Evidence suggests that what we eat as children determines what we eat as adults. Anecdotally, this is probably well known, but scientific evidence supports this contention. For example, researchers investigated the feeding habits of infants over a number of years from aged 2 to aged 8 years1. In particular, the researchers were interested in recording the information surrounding the limitations the mother’s placed on access to sweets and junk food and the abstention of favourite foods that may not have been considered healthy. Analysis of the data showed that as the children aged, the consumption of sugar sweetened soft drinks was associated with the access the child had to sweet and junk foods as they were growing up. The likelihood of consuming a sugar sweetened soft drink at least once per day was decreased significantly in those children whose mothers had attempted to limit their intake of sugar sweetened or junk foods or had limited the child’s favourite food.
These results suggest that the feeding behaviour exhibited in childhood reflects a similar feeding pattern in adulthood. Generally, those children who consume low quality diets when young, go on to consume low quality diets as adolescents and adults. Other research has shown that consuming low quality foods as a child, or being fed formula milk instead of breast milk as an infant, has a significant effect on the health status of the individual as an adult. The researchers of this study also noted that the children commonly consumed sugar sweetened soft drinks, which supports the previously published literature showing a growing trend towards the acceptance of these drinks as a normal part of the daily diet, in increasingly larger quantities. The link between sugar sweetened soft drinks and obesity is now well established with a number of lines of evidence, and therefore diet quality as a whole is suffering because of the inclusion of too much liquid sugar. This also explains the increasing rates of diabetes, both type 1 and type 2.
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