The Washington Post
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Fast-food consumption isn’t merely connected to increases in pants size — it’s also tied to significant decreases in test scores among school children, according to a new national study.
Researchers at Ohio State University used data from a nationally representative sample of about 11,700 children to measure how fast food might be affecting classroom performance.
The study measured how much fast food the children were eating at age 10 and then compared the consumption levels with test results in reading, math and science three years later.
What they found is even small increases in the frequency of eating fast food were associated with poorer academic test results.
Habitual fast-food eaters — those who ate fast food daily — saw “test score gains that were up to about 20 percent lower than those who didn’t eat any fast food.”
The connection held true even after the researchers took into account more than a dozen other factors about the children’s habits and backgrounds that might have contributed to the association between fast-food consumption and poorer academic performance, including fitness, broader eating habits, socioeconomic status and characteristics of their neighborhoods and schools.
“Our results show clear and consistent associations between children’s fast food consumption in fifth grade and academic growth between fifth and eighth grade,” the researchers wrote.