Feeling guilty about the amount of candy you allow your children to eat? Not anymore. If anything, you aren’t feeding them enough!
Or, at least that’s what the research seems to suggest ….
Indulging a sweet tooth might not be anyone’s idea of a good weight-loss strategy. But in jaw-dropping new research, scientists say they’ve found something even more likely to be associated with unwanted weight gain in children and adolescents than eating candy:
Not eating candy.
For the study, published in Food & Nutrition Research, researchers at Louisiana State University tracked the health of more than 11,000 youngsters between the ages of two and 18 from 1999 to 2004. They found that children who ate sweets were 22 percent less likely to be overweight or obese than kids who shunned sweets. Adolescents? Those who ate candy were 26 percent less likely to be overweight or obese than their non-candy-eating counterparts.
And that wasn’t the only surprising finding. Researchers also found that the blood of candy-eating kids had lower levels of C-reactive protein. That’s a marker of inflammation in the body and a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and other chronic illnesses.
Who funds this research? Could somebody please do a study that links the watching of televised sport to greater physical health? I could do with some scientific evidence to persuade my wife that I’m not wasting my time
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