Patrick Holford Flip-Flops on Sugary Drinks? (FFTB Survey Review Part 7)

Professor Patrick Holford of Teesside University and Head of Science and Education at Biocare has nothing but harsh words for sugared drinks in the Food for the Brain Child Survey 2007 (pdf) and elsewhere. However, he has just issued an endorsement for Rocks Organic Red Five Squash.^[1]

We should all obtain 3,500 ORAC units a day and Rocks Organic Red Five Super Fruit Squash contains some of the highest ORAC scoring fruits – including raspberries, red grapes and cherries. So drinking Rocks Organic Red Five Super Fruit Squash will help keep ORAC scores up.

What a difference a few months makes, eh? Why, only last Summer, you might have been an anxious parent, guiltily recounting all the wayward secrets of your children and their eating habits to Food for the Brain (FFTB) so that they could turn it into a Kiss and Tell denunciation of the diet of british children. You might have trembled with shame as you confessed just how many times a week the scions of your clan, the fruit of your loins indulged in the dreaded sugared fruit drinks.

You might have read the report and curled up in a foetal ball of nameless dread when you discovered that:

High consumers of sugared drinks are twice as likely to be badly behaved compared with non consumers. [pg. 24]

There will have been little left to shore up your belief that you are a decent parent when you read the Section 4.4 recommendations for an ideal diet and learned that sugared drinks are listed among the items to be deprecated and, if humanly possible, shunned.

These foods have negative associations with behaviour, overall health, academic performance/SAT Scores even at very low levels of consumption.

You possibly burned with shame but felt a little better when you turned to Section 10.1 (pg. 33) and found no explicit indication that consuming sugared drinks counted as a negative food and worsened the rating of your child’s diet. If you were like us, you were probably just confused rather than comforted by this. We have no idea whether children lost points for including sugared drinks in the diet. It is possible that this section just describes the data relating to SAT scores. Despite the fire and brimstone denunciation of the evils of sugared drinks, this survey reports that there was no statistical significance for any impact of sugared drinks on SAT scores. However, you typically wish that reports are presented clearly enough that you are not left guessing about such important matters.

If somebody out there has more patience or even inside knowledge than we do, we would very much like to know if the diet categorisations (from Very Poor to Very Good) subtracted points for the consumption of sugared drinks.

You may share our bafflement that although colas are incorporated in the ‘tea, coffee cola’ question in the questionnaire, the results for sugared drinks in 9.4 (pg. 24) lump together “colas, “sports” drinks, sugared fruit “drinks”". Without any indication of the numbers of children in each consumption category, it is difficult to tell just how very small might be the number of children who consume several of these drinks a day. It is difficult to know what to make of the report that 8% of the children represented by the green line and 36% of those represented by the red line have sugared drinks most days. (We will expound upon our lack of understanding of what the red and green lines indicate in a later post but ignore their dramatic direction and gradients.^[2] For now, look at the larger image and notice that the numbers given don’t add up to 100%, so the numbers probably don’t indicate what you think that they do from your experience of similar graphs.)

Just for the craic, it is worth noting that 48% of children on the average day (so to speak) do not report consuming any sugary drinks and 66% report that they do not consume any tea, coffee or cola.

So, on balance, does the ORAC score from a certain sugared drink outweigh the high sugar content? Would they cancel each other out in dietary virtues v. blemishes? Is there any way in which this is a consistent message? There were certainly no footnotes etc. that expressed such nuance in the FFTB Child Survey. Is there going to be an announcement to clarify this for concerned parents? Based on Holford Watch‘s previous experience of asking for clarifications and failing to obtain a response, we are not optimistic that any such clarification will be forthcoming.

Notes

[1] Rock Organics has not yet released the contents label of Red Five Squash but other products in that range have from 20-40% added organic sugar; Holford Watch may be picky, but the fact that it is organic does not negate the fact that it is still sugar.
[2] The red and green lines have dramatic and impressive gradients and directions but the careful reader should note that not only do the red and green indicate different groups but the vertical axis for each of these is on a different scale, so the gradient is more than a little contrived. The scale for the green line is on the left vertical axis and that for the red on the right. In this example, but not all examples, the green scale runs from 5-30% and the red scale runs from 10-50%.

Further Reading

Food for the Brain Child Survey 2007: The Promotion
Holford Watch looks at the literature review:
Food for the Brain Child Survey 2007: Review Part 1
Food for the Brain Child Survey 2007: Review Part 2
Food for the Brain Child Survey 2007: Review Part 3
Food for the Brain Child Survey 2007: Review Part 4
Food for the Brain Child Survey 2007: Review Part 5

Holford Watch appeals for help to Professor Holford and two members of the Scientific Advisory Board who approved this report and then looks at the data and analyses:
Food for the Brain Child Survey 2007: Review Part 7
Food for the Brain Child Survey 2007: Review Part 8
Why Don’t Food for the Brain Report Their Survey Results on Supplement Pills Survey: Review Part 9
Food for the Brain Child Survey 2007: Review Part 10