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Soda Makes Five-Year-Olds Break Your Stuff, Science Finds
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 sugar high, new at 11!
It could be that bad parenting causes both the soda and the bad behavior.
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."
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.
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
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.
"43 percent of the kids consumed at least one serving of soft drinks per day"
and the rest drink only booze?
if the marketing were honest it would go like this
"you can get pleasure without risk or effort by purchasing this sugary drink. your brain is evolved to give you pleasure when you consume sweet foods because those indicate a high calorie density. this behavior was useful during hunter/gatherer days but is not longer needed in our modern age of relative plenty. we as marketers take advantage of the fact that your life probably sucks so lets face it, eating crappy food that triggers these sensations is going to be the best part of your day. your long-term health deterioration is an externality for us. your money pays our obscene executive compensation to pay for their oligarch decadence and trophy wives and is distributed amongst parasitic shareholders most of whose only accomplishment is being born into a rich family.
so buy coke/pepsi!"
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.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Olde English 800 soda. It's the charcoal filtering. I don't know anyone who hasn't ended up in a fight after drinking this stuff.
Seriously? Whoever funded that 'study' got ripped off in a bad way...lmao
More proof that the ability to write a research grant application is the most important skill a modern scientist can have...
Maybe someone should write a grant designed to document and validate all the old 'wives tales' that document these types of things, and have passed into 'common sense' and 'obvious'...
In a related study, it was found that 97% of mass murderers had consumed bread within 24 hours of having committed their rampage.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
I have some concerns about the study. The population sample is overwhelmingly skewed towards racial minorities (51% African American versus 14% national average; 28% Hispanic versus 17% national average). The survey did not control for a number of factors that IMHO should have been controlled for, e.g. family income, or median income in area of residence. On the whole, I'd be hesitant to draw any conclusion from this due to these factors.
This article is a troll for scientists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation
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.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
they should re-do the study and compare soda to equal quantities of other things, such as chocolate milk, orange juice, punch, or anything else really. i bet the results would be similar
The problem with the survey can be found in the results section of the Abstract. They oversampled males by +4, and 51% of the families were Black. This isn't a soda/soft drink issue; it's a parenting/cultural issue, which is mentioned, but essentially glossed over when you start delving into the "study". The families were already "in the system", as they were part of an ongoing study, which tells me that there were already parenting and cultural issues that go deeper than the family's diet.
Meanwhile scientists discover that poor parents tend to give their children more sodas and/or soft drinks.
Actually the existance of the sugar high has been hotly debated, and as far as I'm aware most of the scientific literature suggests that it doesn't exist.
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.)
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
It's more likely just correlation... parents that allow their children to drink copious amounts of soda tend to be generally poor parents in all regards. Nothing shocking there at all.
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)
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.
Were Chris Brown and Rihanna in their dataset?
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
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.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Pop is somewhat unhealthy, so good parents will limit their kid's intake of it. Bad parents don't care, so they'll let their kids have it.
Is this accounted for in the study?
God spoke to me
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.
"this study didn't find out what types of soda the children had consumed"
WHAT?! What a pointless, useless study. Blame the sugar? Caffeine? Bubbles? Preservatives? The can or bottle?
Parents who aggressively control their kids' consumption of fizzy drinks will probably control the kid's misbehavior too.
I'd upvote if I could. No fucking sense of humor on /. anymore. Sigh.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
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.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Wait, large amounts of caffeine and sugar made a handful of the thousands of kids studied use all that excess energy to hit and smash things? We needed a study for that? Ok, then, how about tossing me some grant money to see how many of those kids started running around in circles at top speed. I could find a link between soda and an increased desire to exercise in children.
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 mindless constituents.
Parents who let their children drink unhealthy amounts of an unhealthy beverage fail to raise their children properly in other ways. I know a family with a soda-addicted child, and whenever the parents try to curb the habit, the child just screams, attacks, and breaks things until they get their way. It's not the soda's fault, though the effects and addictiveness of caffeine obviously isn't helping.
So there's a correlation between soda consumption and aggression?
Does the soda cause the aggression (as implied) or does the aggression cause the consumption?
Or is it just possible that bad parenting of the "path-of-least-resistance" school cause both?
What a stupid study. The results are based on survey (which is the lowest form of evidence) and there are no controls.
This headline isn't right. It's not even wrong (registered trademark of "Not Even Wrong Industries, Inc.").
Many studies have shown that the difference isn't the children - it's all in the parents heads.
"In my favorite of these studies, children were divided into two groups. All of them were given a sugar-free beverage to drink. But half the parents were told that their child had just had a drink with sugar. Then, all of the parents were told to grade their children’s behavior. Not surprisingly, the parents of children who thought their children had drunk a ton of sugar rated their children as significantly more hyperactive. This myth is entirely in parents’ heads. We see it because we believe it."
ctrl+v from http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/sugar-doesnt-cause-hyperactivity.html
I ran another study and found that approximately 50% of the same respondents are male, the other 50% female, and 100% breathe oxygen on a regular basis. Therefore, I can only conclude that having a gender and breathing oxygen must make 5 year olds destructive, violent, sociopaths.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
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).
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
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.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
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 society/economy/bad luck, there's a whole lot more that are just lazy and dumb, and raise dumb kids who can't be successful.
Born to Play
and i thought all soda drinks did was make cavities in teeth. wow. thanks for posting the story
Kids who are allowed to do/eat/drink anything they want tend to do/eat/drink anything they want.
In other news, pirates reduce global warming. http://sparrowism.soc.srcf.net/home/piratesarecool4.gif
What if those children which area already prone to breaking things, need more sugar than the rest of the kids?
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it couldn't possibly be that parents that let their 5 year old kids drink five or more cans of pop a day are just terrible parents...
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 you put back a 8-pack of Red Bull? Of course they're going to raise hell.
Correlation does NOT equal causation, but the vast majority of lousy so-called 'scientists' that can quote this phrase have no TRUE idea of what it actually means.
Let me take you on a mind experiment. Replace child with cat Replace parent with a variety of cat owners, including professional cat breeders/trainers. Now let me ask you what the professionals will think of the ordinary owners with respect to the behaviour of their pets.
The professional will ONLY feed the cat at fixed times with amounts and types of food that form a correct balanced diet. Their cats will not become fussy, and will not develop behaviour patterns that revolve around the 'begging' for food. This is NOT because of 'magic' chemicals that may or may not be in the food itself. It IS because the creation of a fixed routine takes away uncertainty and tension, allowing the cat to have a stress free relationship with feeding time.
Garbage about 'sugar rushes', highs from 'colours' in foods, the affect of caffeine (how we none Americans howl with laughter when we see a TV drama make a big deal about teenagers drinking coffee), etc., are all self-deluding idiocy. The patterns of behaviour with children in different households reflect the psychological consequences of different patters of raising children.
Take the MORON American belief that crazy numbers of American children suffer from allergies. The so-called allergy response is usually nothing more than learnt pattern behaviour. You know those Evangelical Churches where people spontaneously collapse, and start speaking in 'tongues'. This is the well known phenomenon of 'self-hypnosis' in a situation where the individual picks up non-verbal clues from the rest of the crowd. Most American kids with 'allergies' have, IN REALITY, picked up the non-verbal clues from their overly worrisome parents, and have manifested the symptoms of a non-existent medical problem as a result.
Yes, you braindead Yanks, you actually WORRY your children into apparent ill health. Here's a clue. If the children in the rest of the world do NOT exhibit the same issues as your kids, your kids are NOT suffering from genuine medical issues. But it is impossible to watch a Yank movie where at least one of the (middle-class) children on screen is not portrayed as significantly ill. This is seen as a badge of achievement by the twisted post-Kellogg form that American society has adopted since late Victorian times.
This junk research is part of an authoritarian agenda being promoted by the people behind your Puppet Obama. It pushes the concept that parents MAY be negligent, so the state MUST replace parental decisions in the raising of their children. You will note that the mainstream media uses its limited news slots to constantly highlight extreme examples of parental failure to imply a NEED for the State to intervene in all families. Funny how the same principle never applies to abusive behaviour by the police or politicians. Here you are told the "bad apple" concept applies, but with parents, you are told the whole barrel is filled with rotted fruit.
The other trick they use is a much DIRTIER one- the psychological concept that MY family is fine, but all my neighbours need looking at, because their children... The hatred of the OTHER- the fear of the unknown.
Expect the owners of Slashdot to push much more of this authoritarian crap in the near future.
Sugar in the doses you find in coke and pepsi is like a stimulant, in many regards, giving a pronounced sugar rush to those more sensitive to sugar. This effect changes your behaviour unless you learn to counterbalance the effects it has on you. It is the same with anything stimulating. When it comes to things with the opposite effect, one needs to be aware of how their ability to control things can be inhibited so that lower levels of stimulation can then trigger greater responses not due to the stimulation but to the lack of inhibition. This is, quite frankly, familiar to anybody who has gone clubbing in their lives.
Proper self control comes from trained self-discipline, and this comes through meditative practices that train and reward the ability to focus your mind on something and keep it focussed. Eventually your attention learns to do what it's told. There is a facebook campaign with the slogan 'teach kids meditation' and with more and more mind and mood affecting stuff become more and more readily available, this self-discipline is more and more necessary. Unfortunately too little understanding, too many charlatan gurus and a dismissive attitude by many of those in academic research means that this will most probably be learned too late rather than too soon.
John_Chalisque
You start with soft drinks and become more than twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, get into fights, and physically attack people, more depressed, irritated, aggressive, having suicidal thoughts and delusions of sweepstake-winning grandeur. Then you discover hard drinks. Nothing changes.
Very interesting, never knew this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7MMTwIlWlU
The problem with this type of science is that it only examines one variable at a time.
I strongly suspect that those children that are smoking cigarettes with their soda will be mellowed out, but sadly the study failed to even consider this, which leads to unnecessary alarmist reactions.
Is feed your kids soda. After all, do you want your kids to be on the receiving end of punches or on the giving end?
"In the past, soda and its various strains have been related to depression, irritability, aggression, suicidal thoughts, and delusions of sweepstake-winning grandeur."
http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/aspartame.asp
I mean really people, Slashdot editor Soulskill you have reached a new low for Slashdot.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
they put the kid on a non-sugar diet for a month first.
Face it... nearly all the foods in packages on store shelves have corn syrup or sugar or fructose or sucrose or some other sugar related sweetener. (let's not talk about fake sweeteners from petroleum here... 'nother issue entirely)
My kid doesn't get ANY sugar. In 4 years they've had sugar perhaps 6 times. Plenty of honey and maple syrup and such... sure, but no refined sugar products.
What does sugar do to them? It jacks them up and makes them hyper.
What I don't understand is why everyone is talking about sugar in regards to this article. It's obvious that the behavior they're talking about comes from the effects of caffeine in the sodas. I seriously doubt they screened for non-caffeine soda only.
Retarded.
I'd like to know how the study corrected out other factors that would have led the kids to act the way they do. I'm thinking behavioral issues that stem from other influences, and maybe even crappy parenting might also be common to the misbehaving kids. If you're a parent that lets their kid swill down a bunch of soda, maybe there are other problems here.
Another bullshit survey? OK.
I'd be more incline to believe that caffine, a known stimulant and neurotoxin, is causing the issues. Are we really going to use a simple sucrose molecule as a scapegoat? Seriously? They didn't even document what kind of soda the kids drank, it could have been diet soda for all we know. Their has to be a hidden agenda here, however I still agree that we shouldn't be feeding junk foods to children. Drink some water, have an apple.
What kind of soda are you talking about?
Caustic soda?
Baking soda?
Washing soda?
Soda cracker?
Soda bread?
Soda pop? Do people still call it that? I haven't heard that in decades! I hear Pepsi, Coke, Mountain Dew, etc. etc..
Oh! Soft drinks!! Why didn't you say so?
The sugar high very very much exists.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
As someone who is quite sensitive to sugar, I can assure you if I avoid the stuff and then go near it again after I'm weaned off, the effects are not dissimilar to taking drugs. This has occured multiple times. Admitedly I believe drugs impact different people in different ways, some people are sensitive to alcohol, drunk very quickly or violent and so on. I suspect I'm more sensitive to sugar than most - but it does impact most people I know.
Related: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201105/diet-and-violence
Might be food additives like artificial color or flavor more than the sugar itself? As well as displacing healthy foods.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Yeah, I think here you have the double whammy that it's "common knowledge" and that it seems to fit with a basic knowledge of biology (i.e., simple sugar causes a very quick rise in blood sugar and blood sugar provides energy), so it's very easy to believe. I just happened to see an article on such a study at some point.
Honestly, I've been tricked so many times by "common knowledge" at this point that I actually often stop and google before making anything like health claims. Another example of this is when I looked up the "fact" that vitamin C prevents the cold. Turns out there's no evidence of that (at least not under vaguely normal circumstances), but I always took this as medically validated fact.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
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 are not getting sugar highs on a calorie controlled limited meal ie half a chocolate bar but on unlimited calories as much sugar as they can eat meals. A high carbohydrate snack, plus a full chocolate bar, plus a bag of chips, plus a large soft drink, plus some candy ie sugar rush city the reality. Not some Public Relations junk science limited calorie ration being presented as a typical childs unlimited calorie, stomach capacity meal.
Now add further shenanigans, like calorie negative foods, where consumption of certain foods types actually consumes more calories in the digestive process, than those foods will actually release once digested. There are also many food types which will alter mood so hmm hot chocolate a whole lot of calories but it's going to chill you out more than speed you up. There are a whole range of herbs and spices with various metabolic activities that aren't going to be in the calorie count but will most definitely alter the results in any way that lying shit head Public Relations types want them to go.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I don't know about others, but I can eat a lot of donuts full of sugar or HFCS, but more than a couple of baklava dripping with honey and I start feeling sick. Does anyone really eat as much honey as you'd get in a donut and drink sugar binge?
Hitler ate sugar!
Every end has half a stick.
Are we ignoring the very real possibility that this is a case of False Cause? Isn't it possible that the cause of the breaking of things is that the kids are poorly supervised or lack self-control, which could be hereditary, after all, if the parents are so fucking negligent that they're giving children soda to drink, they're probably shitty parents.
That's right, bitches, I said it. If you let your children drink soda, YOU ARE A SHITTY PARENT, and have failed as such, perhaps you should give your children up for adoption, perhaps to someone who won't POISON them. Soda shouldn't be consumed by children, that's a time in a life when they should be forming GOOD habits, NOT BAD ones.
Heard someone comment (think it was a dentist on NPR) who said he's seeing more teenagers lately being fitted for dentures because their teeth have rotted out of their heads. Where the fuck, I want to know, are CPS? If I were a dentist, and someone brought a teenage kid in who had so many permanent teeth rotting that he or she needed to be fitted for dentures, I'd take one of the extracted teeth and analyze it to see if it's rot secondary to such beverages, diet, lack of properly supervised oral hygiene, then when it turns out to be, call the authorities to place the kid in a home with less abusive or negligent parents.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Parents that care have good kids. Parents that don't care have bad kids.
There are certainly exceptions, but exceptions, not norm.
4% of such a small sample. Is that even significant?
Feeding four sodas a day to a 40 lbs 5 year old is like giving an adult 2 galons of soda each day. In ddition to all that sugar, it is a great deal of caffein to give a child. Caffein causes the body to lose magnesium. "Symptoms of magnesium deficiency may include agitation and anxiety, restless leg syndrome (RLS), sleep disorders, irritability, nausea and vomiting, abnormal heart rhythms, low blood pressure, confusion, muscle spasm and weakness, hyperventilation, insomnia, poor nail growth, and even seizures." Source: Magnesium | University of Maryland Medical Center http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/supplement/magnesium#ixzz2cM8HGbnh University of Maryland Medical Center) Seems pretty straightforward to me. If you wanted to determine whether this was so, you could do a double blind study with coke and 7-up. If your epected symptoms appeared in the coke group and didn't arise in the 7-up group, I'd say we're talkng about caffein induced manesium defficiency. You could then give the coke group magnesium supplements and see if the symptoms decreased.
An association does not equal a link, nor does a link equal a cause.
Soda drinks like Coca Cola contain high levels of caffeine. On its own this might be related to the behavior.
Sugar "highs" might be claimed to be a myth, but sugar "low" crashes following a sugar (hence insulin) spike in the bloodstream certainly are a physiological reality and are no myth.
When I was a construction laborer my lunch was chocolate milk and peanut m&ms, both for the energy boost. Some people will react atypically to a given substance, so while a few may be relaxed by hot chocolate, your assumption that it works like that for everyone is wrong. The psychoactive compound in chocolate, by the way, is theobromine, and it is a stimulant. You may not be the appropriate person to be calling out junk science.
Actually the existance of the sugar high has been hotly debated, and as far as I'm aware most of the scientific literature suggests that it doesn't exist.
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.)
In the fifties and sixties, it was one of the marketing points for Coca-Cola that its Coke would give a boost upon consumption.
Maybe the same parents that allow their children to consume several soft drinks per day are also the same parents who allow their children to run wild and break things without consequence.