I’ll file this under “Not surprising, but interesting.” A study in the Journal of School Health shows an association between poor diet and poor academic performance.
Remember, an association doesn’t mean cause and effect. The abstract weasel-words slightly:
Although the effects of nutrition on health and school performance are often cited, few research studies have examined the effect of diet quality on the academic performance of children. This study examines the association between overall diet quality and academic performance.
They aren’t examining the effect, but the association, because they are not manipulating any variables.
Apart from that, it appears to be a well-designed study, with a large and fairly homogeneous population (5517 students, representing 51% of the Grade 5 enrollment at 96.9% of the schools in Nova Scotia which had Grade 5 classes, although for various reasons a number were subsequently excluded and the final number of participants was 4589). The Diet Quality Index – International (DQI-I), an internationally accepted composite measure of diet quality, was used and the academic assessment was a standard literacy test in the Canadian education system. The results were adjusted for differences in performance attributable to gender, parental income and education, and school, and still showed significant differences associated with dietary quality. The DQI-I results were broken into tertiles (that is, the total number of participants was ordered based on their score and then broken into three equal groups, a high, a medium and a low group), and the researchers found that the medium group was 18% less likely to fail the literacy test than the low group, while the high group was 30% less likely (after the adjustments already mentioned were taken into account).
It’s another reminder that good nutrition, like exercise, is associated with mental as well as physical benefits.
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