Drop Sugar, Get Smarter (And Better Behaved)
For all you parents looking to give your child an edge, check this out: Principal Says Banning Sugar Made Students Smarter.
For the past ten years, the now-trim principal has required students at Browns Mill Elementary in Lithonia to participate in daily physical exercise and eat healthy foods. Her school enforces a strict ban on sugar.
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According to Butler, standardized test scores increased 15 percent at the school within the first year of the program. She said discipline problems decreased by 23 percent. Student health has improved and obesity at the school has been virtually eliminated.
It makes sense to me. We all know how hard it is to concentrate after a hefty dose of sugar and the resultant blood sugar crash. Kids become restless and hyperactive, followed soon after by an inability to concentrate.
“For me, it was not just about educating children about reading, writing and arithmetic,” Butler said. “If these people were going to be successful, I had to ensure that they were going to be healthy.
Unfortunately, most schools seem to focus solely on standardized test scores.
About Scott
Scott Kustes loves to cook and loves to eat. He started Real Food University to help you get maximum enjoyment out of the meals that you eat. To find out more about how he has rebelled against the fast food culture and counting calories or carbs, join the Real Food Revolution.
18 Reader Comments
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These findings about sugar are really important, not just for kids, but for adults too. One comment on how you “tagged” your article. ADD is an outdated diagnosis, though people are still really confused about this. ADHD has different subtypes now, and just because the word “hyper-active” is in the terminology for ADHD, doesn’t mean that if your child receives this diagnosis is indeed hyper-active. One of the subtypes of ADHD is ADHD-I, the “I” standing for inattentive.
If this site wants to be authoritative and stay in competition with other sites, it must get their tags in proper diagnostic terminology.
How am I an authority on this subject of diagnostic labels? I have taken over 10 psychology classes at my university, and I’m a Behavioral Science, Double Major in Psychology.
Please fix your tags. It makes me question the validity of the rest of the content on this site.
Megan, thanks for your feedback. Adding new classifications to disorders doesn’t change the underlying factors. The general public knows what ADD and ADHD are and as such, I have to tag posts accordingly. If you’d like to question the validity of anything on my site, I encourage you to actually read it. There’s far more of importance here than whether I classify a post as “ADHD” or “ADHD-I”. In fact, classifications tend to just allow yet more medication whereas my goal is to help people avoid medications in the first place.
Cheers
Scott
I remember an episode of Jamie Oliver’s show a few years back where he went into a family and changed what they ate for a week or so. The transformation in the behavior of the kids was astounding. I can’t figure out why people can’t see the correlation between what they put in their mouth with their mental, physical and emotional state.
Cheers,
Adam
Wow, ten psychology courses!!
I can definitely see why you would be an authority after such rigorous study of an uncontentious subject matter.
Geesh
“Unfortunately, most schools seem to focus solely on standardized test scores.”
And fat content.
My only issue with this is I don’t like the schools (or the government) getting into the business of setting nutrition policy for kids. That isn’t their role and it’s a slippery slope into a nanny state. In this case, they probably go it right by picking on sugar, but that isn’t always the case. It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine next they will dictate how much fat or what type (and get it wrong), or determine that there needs to be a minimum of whole grains.
For instance, I put a lot of thought into what I pack each day in my son’s lunch, and you better believe his lunch doesn’t match the nutrition guidelines at his school – it’s much higher in fat, completely lacking in whole grains (or any grains for that matter), and sometimes doesn’t even contain fruit – horrors. But his food is always nutritionally dense, has the protein and energy he needs, and is prepared at home from real food.
Wow. What a novel idea. This would have never happened at my school. I’m sure they made far too much money from soft drink vending machines and selling chocolate muffins at the canteen to consider banning sugar.
As Dr. Eades pointed out on his blog, the federal government sets the nutrition guidelines with the food pyramid, and federal funding for food (that feeds millions of people) follows accordingly. For all we know, this principal would have preferred to be much more radical in changing the school’s dietary guidelines, but such change may have negatively affected virtually all of the tax-based funding the school received. I can imagine there would be plenty of parents who would have been in an uproar too. (The article claims that “skeptics” initially resisted the change due to budget constraints… talk about false economy!).
I’m surprised the principal was not only able to get this change made, but to get it to stick for TEN years. It takes a lot of courage to buck the system, especially the school system. Kudos to Principal Butler.
Scott – I have a master’s degree in counseling and I don’t believe your use of ADHD terminology invalidates the useful content you have posted. I’ll be e-mailing a link to this article to some friends who I think will find it useful.
There have also been other instances of schools for troubled teens implementing sugar free food for their students. The turnaround has been shown to be amazing… discipline problem are less than in standard schools with “good kids” and test scores are higher.
The SoG
The ironic thing is that people are told to eat a candy bar to be smarter, before a test for example..
By the way, I went to an exam yesterday.
It was my day of fasting. So I went in a fasted state.
Perfect concentration.
Yavor
I wonder if the results are truly from the absence of sugar itself…
Or from the absence of artificial flavors and colors that are usually in food with sugar in it. (More detrimental in my experienced…)
Either way, I’m glad to see that schools are taking measures to help the kids feel better and learn better.
I saw this story in the fall, too, I believe when schools were just coming into session for the year. I’ve noticed in my own experience children acting so much better when their junk and refined sugars are limited. I wish more schools would adopt this approach.
It’s kinda funny to see people talking about the nanny state telling our kids what to eat, but y’all have no problem whatsoever using the nanny state to babysit your kids for you all day, even though they’re perfectly capable of learning without it.
If you expect a school to watch your kids all day then it follows you probably don’t want them encouraging unhealthy things for your child. As long as you and the school agree on what constitutes healthy and unhealthy, the school backing you up insofar as what values you impart to your children is tremendously important. Children look to adults to show them how to live properly for their culture and it doesn’t matter which adults, they still need to show a united front.
Meanwhile, my daughter not only acts out worse after sugar, but also after wheat consumption. Sugar is sugar is sugar, and the non-fibrous parts of wheat do turn into sugar sooner or later…
Dana,
Touché! I do have a lot of ambivalence about the “nanny state education” my son gets at the local public school and often think about alternatives for him (we had a great year at a charter school last year, but the school board closed it down so we went back to our neighborhood school). But you’re absolutely right, there is an element of “babysitting” that we grudgingly accept instead of educating our son ourselves – and the irony isn’t lost on me.
A great book to read about homeschooling is “The Teenage Liberation Handbook” by Grace Llewellyn. The book’s intended audience is teenagers who are dissatisfied with school, but it’s a good read for anyone interested in the topic of homeschooling (or unschooling, as she calls it).
It’s a bit dated (published around 10 years ago?) but still has all the classic solid reasons for taking kids out of public schools. The main reason is, that schools are geared more for behavior control than teaching. Lots of other reasons too … that’s the one that sticks in my head.
She also argues persuasively against popular reasons for keeping kids in public schools, like the need for socialization or a common cultural experience. Of course, we can add that the food in most public schools is awful, too.
[...] Drop Sugar, Get Smarter. [...]
I’ve never heard of a comprehensive study on the effects of sugar on children, so this is a very cool article. Nowadays we get alot of conflicting information regarding things, and it seems no one has any clue or any conclusive thing to say on subjects like this.
I remember my mom used to say “sugar will make you bounce off the walls” and that was the conventional wisdom. Then everybody said it was’nt sugar it was “parenting” or “bad kids causing problems”, now its back on sugar. Heh
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Great blog btw.
I remember in my high school we had a miniature Taco Bell right in the cafeteria. Not that the school lunch was a healthy alternative; it usually consisted of some form or another of potato fried in shortening, and MSG-laden meat.
Oh, and if you wanted a snack from the school store, there was a plethora of candies and chips with plenty of kinds of soda to wash it down.
And the best part? In “health” class, they simply showed us a picture of the food pyramid. That was our only lesson in nutrition.
I think monitoring and placing restrictions on what students eat should become the norm. Many public schools have banned the wearing of hats, so why not ban the consumption of refined sugar? Remember, these are kids we’re talking about. If it were up to them to feed themselves, they’d eat funyuns and skittles all day because they don’t know any better. They only know what we teach them, so let’s teach them correctly.
This is a really great example and one which a lot of schools should enforce. Putting aside all the politics behind the issue of regulating what your kids shouldn’t eat in school, the principal made use of good judgment when he decided to ban sugar. I am sure that if he was to ban something more specific like a minimum amount of whole grains etc. that he would have gotten some negative attention from the parents and school district for meddling with students’ diet too much.
Kudos to the principal and to you for sharing this story.
Thanks for a great post!