After millennia going very hungry, in recent years Western society faces a very different situation, that of having abundant food and overweight and obesity rates too high, even in childhood (in Spain one in three children is overweight).
It is urgent to find a solution to this because it is being seen that overweight children have signs of heart disease already at age 8, and if it can help in motivating parents to cause changes in diet, a new study suggests that children who eat better may have more reading skills.
What would "eat better" according to the study
The research was carried out in Finland and has been published in the journal European Journal of Nutrition. To carry it out, they took a sample of 161 children between the ages of 6 and 8, studying between first and third year.
They investigated what diet they received and what their reading skills were, as well as arithmetic, and saw that they obtained better scores in reading skills. children who ate few sugary foods and little red meat, and whose diet consisted mainly of vegetables, berries and fruits, in addition to fish, whole grains and unsaturated fats. When evaluating math results, no clear differences were seen.
These skills were significantly better even when considering confounding factors such as socioeconomic status, physical activity, body fat and physical fitness.
Do they mean that those who eat worse will read worse?
Because of the sample size, which is very low, and the type of intervention performed, it cannot be said that those who eat worse will necessarily read worse, because It is not entirely clear that there is a relationship between diet and reading skills. However, the study authors state that parents, schools and governments should ensure the health and performance of children, and a good strategy may be to make healthier foods available and within reach of More smalls.
In fact, it is not the first study that associates the quality of the food children eat with their school performance. Two years ago we explained that the more fast food children ate, the worse their ability to learn. In the same study, it was thought that the results could be due to the fact that children from households with less resources tend to eat worse, and that the results in school could come from there and not by diet, however they isolated the data and they observed that the difference existed equally.
So if you still have doubts about why your children have to eat healthy, here is one more reason: we are what we eat, and children who eat healthier seem to have better performance in school. It will not necessarily be better than those who eat worse, but it will be better than the performance you would get if your diet were poorly varied or with excess of poorly nutritious foods.
