Junk food, energy drinks, behaviour and attainment

Diet has been shown to play an important role in the prevention and management of many different kinds of behavioural problems. For example, it is associated with mental health and may play an important role in developmental conditions (e.g. ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and autistic spectrum disorders). It can also influence behaviour, cognition and mood and these changes may be important at home, at school and in the workplace. The present research will be concerned with dietary influences on the behaviour and attainment of secondary school children. Much research has been concerned with positive influences of diet (e.g. breakfast – Smith, 2010) on children’s behaviour (see Benton, 2010). However, other research has focused on negative influences of dietary factors (see Schoenthaller, 1995) and recent attention has been given to effects of junk food (Feinstein et al., 2008) and energy drinks (Reissig et al., 2008).

Proposed study - The present proposal is for a larger study to look at the associations between diet and consumption of energy drinks with both bad behaviour and attainment scores (taken from school records).
The study will be carried out following ethical approval from the School of Psychology, Cardiff University. Three schools have agreed to participate and every child (N=3,000 approximately) in the schools will complete a dietary questionnaire at the start of the study and correlations between dietary measures and sanctions and attainment will be analysed. A smaller number will complete the questionnaires on a weekly basis in order to investigate temporal associations between diet and behaviour. Finally, those in detention will record what they had eaten/drunk prior to the incident. The attainment data will be obtained from electronic records and an anonymous data file containing both dietary and educational data created in Cardiff. The file will also contain information on possible confounders (e.g. socioeconomic status measured by parents occupation, free school meals etc) that need to be adjusted for in the analyses.

Logistic regressions will examine whether general dietary patterns (especially consumption of junk food and energy drinks) and recently consumed food and drink are associated with behaviour and attainment scores. The analyses will adjust for possible confounders (e.g. socioeconomic status) and will also identify the combinations of variables that predict good or bad scores.

Following this initial study it will be possible to either examine these topics with a sample of University students or a sub-sample of school children who may be particularly susceptible.