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."
Re:Scientists finally discover... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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.)
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.