Healthy diets lead to better grades-study

Tuesday, 1 April 2008

Students looking to ace their final exams had better watch what they eat, as new research has drawn a definite correlation between healthy diets and better grades.

University of Alberta Public Health Services professor Dr Paul Veugelers led a study involving 5200 fifth graders in Nova Scotia that proved academic performance was linked to dietary quality.

While the findings, which have been published in the April edition of the Journal of School Health, may seem like common sense, Veugelers pointed to the fact that very little research has been done in this particular area.

“The research that has been done was always focusing more on the malnutrition side [...] so the bulk of the literature that is out there comes from Africa and developing countries,” he said, noting that these findings didn’t address the issue of children who get enough calories through unhealthy food choices.

Using the internationally recognized Diet Quality Index, Veugelers and his colleagues summarized the healthiness of the children’s diets by looking at a number of criteria, including dietary moderation, balance of food groups, and the amount of vitamins consumed. Then, in conjunction with the Nova Scotia Department of Education, they looked at how the students performed on the standardized provincial literacy assessment.

In order to ensure that other external factors such as socio-economic standing, paternal education levels, and gender weren’t screwing the stats, Veugelers explained they accounted for all this “background noise” by coming up with multivariate odds ratios to describe the correlation between diet and academic performance.

What they found was that children who had the best diets were 30 per cent less likely to fail the standardized test than children with the worst diets, and when other contributing external factors were included, that number jumped to 41 per cent.

“If you do this study in a few localized schools, then it is really difficult to come to good conclusions, but this study is good in that we went province-wide,” Veugelers said, adding that the principle of manipulating your diet to manipulate your ability to learn works at any age.

“The important thing here—and I think that applies not only to elementary school students but also to university students—is that these findings basically justify that we invest not only in more hours of studying, but also invest in more time to eat healthy,” he continued.

Veugelers reiterated that while there are “a lot of things we already know,” there’s little scientific evidence to support this conventional wisdom. In fact, there are no studies looking at whether university students with healthier diets perform better than their junk-food-loving counterparts.

“But I think it’s reasonable to extrapolate that [correlation]. If you give me $1 million, I’ll investigate it for you,” he said.

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