Junk food diet linked to lower IQ

[kpete]

Source: Raw Story/Agence France-Presse

Junk food diet linked to lower IQ

By Agence France-Presse
Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 -- 8:21 am

PARIS – Toddlers who have a diet high in processed foods may have a slightly lower IQ in later life, according to a British study described as the biggest research of its kind.

The conclusion, published on Monday, comes from a long-term investigation into 14,000 people born in western England in 1991 and 1992 whose health and well-being were monitored at the ages of three, four, seven and eight and a half.

...........

Of the 4,000 children for which there were complete data, there was a significant difference in IQ among those who had had the "processed" as opposed to the "health-conscious" diets in early childhood.

The 20 percent of children who ate the most processed food had an average IQ of 101 points, compared with 106 for the 20 percent of children who ate the most "health-conscious" food.

Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/junk-food-diet-linked-iq/

[nebenaube]

1. Shouldn't the headline be:

Low IQ trends towards poor food choices.

[apnu]

7. That can be true, but the first headline makes more sense.

A young child's brain is still growing rapidly, and if you do not give them good nutrients to grow with, you're going to get a less developed brain. Its simple logic really. Give someone shitty bricks and they can only make a shitty house. Give someone the best bricks and they can make the best house (though they can still screw it up, but at least the bricks won't be to blame).

So give a child good nutrition and you give them the opportunity to have a well developed brain, its one of those "well duh" things. But its nice to see research that bears out common sense.

[nebenaube]

35. It takes an IQ to feed an IQ is all I'm sayin... n/t

[May Hamm]

51. For toddlers???

Quote:

"Toddlers who have a diet high in processed foods may have a slightly lower IQ in later life"

So those toddlers are making poor food choices, are they? Most toddlers are given the option of: Eat it or Go hungry. I'm not sure that reflects on the child's intelligence.

[SpiralHawk]

2. "Move along. Nothing to see here." - Big Ag - Industrial Food, Inc. (R)

[HereSince1628]

3. The damned IQ tests are good enough to consider a ~5% delta

intellectually meaningful? Paint me skeptical.

[AngryAmish]

5. Almost all of these studies are garbage

If you look at 100 different factors for why some kids have lower IQ pure chance will turn up some factors that appear statistically significant.

But this got published and the proponents of organic foods will get a grant somewhere.

That said it is a terrible idea to feed a kid a lot of junk food. At a minimum it makes kids fat to give them such calorie dense foods.

[apnu]

9. Well it is logical that the quality of the food will affect the quality of the body.

That includes all parts such as the brain. My point is bad food is obviously bad all around. I think the study is trying to show that in a clumsy way. You can give a kid great food and still have a low IQ, but it certainly doesn't harm the kid to give them good food. And who knows, maybe it will help, but junk food helps no one and nothing other than the corporate giant that made it.

[AngryAmish]

10. It is an abuse of science

What if there was a bs study out there that said joining some fundy church rises IQ by 5%? If I wanted to prove that I could design a study that would do that exact thing. Ends justifying means and all that.

So what is the harm? Making food is an enormous time sink. Time that could be better spent doing other things like helping a kid with their homework or reading to them.

Plus, your definition of "good food". I assume it means fresh, organic etc. I could make you a meal using nothing but fresh, organic, local seasonal, etc. that would be terrible for you. Stuffed with calories and all other sorts of garbage.

People do not act rationally about food. Virtually every scientific study says nutritionally organic food is the same as normal food. Point that out and people go nuts. You cannot have a rational discussion about that so let me give you some advice - don't even try to have that discussion. You will not change minds because the subject is so emotional.

[KittyWampus]

11. your post actually has no rational basis regarding the subject of this thread.

You have zero evidence to back up your assertion the study is crap.

[defendandprotect]

20. Factually, a junk food diet contributes to illness of the body --

from hyper tension to strokes and heart attacks --

from diabetes to cancer --

Your brain is the most vulnerable organ in your body -- it would be the first

to suffer!

[apnu]

21. I never mentioned organics once...

...that was an assumption you made. When I say "good food" I mean "not junk food." Also, you have a bunch of "what ifs" in there, we can do that all day long, what good does it bring?

I'm not trying to change any minds, nor am I judging people for their choices. People will live the way they want to live, my opinion of lifestyle bears no impact on anybody but myself and my family.

You are right, you can take the best quality foods and produce a fat laden meal sure to clog arteries among other things. But I don't think you can reverse the process. That is, to take junk food and somehow make it "good." You can't reverse the processing of processed foods. I'm sure, after you take the chemicals away, the ingredients of junk food, were normal ingredients and could have been used to make something tasty and good for you. But the makers of that food choose to do what you suggested with quality ingredients and that's kind of the point here isn't it?

Food is what you make of it. But pre-processed food, food that is, well, nearly pre-digested for you -- that's just bad stuff all around. The only advantage is that its cheap and its easy. But I'm not sure that's an advantage to anybody but the producer of the food.

Time sink? Sorry, I don't agree with you. As a parent, my family finds time to make our own food and help with homework and family reading. As a parent, its what I do, I work for my kids at the expense of my desires and leisure. There is no other way to do it. My point is, as a parent, I make time. Life sucks that way, and it is our choice to prepare our meals. You make your own choices, please do, its none of my business what you choose to do.

I'm not a organic nut, I do like to eat organics when I get the chance because I like to eat meats and veggies that haven't swum in a chemical bath, or had poisons dumped on them or any of that stuff. I don't want to put that in my body, it makes me feel ill when I do. But, I've learned, like you, to not yammer on about organics. I simply buy what I buy from where I buy it from and that's the end of it. People are irrational about their food, they're even more irrational about parental decisions. Have you seen this business over the Tiger Moms? It makes the raging war of organic food look like a minor disagreement. People trip out if they think anything differs from their parental system, and heaven forbid, there is a suggestion of another way to do it.

People don't like to have their reality bubbles popped, it freaks them out. People also don't like to take responsibility for their choices, which is, really near to the heart of food and parental choice. Because its a choice in either case, and folks do not like knowing they made the "wrong" choice. Even though "wrong" in most cases is a matter of points of view and not some true/false quiz. In almost every conflict both sides of the conflict believe they are "right" and the other is "wrong"

[joshcryer]

23. Religiosity and intelligence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence

[Prometheus Bound]

37. Abuse of science??? 14,000 subjects. Peer-reviewed study.

[mopinko]

48. no, it is a study of 4000 subjects.

they looked through records of 14,000 and came up w/ 4000 that met their criteria for the study.

[Psephos]

45. You sure called that one right. :)

The people with purple faces and flecks of spit on their lips are generally the ones screaming "science." Double that if the subject is nutrition, climate, nuclear energy, or vaccines.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your views on food, but I am absolutely agreeing with your analysis of peoples' rationality regarding the subject.

[SpiralHawk]

15. "Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es." - Dr. Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

[WatsonT]

28. There seem to be many problems with this study

not in the least the whole causation angle.

Does poor nutrition create dumb kids, or do dumb parents create dumb kids and also feed them poorly?

Intelligence is heritable to a degree. And kids don't generally choose their own diets.

[HereSince1628]

30. The media will use 'links' because it is short and because

it carries an allusion of saying more than what it should. I'm not sure the researchers would go there on their own. I'm pretty sure that peer reviewers would beat their manuscript up for trying.

No one is going to read an article that says tenuously weak correlation found between diet and IQ.

[WatsonT]

31. Reminds me of this:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

And of course anything relating to your childs intelligence is going to be big sensational news. Everyone wants their kid to be bright and successful, and many parents blame themselves if those kids aren't.

So it's understandable that people will look for an easy answer. "Ahah, just ban junk food and my kid will be a rocket scientist! I'm a good parent". Even though I suspect many realize that the answer is far more complicated than that.

Another recent one found that the number of books present in a household correlates to academic success. And it was being presented as "buy more books and your kids will be smart!". Ignoring that perhaps more educated people have more educated children and tend to earn more and also have more books.

[Prometheus Bound]

36. The authors explained that they controlled for that.

The association between IQ and nutrition is a strongly debated issue because it can be skewed by many factors, including economic and social background.

A middle-class family, for instance, may arguably be more keen (or more financially able) to put a healthier meal on the table, or be pushier about stimulating their child, compared to a poorer household.

Emmett said the team took special care to filter out such confounders.

"We have controlled for maternal education, for maternal social class, age, whether they live in council housing, life events, anything going wrong, the home environment, with books and use of television and things like that," she said.

[glinda]

4. Become one with GM potato chip.

[LittleGirl]

6. another label is needed for 'junk food'

because that stuff just isn't 'food'. It's chemicals...mixed with what used to be defined as a possible food substance.

[Javaman]

8. Mmmmm, I'm eating a big mac in one hand and a whopper in the other at the moment...

Mmmm, tastes soooo gooooood. I think I will do some calculus....

munch munch munch...

What are all these weird symbols...Meh, I'll try some algebra instead...

munch munch munch...

X= what the fuck?

screw this...on to long division...

munch munch munch...

2 goes into 43 how many times?

boy, these burgers taste goodly...

Maybe a little addition...

2 + 2 equals...hmmm...equals....

Dang if I know. Screw it, what's on tv.

Ahhhh Sarah Palin. That womens is a thoughter of smart thingies!

[Alcibiades]

12. Note that they don't report the difference btweeen

the "traditional" and "health-conscious" diets. Why? I am guessing there was not one: the biggest effect they could find was between the "health-conscious" and "junk" diets.

The N is big, which is good, but the difference is still pretty small. They claim they have controlled for social class, which is their biggest confounding variable, which is good, because we know it's related to IQ.

I'd be curious to see if they also examined how much TV these kids watched, because it would strike me that the ones who had more junk going into their bodies also had more junk going into their minds, and because we know there's an effect:

http://world.std.com/~jlr/comment/tv_impact.htm

[defendandprotect]

19. Obviously, a junk food diet harms your body ... why not your brain?

[WatsonT]

29. Science doesn't work that way

you can't make a conclusion based on what seems logical to you. That can be how you form your hypothesis, but not any meaningful conclusions. "It stands to reason that . . . " is not how a study should end.

You have to test it, under controlled circumstances, while taking in to account variables as best you can.

It doesn't seem they did a great job here.

[Alcibiades]

33. Indeed, the brain is part of the body

14,000 subjects is a large enough of a number to parse out a difference. I suspect a high fat diet, over the long term, might impede the flow of blood to the brain, but we're not dealing with long enough of a time span here.

I strongly suspect spuriousness. I think it's likely that, if the diets for these kids were chosen by parents, these same parents may have made other choices that also may account for the observed difference.

[progressoid]

13. Unrec.

Correlation does not mean causation.

[slackmaster]

16. Indeed. Causality could easily go either direction in this one.

Maybe dumb kids eat more junk food than smart kids do.

[Prometheus Bound]

38. Why don't you read the article at least.

[hughee99]

14. While I wouldn't be surprised if eating healthy improved brain development, I'm very skeptical...

I'm usually skeptical about studies that take "special care to filter out such confounders", but I'd be interested to know, did the parents take IQ tests? As a child (most anyway) doesn't get to be their own dietitian, they are eating what their parents choose to give them. Parents smart enough to feed their child a healthy diet may also have the sort of genetic makeup that enables them to produce a smarter child in the first place.

In any case, whenever I see a study showing correlation with a story implying causation, I'm always skeptical.

[defendandprotect]

18. If you're skeptical ... are you eating organic foods and avoiding animal eating?

Because foods grown with petroleum based fertilizers and the campaign to

eat animals are two things to be skeptical about.

Both doing harm to our planet -- and logically would also be doing harm to humans!

[hughee99]

25. I'm skeptical about how much the study proves anything,

not about the underlying theory that eating healthy is better for brain development than eating junk food.

I eat organic when possible. I eat animals. Not sure what either has to do with me being skeptical of causation conclusions of this study, though.

[defendandprotect]

26. If you're "skeptical" at all, you should be skeptical of animal-eating ....

and junk food --

that's all I'm saying to you --

Skepticism should be overall -- not something turned off and on like a light switch!

[hughee99]

27. I'd try to do better, but I'm skeptical of your advice.

I'll offer you some though, turning a discussion of the actual scientific value of a study into a discussion of one of the participants diet is not really the best way to win friends and influence people.

Is there some reason I SHOULDN'T be skeptical of this study, and EVERYONE turns on and off their skepticism like a light switch based on their own experiences. Consider the promises of our own president. Two years ago, few DUers were skeptical when he said he wanted or intended to do something, but after 2 years of watching the "chessmaster" in action, skepticism seems to be the norm even around here. Yet did for 8 years before Obama, did Bush ever make a pledge that you weren't, by default, skeptical about?

[defendandprotect]

42. As I'm skeptical of yours ...

If you're defending a "junk food" diet, presumably you're defending against the notion

that you have lowered your own intelligence?

Rather it was a challenge to do some real thinking about the realities of junk food.

There is every reason to give some serious thought to what the study is saying --

based on prior knowledge of what's in these "foods" and the effects they have on people --

from cancer to obesity, from high blood pressure to strokes -- and diabetes.

And when one understands that whatever harms our bodies - FIRST -- harms our brain.

And no -- I don't think people turn skepticism off and on -- it may rise and fall a bit --

but not off and on.

Consider the promises of our own president. Two years ago, few DUers were skeptical when he said he wanted or intended to do something, but after 2 years of watching the "chessmaster" in action, skepticism seems to be the norm even around here. Yet did for 8 years before Obama, did Bush ever make a pledge that you weren't, by default, skeptical about?

Certainly, I was no fan of Obama and skeptical of his meteroric rise. Had I known he was a

"New Dem," I would not have voted for him. I probably would have done a write in for Bernie

Sanders -- imo, he could run on a Dem ticket. However, I certainly didn't expect anything as

bad as this! Nor do I agree it took two years -- people were "getting" Obama immediately when

he eloped into the WH with Rahm Emmanel and when he picked his Wall Street team!

And, of course, now it's beyond skepticism with Obama. Many here, are in a post-Obama mode.

And, I think many are in a post-DU mode, having left after the huge disappointment of Obama.

As for Bush, I consider him criminal/fascist -- but I was not only shocked still at some of

the things he did, but at the fact that he got away with them.

[hughee99]

46. I have yet to understand why you think I'm "defending junk food".

Have I ANYWHERE suggested that junk food is good or that a bad diet won't have bad effects. You REALLY seem to want to avoid addressing my actual point here, which is that I'm skeptical NOT of the conclusions of the study, but of the METHODOLOGY. While the conclusions of this study may be true, and they're certainly pointing toward a belief that I already hold, I have significant doubts about whether they've actually been able to effectively screen out other factors. One of my biggest pet peeves is scientific studies that "conclude" or imply causation without factoring out significant variables.

Of course, there's also the possibility that the study methodology is fine, and the article itself is misrepresenting the findings.

[defendandprotect]

50. Science is merely and only observation of nature ....

I'm sure you have OBSERVED something about junk food --

and if you have it certainly would argue for skeptism about junk food, itself --

and not any challenges to it!

Bye --

[Codeine]

40. I find it very amusing that a person who believes every conspiracy

ever postulated would presume to lecture anyone about skepticism.

And that's vegan-to-vegan, for the record. ;)

[WatsonT]

32. "the campaign to eat animals"

Apparently the oldest and most successful campaign in human history as we've been eating animals since before we were humans.

[defendandprotect]

43. Humans have no need to eat animals ...

but there are signs of an obvious "campaign" even in the story of Adam and Eve and Lilith -- !!

Certainly an apple didn't turn the world upside down --

More likely it was the shock and violence of animal-killing and animal-eating which served

that purpose.

[WatsonT]

47. Oh

you're a fundy.

Interesting.

[defendandprotect]

49. "Fundy"-- ? Didn't know they disbelieved Genesis -- !!

[WatsonT]

52. No but they do reference

biblical stories in situations that don't warrant them.

[AngryAmish]

53. That reminds me of the Book of Esther

[defendandprotect]

54. Bibical stories are myth -- created by patriarchy -- good to examine the rasons behind it ...

and certainly the myth of the Garden of Eden deals with the world

being turned upside down because of an APPLE --

that is relevant to animal-eating and the campaign for it.


As it is good to examine all patriarchal myth --

[defendandprotect]

17. Vegetables and fruits nourish all parts of your body in specific ways and are our MEDICINES...

Carrots -- your eyes

Strawberries -- lining of your mouth --

A lack of nutrition will effect the most delicate organ of your body first --

your brain!

And that includes foods that have been robbed of their nutrition by throwing

petroleum fertilizers all over the soil!

[Codeine]

41. Petroleum-based fertilizers don't harm the nutritive value of the food,

though they may pose other hazards and are not Earth-friendly.

[Jankyn]

22. Small sample, small IQ difference...

...and like many of the commenters, I'd guess that the correlation runs the opposite way: Less educated parents provide inferior food as well as less enrichment, resulting in only slightly less intelligent children.

And that's IF you accept IQ as a measure of intelligence.

[Prometheus Bound]

39. 14,000 subjects is a small sample???

[alp227]

24. I thought this story was about Fox News...but oh

Still no surprise here. That's why I'm grateful for Mrs. Obama's nutrition initiatives.

[lbrtbell]

34. Duh. n/t

[Odin2005]

44. Heh, so there was a good outcome to my Pop-Eye Spinach obsession when I was 3!

[karynnj]

55. self delete