October 24, 2011

expert reaction to research into fizzy drink consumption and violence as published in the journal Injury Prevention

A paper from American researchers highlighted what they saw as a potential relationship between consumption of fizzy drinks and violent behaviour.

Dr Seena Fazel, Senior Lecturer, University of Oxford, said:

“As the authors themselves rightly caution, there may be other factors that they have been unable to account for that lead to both high soft drink consumption and aggression in young people, so it is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions from this study on its own.

“However, it does suggest that a trial of an intervention to reduce high soft drink consumption may be worth considering in high risk populations, and may lead to broader health benefits beyond reducing aggression.”

Prof Peter Kinderman, Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Liverpool, said:

“The causes of violence in young people are complicated and this work is presenting an overly simplistic interpretation of the role of ‘soft’ drinks. There are a large number of known risk factors that would contribute to violent behaviour that have nothing to do with the consumption of these drinks.

“We know, in many areas of human behaviour that correlation does not imply causation. We also know that poor diet is associated with a range of negative health and social outcomes. This study is unsurprising. But, more importantly, it fails to address “third-variable” issues that could explain the findings – kids exposed to different social, parental or educational backgrounds might therefore have different diets and different attitudes to aggression, without any direct causal link.

“As the authors themselves say: “…there may be other factors, unaccounted for in our analyses, that cause both high soft drink consumption and aggression…”. That’s true, and renders this study rather limited, I’m afraid (especially because that outcome could easily have been predicted). A laboratory study of the impact of such drinks on aggression and violent behaviour is very feasible and ultimately far more informative.”

‘The ‘Twinkie Defense’: the relationship between carbonated non-diet soft drinks and violence perpetration among Boston high school students’, by Sara Solnick and David Hemenway, published in Injury Prevention on Monday 24 October 2011.