Soda Makes Teenagers Violent?
That’s what a new study is claiming, putting another bullet in the gun of the nanny statist alarmists who want to regulate our diets for us.
Researchers in the United States said on Tuesday they had found a “shocking” association — if only a statistical one — between violence by teenagers and the amount of soda they drank.
High-school students in inner-city Boston who consumed more than five cans of non-diet, fizzy soft drinks every week were between nine and 15-percent likelier to engage in an aggressive act compared with counterparts who drank less.
“What we found was that there was a strong relationship between how many soft drinks that these inner-city kids consumed and how violent they were, not only in violence against peers but also violence in dating relationships, against siblings,” said David Hemenway, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.
“It was shocking to us when we saw how clear the relationship was,” he told AFP in an interview.
Of course, as any objective observer of research will tell, correlation does not suggest causation. If we look at larger trends, this study seems like bunk.
According to Medical News Today, “consumption [of soft drinks] has steadily increased over the last three decades.” And yet, simultaneously, violent crime rates in America has been plummeting:
Soda consumption increases, but violent crime decreases. Now, if I were to use the same reasoning of the alarmists quoted in the article above I could suggest that soda consumption makes people more peaceful and less prone to violence.
But that would be a ridiculous conclusion. But the statistics to rebut the notion that soda consumption causes violence.
My guess is the story referred to in the article is reflecting the fact that problem kids tend to be more irresponsible in their diets than other kids. Which isn’t exactly rocket science given how often problem kids are the result of irresponsible parenting.
Tags: Asshats, nanny statism
