Soda is Turning Our Children Into Toy-Crushing Monsters
Soda is a nutritious beverage that will aid your physical health with all sorts of micro-probiotic-raw-superfood wellness, said no one. It's not good thing to put in your body and we all know that. Soda's effect on the mind and behavior has not been so frequently observed. Now, a study in the Journal of Pediatrics connects drinking too much soda to behavioral problems and violence in young kids.
Researchers from the public health schools at both Columbia and Harvard tracked the habits of 3,000 mothers and their five-year-old children in 20 large urban centers. The researchers found that 43% of these kids consumed at least one soda a day.
Children who drank four or more sodas a day (four percent) were more than twice as likely to show signs of attention problems and aggression, including destroying other children's toys and physically attacking people.
While the amount of sugar could be enough to set a child ferociously buzzing around, Alexandra Sifferlin at Time says that the effect of caffeine "changes in hormone levels that could alter the way still developing brains perceive and evaluate risk."
When sociodemographic factors (like depression within the family, domestic violence, and paternal incarceration) were considered, soda consumption was still connected to aggression, attention problems, and social withdrawal. "With every increase in soda consumption, we saw an increase in behavior problems," Shakira Suglia, a study author told CNN.
