A shocking new five-year study revealed that American children and adolescents who ate candy were 25% less likely to be overweight than those who completely removed candy from their diet.

Victor Fulgoni III, Senior Vice President of the Michigan-based Consulting Firm Nutrition Impact and one of the study’s co-authors, said: “You’d think that if you eat candy you must be taking in more calories and you must therefore be more overweight, but that’s not what we found”.

In the new study, Fulgoni and researchers at Lousiana State University analyzed the health data of 11,000 youngsters between 1999 and 2004, and broke them down into two groups.

The first group, consisted of children aged from 2 to 13, it was discovered that those who ate candy were 22% less tendencies to be overweight than those who did not eat sweets, while the second group, which had adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18, those who eat candy were less likely to be overweight by 26%.

Though the results of the research did not validate that candy may prevents weight-gain, there was no visible difference in the quality of diets of candy consumers and non-consumers, as they were generally poor.

Moreover, researchers expressed that they hope their ‘findings will encourage future research into the association between candy and weight measurements, including reasons for the relationship’.