Fast food boosts obesity and lowers academic grades

Daily consumption of fast food not only causes obesity but hurts children's academic performance, a new study published by SAGE Journal says.

Students who attempt to consume fast food even just once everyday exhibit very slow progress in math, reading, and science skills, as compared to others who keep away from fast food, according to thinkprogress.com.

The experiment, conducted by Ohio State University (OSU), collected information from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, which surveyed about 12,000 students between the fifth and eighth grades. It quizzed them about their eating habits to check the link with academic progress in the last three years.

Less than 30 percent of the students clarified that they had not eaten fast food that week. About 50 percent ate it about one to three times a week, while ten percent consumed it four to six times. Only the remaining 10 percent ate fast food every day, according to sciencetimes.com.

Unfortunately, those who ate higher levels of fast food showed lower growth in all the three academic subjects, according to Kelly M. Purtell, the lead researcher. While fast food is popular and pervasive among everybody, it is important to check and explore how families can be persuaded to stay away from it.

In 2013, a report released by Action for Healthy Kids, which is a public-private partnership of more than 50 organizations that are exploring children's health, showed that children who started with a healthy morning meal and then went on a round of rigorous physical could improve their cognitive skills and academic approach.

Eating these meals at times doesn't do too much damage, but regularly eating high-salt, high-sugar meals can lead to loss of memory and slow cognitive development. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains that such foods have the nutrients that can lead to growth, such as calcium, iron, Vitamin C, and zinc. The list is crucial for children who are shooting up into adulthood.

The new Democratic law supports the nutrition guidelines for the National School Lunch Program, which advocates the dietary nutrition that children need in order to excel. Surveys showed that 90 percent of the lunch brought from home was mostly comprised of chips and sweets that were non-dairy. None of those should be given in schools, according to the new laws.

Parents seem to be switching to fast food in order to save time and money. The fast food industry exploits the constraints of people and takes advantage of their problems. A $700 million per year marketing drive is advertising in order to lure lower income families.

The industry's efforts are rewarded when they capture the interest of almost one out of three American children between two to 14 years, and half the teenagers consuming fast food everyday.