According to the latest study published in The Europeal Journal of Public Health , the answer is yes. According to the results, children who as babies received their meals according to a schedule have lower IQs than those who were fed when they were hungry.
The work, carried out by researchers from the Institute for Social and Economic Research (United Kingdom), used the results of IQ tests and other school achievement tests carried out on more than 10,000 children between the ages of 5 and 14.
The best academic performances were obtained by children who when they were babies had been fed as requested. Although this is the first study to analyze the long-term consequences of these two types of feeding in babies, the authors recommend taking the results with caution.
"The differences could be due, not to the fact of having fed according to a fixed schedule, but to the type of mother who tried to adjust to it", explains María Iacovou, main author of the study. In general, mothers who followed a fixed schedule were younger and among them there was a higher percentage of single women and women with a low level of education who did not read to their children when they were young. "It is clear that these social characteristics increase the chances that a child will perform worse in school," concludes the researcher.
