Candy-Chomping Kids Commit Crimes as Adults

Can eating too much candy on a daily basis make you commit crimes? 

If you're planning on passing out candies to trick-or-treaters on Halloween, read this first.

Kids who eat candy and other sweets daily may be more likely to be arrested for violent crime  as adults, according to a new British study, which you can read about on MSNBC and other organizations.

Curiously, this startling study was published soon before this widely accepted sugar-giving holiday, in the October issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Researchers from Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, headed up by Simon Moore, Ph.D., a senior lecturer in the Violence and Society Research Group, looked at data from the British Cohort Study of more than 17,000 children born in 1970 in the U.K.

Studying the data of four decades, Dr. Moore and his colleagues found that 69 percent of those children who ate candies or chocolates daily at age 10, were later arrested for a violent offense by age 34, the AP reported. Of those who didn't commit any crimes, 42 percent ate sweets daily.

Dr. Moore, who has been studying children to commit serious crimes,
discovered that "kids with the worst problems tend to be impulsive risk
takers, and that these kids had terrible diets — breakfast was a Coke
and a bag of chips," he says, according TIME. 

To be sure, experts are critical of these conclusions, this sugar-crime connection is nothing new. In fact, you can read about other related, eye-opening studies that arrive at similar conclusions in my book SUGAR SHOCK!

Now, listen to the conclusion of the abstract, which pinpoints a definitive connection between candy and crime.

"Diet has been associated with behavioural problems, including aggression, but the long-term effects of childhood diet on adult violence have not been studied. We tested the hypothesis that excessive consumption of confectionery at age 10 years predicts convictions for violence in adulthood (age 34 years). Data from age 5, 10 and 34 years were used. Children who ate confectionery daily at age 10 years were significantly more likely to have been convicted for violence at age 34 years, a relationship that was robust when controlling
for ecological and individual factors."

Interestingly, Dr. Moore speculates that the candy-violence association may have to do with the fact that that giving children sweets regularly may prevent them from learning to delay gratification, which, in turn, may encourage impulsivity, leading to delinquency, HealthDay points out.