Could the efforts of school boards to remove candy bars and soda pop from school vending machines lead to reduced crime rates in the future?
The answer depends on whether you believe new research coming out of the United Kingdom. There, it seems, children who eat lots of sweets are more likely to grow up to be violent as adults.
So concludes a study of 17,500 adults by Cardiff University, which found that people who ate sweets and chocolate every day as a 10-yer-old were 64 percent more likely “to have a criminal violence conviction by age 34.”
As with any research, educators need to look a little deeper at the findings. Researchers didn’t say that sweets, in and of themselves, are the cause of increased levels of adult violence.
It could well be that children who eat lots of sweets simply have poor parental supervision, which itself could be the contributing factor in these young people’s development.
Poor nutritional habits also are more likely in low-income families, and poverty is associated with a host of social woes that could contribute to higher rates of violence later in life.
(It should be noted that researchers say the link between sugar and violence remained even after taking such factors into account.)
So what use is this research to school boards? Actually, it’s not the findings that I’m concerned with. It’s that this study is yet another example of why school boards should heed my advice of previous blogsĀthat no single piece of research ever provides all the pieces of the puzzle.
(Also, newspaper and TV reports tend to gloss over the details and caveats that are included in any responsible study.)
Yes, there seems to be a link between sugar and adult violence. It’s not clear, however, what that link is. There is, as yet, still no evidence of “cause and effect.” Even the Cardiff researchers acknowledge that.
So don’t panic if you still let high school kids buy soda from cafeteria vending machines. That’s not going to give birth to any serial killers.
Del Stover, Senior Editor
