy? in britain? soon it'll be freedom fries (Score:5, Informative)
I very much doubt any British study would have looked at candy consumption as that's not a word in common usage over here.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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The other way to see it (Score:2, Insightful)
Criminals which have been eating candies when they were 10 are dump at the age of 34. The criminals which did not eat candies at the age of 10 are less likely to be caught.
And if I see again this: "Thirty-five of those children went on to report at age 34 that they'd been convicted of a violent crime, the researchers found." .... they make a statistical statement about a sample of 35! Gosh! The study is not worth even a single penny (nor a candy)!
really? (Score:2, Insightful)
It is the parents... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parents who regularly give their kids candy usually are the sort of parents who aren't disciplining their kids. Candy is often used by such people as a replacement for parental authority in controlling their kids' behavior.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> parental authority in controlling their kids' behavior.
Actually, it can be even worse than that.
There are parents out there who make absolutely no attempt whatsoever to control their kids' behavior or teach them *anything*, at all, ever. They let them eat quite literally whatever they want, which generally does not result in anything you could describe as a healthy diet. And they let them *do* whatever they want, which doesn't necessarily re
Correlation does not imply causality (Score:2, Insightful)
When will people finally learn? Studies like that are just stupid. Absolutely nothing was shown here.
Simple explanation (just an example of cause):
Less educated families tend to give their children more sweets. Lack of education is responsible for criminal activities (causality assumed for this example). In such a scenario there would of cause be a correlation between sweets and crime but obviously no causality.
My take on the thing: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you eat candy as a replacement for love, you are more likely to be violent because of a lack of love.
Just a theory. And one way of many. But I've seen it too often, that a addiction, being itself a replacement for something else you need, does mean that when you don't get it, you become desperate and do things that you normally would not do. Not specifically violence. More like when you destroy everything around you because you can't stand the situation. (Similar to rage.)
We should be clear about those two things:
1. Candy is a likely candidate for addictions.
2. Addictions always are a replacement for a lack of something else.
So find that something else, and help the person get that stuff so much, that they forget the addiction because they don't need it anymore.
For children, this usually is the lack of good parents.
(I said for a long time, that social and parenting skills must be an essential skill you learn in a class in school! [Which for the second generation will mean that they also learn it from their now capable parents at home.])
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If you eat candy as a replacement for love
Who would eat candy as a replacement for love? That's what the television is for!
Revised Headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Children of parents who encourage poor & impulsive choices grow up to make poor & impulsive choices.
Try the expt. yourself (Score:3, Interesting)
Statistically demonstrable != sensible
Diet? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Bad and Clueless Parenting Linked to Violence"?
The big problem with Anglo-Celtic society, is that we always love to yammer on about our rights and inalienable right to individual freedom, but never our responsibilities to each other.
Libertoons who try to defend the indefensible in the name of "freedom" and "individual liberty" annoy the hell out of me. They're every bit as bad as Marxists, religious crazies and animal rights extremists.
Synthetic additives, not sugar (link: Lancet) (Score:4, Interesting)
Food additives and hyperactive behaviour in 3-year-old and 8/9-year-old children in the community: a randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial [thelancet.com]
Even that study could have been done better but it was enough to get the point across. Petrochemical food additives such as artificial coloring (FD&C anything), flavoring and preservatives (BHA, BHT, some others) are inherently toxic and immune response to them varies wildly between individuals. With some people you'll never notice a difference. With others, the tiniest bit of, say, red dye will make them hyper, violent, you name it. Synthetics are a major reason why ADHD has become epidemic.
For me, synthetics were making me more impulsive and a bit mean. Nothing dramatic but switching to a clean diet made a noticeable difference in my psychology and I'm in better shape now too.
Keeping synthetics out of your diet can be difficult. It helps if there's a nearby Whole Foods Market or similar store that bans all synthetics. There is NO REASON for synthetics in food other than that they save food processors from having to buy real ingredients.
Why haven't you heard more about this? Who's going to pay for the research? It won't lead to a prescription drug, surgery, or any other medical intervention. It'd wipe out most of the market for ADHD meds (not all, some people have congenital neurochemical imbalances). It would require people to learn how to cook again.
Much more info at the Feingold Association research [feingold.org] page.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
*dons Kevlar vest*
*rewards you with candy*
Re:scaremongering? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah but so do 100% of people who are not violent criminals.
I think there may be a correlation between consumption of unhealthy food, and quality of parenting. Parents who do a good job tend not to encourage consumption of junk food. The same parents steer their kids away from becoming criminals.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes me wonder. My 3 year old likes crackers and chips just fine but prefers steamed vegetables. (absolutely adores peas but then again, he tends to count them before he eats them) He doesn't care for candy of any kind, can't get him near ice cream and will barely eat doughnuts or sweet pastries. I don't force anything on him at all in terms of foods he likes and pretty much let him choose his favorites on his own. (Would I intervene if he was predisposed to sweets? yeah, probably.) So far, he likes "
Re: (Score:2)
Oddly enough my sons eight year old classmate was over for dinner today. He ate his dinner without being prompted, a vast improvement over my son. He is from a bigger and less well off family, and is expected to look after himself in situations where my son would be coddled and hand fed by myself and my wife.
So yeah its hard raising kids well. I don't claim to do the best job of it. Most of us control our offspring to some degree, getting it right at the start is an important trick. Knowing when to let go l
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You, on the return of your wife: "Now honey, you're going to hear a lot of crazy talk about our son working in a burlesque house"
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
agggh! Read this: The study controls for teachers' reports of aggression and impulsivity at age 10, the child's gender, and parenting style.
Do you think scientists with >10 years training know less about statistics than you? They actively try to exclude other causes, which is what "controls for" means. Any other ideas for root causes that do not include those controlled for? Or were you just trying to be smart with a nice one-liner because it worked so well for others?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry links daily consumption of candy at the age of 10 to an increased chance of being convicted of a violent crime by age 34"
It doesn't say how much of an increased chance, and whether or not other rewards (such as toys, or non-candy foodstuffs) would also increase this. Is it the candy that's causing the impulsive behaviour or the rewards themselves? If it's the Candy, which chemical, or mixture of chemicals, is causing it and is it contained in all candy
Re:umm (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet improving the diet of jail populations does seem to reduce violence too.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime [guardian.co.uk]
Thankfully smart people around the world will follow this up and I hope get some idea of diet, a spike in sugar, hormones, brain activity and ongoing development.
It might the a cheap colouring, cheap high-fructose corn syrup like structure or amount consumed during development.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It was published in a British journal - though I don't know where the research took place - and HFCS is quite unusual in most of the EU so it may not be that.
Though glucose syrup is certainly ubiquitous in sweet things sold in the UK and is apparently normally made from corn or wheat, it doesn't have a particularly high fructose content.
Re:umm (Score:5, Insightful)
Not directly, but the article does give sample size information and goes on to state: "About 69 percent of those who reported having committed violent acts also reported eating candy daily at age 10, compared to 42 percent of those who did not have a violent criminal past, the study authors noted."
Then again, even if you were correct I'm not sure what the point of bringing it up was. Read the full study if you're actually interested in what its findings are.
A perfectly valid question. A little reading comprehension would indicate that they're not sure, given that two different groups are hypothesizing two different explanations based on the same data. In fact you've merely restated the two positions as a question.
Well, you're getting on the pedantic side now so far as criticizing the study goes. But yes, if it turns out to be the contents of the candy itself I'm sure they'll investigate that further. Unless you demonstrate who's saying that candy is the actual cause of the increased violence though, I'm not sure what the question has to do with what you quoted for your response, nor to what degree your new post somehow explains what you originally said.
Yes, correlation is not causation, and that's important to distinguish. If you're not simply going for brownie-point mods, then you're going to have to explain who said otherwise. Yours was a root comment, without parent, so one has to assume you're talking about the article. Well, it's not the title, which simply says "linked." Nor the summary, which explicitly uses "correlation." And hell, the article itself actually uses the phrase "correlation never shows causation." So other than the cheap mod points you're accused of, what the hell were either of your posts trying to accomplish?
My suspicion is that you're one of those people who thinks repeating memes without even a cursory examination of what he's referring to makes you sound smarter. If that's the case: No problem, carry on. Otherwise I suggest you articulate what value you're trying to add to the conversation more clearly.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My suspicion is that you're one of those people who thinks repeating memes without even a cursory examination of what he's referring to makes you sound smarter.
You must be new here.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is psychology/psychiatry, not Science.
Do not conflate psychiatry and psychology. Psychiatry is a science, and uses an evidence-based system along with falsifiable theories. Psychiatry focuses on chemical imbalances in the brain and psychiatrists mostly prescribe drugs to control these chemical imbalances.
Psychology is a also a science, though theories are not all 100% evidence based. However, increasingly, the field of psychology has been becoming more scientific and following more scientific principles. Even the still very prevalent but som
Re: (Score:2)
In this case? Yes.
From another article summarising the same research (might be paraphrasing slightly): "We tried to control for other factors such as poverty..."
from the article: "Using sweets to quiet noisy children might just reinforce problems for later in life."
So yes, basically this has nothing to do with candy. It's just the well known phenomena of behavioural psychology, whereby rewarding people for bad behaviour
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
To reevaluate your quote on bad behaviour reinfocement:
We taxpayers in today's semi-socialist Europe are constantly told that social security, unemployment benefits, welfare (and of course taxes) MUST be that high to keep poor people from starving - and rioting.
So we are told we're pacifying potential rioters by giving them money. Actual riots are always treated with more money. Most parties on the left and right tell us that all violence and problems will simply go away when we give poor people more money.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No, we in "today's semi-socialist Europe" are not told that social security is to prevent riots, neither constantly nor only now and then. I was going to say that I'm not saying you're lying, but you are: show me where they say that (party sources, not internet dweebs like yourself), and show me sources for the daily riots in Paris, Berlin and Malmo.
Basically, you support your "argument" with nothing but utter bullshit. That ought to tell you something about yourself.
Re:umm (Score:5, Informative)
I work for a living in statistics, namely as a quant.
This study is crap!
17,000 tests, and 35 yes count them 35 had a violent crime. Of those 35, 65 percent said that they ate candy whereas in the 17000 only 42 said so.
See the flaw? The flaw is that the pool size of the violent criminals is actually way too small. Instead what they need to do is go to the prison system and see if the 65% number holds up. Because only with a big enough pool size can something be said.
Right now this study is crap, because the results could be the result of a sampling flaw.
If anything can be said of this study is that you need to verify it with the prison system.
Parent
Re:umm (Score:5, Interesting)
While I agree that a sample of 35 isn't great statistics, the odds of having 69% of them in the candy-eating category if they WERE the same as the background population is under 0.05%, as I'm sure you know. (I just did a Monte Carlo simulation with 100000 trials.) So it's not the best study in the universe, but this is real human data: you take what you can get, particularly in sample size. It's not enough of a study to drive policy, but it's certainly enough to be publishable and enough to warrant further attention.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, thank you. Sample is WAY too small.
It's worst than 35 people. They had 35 violent criminals multipled by (.65 - .42 extra candy eaters) = eight people. This finding is based on EIGHT FRICKIN PEOPLE reporting they ate candy as a child.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Read the article before you spend at least as much time to criticize it here, please.
This was a cohort study. The candy reporting was done AT THE TIME WHEN THEY WERE KIDS.
Re:umm (Score:4, Funny)
correllation is not causation? agggh!
Hey, calm down Matt4077. Stop yelling at the nice slashdotters and I will give you a piece of candy.
Parent
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If the use of short-term rewards for behavior affects the level of violence in people later in life, perhaps it may be worthwhile to re-examine the use of treats as an aid in training dogs?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Pro dog trainer here with 40 years experience. I an adamantly against using food rewards, primarily because it inverts the master/underling relationship (it also actively prevents the trainer from learning to accurately read the dog's responses).
As it works in nature, the *underling* offers a treat to the =master= ("see? I'm useful! don't kill me!"), who then may OPT to graciously "share" part of it with the underling. (We even see this in the human workplace, where the underlings' labour brings in a profit
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Not just once either.
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You know, do you?