Soda Linked to Behavior Problems in Young Children

You may want to think twice before giving your child a soda. Scientists have discovered that young children that consume soft drinks have problems with aggression, attention problem and withdrawal behavior.

Soda has long been linked with aggression, depression and suicidal thoughts in adolescents, yet researchers hadn't studied its effects on young children before now. With Americans buying more soft drinks per capita than people in any other country, though, researchers decided to study the effects of soda a bit more closely.

In order to examine how soda might affect young children, the researchers assessed approximately 3,000 5-year-old children enrolled in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. This prospective birth cohort follows mother-child pairs from 20 large U.S. cities. The mothers reported their child's soft drink consumption and completed the Child Behavior Checklist based on their child's behavior during the previous two months.

So what did they find? It turns out that 43 percent of the children consumed at least one serving of soft drinks every day. Another four percent consumed four or more. In addition, the researchers found that aggression, withdrawal and attention problems were associated with soda consumption. In fact, even after adjusting for sociodemographic factors, maternal depression, intimate partner violence and paternal incarceration, any soft drink consumption was associated with increased aggressive behavior.

Needless to say, this is bad news for children that drink soda. Scientists found that those who drank four or more soft drinks per day were twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, get into fights and physically attack people. These children also had increased attention problems and withdrawal behavior when compared to those who didn't drink soda.

"We found that the child's aggressive behavior score increased with every increase in soft drink servings per day," said Shakira Suglia, one of the researchers, in a news release.

While this latest study doesn't exactly identify the nature of the association between soda and behavior problems, it does show that there is some kind of effect. Future studies should focus on exactly what might cause these issues, though it does show that parents should probably limit or eliminate soft drinks from a child's diet in order to avoid behavioral problems.

The findings are published in The Journal of Pediatrics.