Chocolate (and consumption of other sweets) encourages violence?
New study indicates that children who often received sweets, including chocolate, are more likely to become violent adults.
Photo: Feastguru.com If your parents were stingy on the sweets when you were a child, they might have been doing you a favor beyond nutrition: contributing to your psychological stability. A new study in the British Journal of Psychiatry (as cited in eScienceNews) indicates that subjects whose daily consumption of chocolate (and other sweets) at age 10 were “significantly more likely to have been convicted for violence at age 34.”
Researchers from Cardiff University found that 69 percent of the participants who were violent at the age of 34 had eaten sweets and chocolate nearly every day during childhood, compared to 42 percent who were nonviolent.
"Our favoured explanation is that giving children sweets and chocolate regularly may stop them learning how to wait to obtain something they want. Not being able to defer gratification may push them towards more impulsive behaviour, which is strongly associated with delinquency."
Comments
Oh, that is really unique notes just about this good post! Even the freelance writing will hardly grapple with this.
As the VP of Communications for the National Confectioners Association, I read your headline with some alarm. It's not at all accurate to say chocolate encourages violence. The study is about permissive parenting styles (such as letting a child eat as much candy as he wants), which you do explain in this story - but not until paragraph four. The researchers are not suggesting that it's the consumption of the sweets that encourages poor behavior. The same results would likely have been.... More
