Junk food diet may lower kids' IQ - Well, Duh!

Let's see - eat fruits and vegetable, become big and strong.  Eat junk food, and get sick.

I don't know anyone who doesn't believe that at least on some level, but now we have a study to support our suspicions on what junk food is doing to our kids' brains.

This study focused on 3,966 children for whom complete data were available. The researchers broke up the kids into three dietary patterns:

• "processed" high in fats and sugar intake
• "traditional" high in meat and vegetable intake
• "health conscious" high in salad, fruit and vegetables, rice and pasta.

After the researchers adjusted their findings for several factors, including breastfeeding duration and the amount of oily fish their mothers consumed while pregnant, they found that a highly processed food diet at the age of three was linked with a lower IQ at the age of 8.5. Every 1 point increase in dietary pattern score was associated with a 1.67 fall in IQ.

On the other hand, a healthy diet was associated with a higher IQ at the age of 8.5, with every 1 point increase in dietary pattern linked to a 1.2 increase in IQ.

"This suggests that any cognitive/behavioural effects relating to eating habits in early childhood may well persist into later childhood, despite any subsequent changes (including improvements) to dietary intake," say the researchers, whose study appears in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

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