Emily Deans discusses a horrifying study tracking soda consumption in 5 year-olds:
The study was part of a Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing cohort of about 3000 urban US children and their mothers from 20 different cities. The sample is 51% African American, 28% Hispanic, and unmarried mothers outnumber the married ones 3:1. In this cohort, 43% of the 5 year old children consumed at least one soda per day, and 8.2% drank three or more servings a day. Those who did drink 4 or more sodas daily were over twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, get into fights, and physically attack people, and violence across the cohort linearly correlated with the amount of soda consumed. We’ve seen a similar pattern in a previous study of adolescents. No one has measured it in young children before.
Covariates included violence in the home, fruit juice and candy consumption, obesity, maternal education, and hours of TV watching, and when the statisticians took these confounders out, the correlations between violence and soda consumption still held. Perhaps the most interesting bit of the study is that fruit juice consumption was correlated with less aggression and candy with mildly increased aggression, so sugar itself is clearly not the whole story here.
I think we have a question of causality here.
“Perhaps the most interesting bit of the study is that fruit juice consumption was correlated with less aggression and candy with mildly increased aggression, so sugar itself is clearly not the whole story here.”
That’s pretty telling. It’s easy to see soda consumption as a proxy for being a bad mother or in a bad family — who thinks soda is A-OK for kids these days? — and what would a “good” mother do? Feed her kids juice rather than soda — even if actually they have very similar sugar contents. And what might a “bad” mother also do besides feed her kid soda? Feed them pure-sugar treats like candy.