According to new research published in Injury Prevention, teens who drink more than five cans of non-diet, fizzy soft drinks a week are more prone to aggressive, even violent behaviour.
Known as the "Twinkie Defense", US lawyers have in the past successfully argued that a teen accused of murder had "diminished capacity as a result of a junk food diet".
Although the precedent-setting case blaming a cream-filled snack cake seemed hokey at best, it may have merit.
The behaviour of almost 2,000 Boston, MA, 14- to 18-year-old teens between were studied according to how much carbonated non-diet soft drinks they had drunk in a given week.
Although less than 30 per cent fell into the high consumption (five or more cans per week) category, these teens were found to be more violent in their dealings with peers, siblings, etc, and were more likely to have carried a gun or knife over the past year.
"There may be a direct cause-and-effect-relationship, perhaps due to the sugar or caffeine content of soft drinks," claim the study's authors.
The face of Hallowe'en is a-changing. With food allergies and child obesity, the one-day junk food fest is losing its lustre with parents and health professionals.
First there was the anorexia costume, now other costumes are coming under attack.
The Ohio student group, Students Teaching About Racism in Society, has created a poster campaign called “We’re a culture, not a costume.”
The five posters feature costumes targeting ethnic stereotypes -- from a geisha to a "bomb-wielding Middle Eastern terrorist" and an African American pimp from the '70s -- bearing the slogan, “This is not who I am, and this is not okay.”
Are the costumes parodies of cultural and historical figures or are they deeply offensive to the ethnic groups they represent?
Is Halloween getting too politically correct and missing the point?
Apparently those babies switched at birth stories aren't just the stuff of urban myth.
Back in 1998, two twelve-year-old girls in eastern Russia, born within 15 minutes of each other, were accidentally swapped.
Though the girls were raised just a few miles of each other in the town of Kopeisk in the Ural Mountains, they are polar opposites -- one Muslim, the other Christian.
The switcheroo was only discovered after the ex-husband of Yuliya Belyaeva, one of the mothers, questioned his paternity because his daughter Irinia "looked nothing like him".
Imagine the surprise when DNA tests came back, revealing that neither parent was biologically linked to Irinia.
“Suddenly my whole world turned upside down,'' Ms. Belyaeva told the BBC. “And I kept thinking about my real daughter. Maybe she’d been abandoned. Put in an orphanage. Or perhaps she was begging on the streets.”
With help from local authorities, Ms. Belyaeva tracked down records from the labour ward where she gave birth. That's how she found Anya, her biological daughter.
Now both families are suing the Kopeisk Maternity Hospital for more than $300,000 (U.S.) in damages.
So much for nature trumping nurture. In this case, both girls are happy to stay put, though they are glad to know one another.
That's more than can be said for the parents, however, who worry about how, with such radically different backgrounds, the girls will influence each other.
“There is tension between the adults,” Ms. Belyaeva said. “Naimat doesn’t like some things that go on in our family, I don’t like some things in their home. Both of us are used to life as it has been. Not as it is now. Now it is a nightmare.”
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