Eating Fast Food May Cause Your Child to Have Lower Test Scores

First Posted: Jan 08, 2015 06:34 AM EST
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There may be another reason to avoid fast food. Researchers have found that the amount of fast food that children eat may be linked to how well they do in school.

"There's a lot of evidence that fast-food consumption is linked to childhood obesity, but the problems don't end there," said Kelly Purtell, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Relying too much on fast food could hurt how well children do in the classroom."

The researchers examined data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. This nationally representative study included students who were in kindergarten in the 1998-1999 school year. In all, it included 11,740 students who were tested in both fifth and eighth grades. These students also completed a food consumption questionnaire in fifth grade.

So what did they find? Students who ate the most fast food had test score gains that were up to about 20 percent lower than those who didn't eat any fast food. These results remained even after researchers took into account other factors, such as how much they exercised, how much television they watched, what other food they ate, and their family's socioeconomic status.

"We're not saying that parents should never feed their children fast food, but these results suggest fast-food consumption should be limited as much as possible," said Purtell.

The findings reveal that when it comes to fast food, it may be important to cut back. That said, the study can't prove that fast-food consumption caused the lower academic growth. However, by controlling for other factors, the scientists believe that fast food explains at least some of the difference in achievement gains.

The findings are published in the journal Clinical Pediatrics.

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