Fast Food Could Make Children Perform Worse in School

A new study shows that children who regularly eat fast food don’t perform as well as their fellow students in school.

“Research has been focused on how children’s food consumption contributes to the child-obesity epidemic,” Kelly Purtell of Ohio State University, who led the study, told the Telegraph. “Our findings provide evidence that eating fast food is linked to another problem: poorer academic outcomes.”

The study, published in Clinical Pediatrics, measured the fast-food consumption of 8,500 American 10-year-olds and then reviewed their academic test results three years later. The children were a nationally representative sample and researchers took into account more than two dozen factors other than fast food that could skew the results.

Among those who ate fast food on a daily basis, the average science score was 79, as compared with 83 for those who never ate fast food. Similar results were discovered for reading and math.

[Telegraph]