Great. Just when I've totally got my kids (um, and me...) weaned off the sugary cereals, we get the news that they may have some redeeming qualities after all. It turns out that foods with a high glycemic-index (read: tons and tons of sugar) like sweetened cereals may help kids remember words better in the short term. Trix before spelling tests? I can totally see it now, teachers handing out bowls of Cocoa Puffs in order to boost standardized test scores. or is it only my mind that works that way?
But hold on here, don't abandon your organic Purely-Oh's just yet. The study only involved 38 subjects, all teenagers. They were fed either a high glycemic-index (GI) cereal or a high-fiber bran-based low-GI cereal, and then were tested on the names of various fruits, vegetables and spices. The kids who ate the high-GI cereal remembered more than 5% more words. Ooh, scientific, eh? If I ate bran cereal I might not be interested in spouting off names of food either.
