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It took Jamie Oliver’s stunning TV series on the state of school dinners to bring some of these issues to public attention and make the UK Government finally admit that there is a problem.
A poor diet leads to poor health.
The real trouble is that cheap, low-quality foods and drinks bring big profits to those who get away with selling them. (All the better if the contract is with a Government agency and lasts for years, as some school dinner contracts do.)
Reading through this chapter, have a think about whether there might be a connection between diet and why your child misbehaves, gets moody, is often tired, or has problems learning. If you saw Jamie’s School Dinners, you may remember that many people interviewed spoke about the dramatic changes in some children’s behaviour after ‘dumping the junk’ and feeding them with real, freshly cooked food. When the media followed up on this, they naturally wanted to track down the ‘scientific evidence’ for this remarkable phenomenon, and speak to the scientists involved in such research. So on one particularly memorable morning, I got four different phone calls on my mobile as I dashed between meetings in Oxford, London and Cambridge (via Luton airport to pick up a colleague!). When even the Financial Times joined in I realized that the ‘food and behaviour’ issue really had hit home. This was the aspect they all seemed to be interested in—and no surprises there, really. The only trouble was there clearly weren’t enough scientists to go around, so I found myself deluged for some time.
Where’s the Good Evidence?
The reason so many enquiries came to me is that when it comes to the kind of research that really can provide firm evidence of cause and effect,
there are actually remarkably few studies of how food and diet may affect children’s behaviour and learning. Fewer still are by researchers in the UK. My own investigations of this kind have mainly involved omega-3 fatty acids (found in fish oils)—belatedly recognized as essential ‘brain food’ as well as beneficial for your heart, joints and immune system. In our latest study, children given omega-3 showed faster reading and spelling progress, better attention and memory, and less disruptive behaviour than a matched comparison group over a three-month period. We still need more evidence, but I can understand why parents, teachers and the media are interested. You’ll hear more about these special fats—and our research findings—in Chapters 8 and 9.
Healthy Strawberry Yoghurt, Anyone?
Check your labels:
‘strawberry yoghurt’: contains some real strawberry
‘strawberry-flavoured yoghurt’: there’s a tiny bit of strawberry, somewhere
‘strawberry-flavour yoghurt’: no strawberries at all
The cheaper ones are usually the last of these three, and some of their ingredients can be dubious: gelatine, pectin/gum, flavourings, colourings, and corn sugar.
Low-fat ‘healthy’ yoghurts usually contain even more thickeners (corn starch this time) along with plenty of sugar or artificial sweeteners.
Other scientific studies have looked at other aspects of diet. For example, many well-controlled trials have looked into whether artificial food additives might aggravate hyperactivity and related behaviour problems. Many of these were carried out years ago, but variability in their designs and results made it hard to know what to believe. More recently, two important studies have confirmed that some common food additives with no nutritional value really do seem to worsen behaviour in many children. Might your child be one of them? How much more evidence will we need before we take action? When you read about these issues in Chapter 6, you can decide for yourself (and your children) what you want to do.
‘Cheap Trick’ Frozen Chicken Nuggets*
Ingredients
Chicken carcasses
Chicken skin
‘Mechanically recovered’ bits of bird
Artificial additives (colourings, flavourings, preservatives, texture-modifying agents)
Hydrogenated (bad) fats
Procedure
Scrape the skin and other bits off the machinery or factory floor.
Add to chicken carcass and put in high-speed blender.
Add the bad fats, texture-modifiers and other additives.
Form into nugget shapes and cover with ‘bread crumbs’ (more additives).
Freeze and package attractively.
Sell to parents to feed to their children.
Sell to schools and restaurants en masse for the same purpose.
*with due credit to J. Oliver and Co for showing that consumers do often change their preferences when you tell them what they’re really eating.
It’s not just what has been added to our food that matters—it’s also what’s been taken away. In Chapter 4 we’ll look at essential nutrients. As you’ll see, there are lots of these—but many are seriously lacking from the diets of children, adolescents and adults in the UK. How would you know? Well, deficiencies in some nutrients lead to well-documented physical symptoms, but these are not always recognized as such—and may be treated with medications that can make matters worse. What about mental symptoms? Can a poor diet alone really cause bad behaviour? Later, you’ll hear more about a rigorous study of young offenders carried out in a high-security prison.
In this study, giving just the recommended daily amounts of vitamins and minerals (with some essential fatty acids) with no other changes actually reduced the number of violent offences by more than 35 per cent. Can you imagine that effect translated into the wider community? What might be achieved in your child’s school, or your neighbourhood, if aggression and antisocial behaviour fell by that amount? Given the potential implications, wouldn’t you think the Government would be keen to follow up on these kinds of findings? In the UK, sadly the answer is ‘No, not yet.’ The funding for this particular research (including replication studies now underway) has been provided almost entirely by charities.
Healthy Apples?
Supermarkets force producers to grow larger apples (so people end up buying more) which means the apples’ vitamin and mineral content declines.
Want Fries with That?
McDonald’s got into trouble for selling their fries as fit for vegetarian consumption when their reformed spuds had been cooked in beef tallow.
So they switched to vegetable oil (which incidentally produces bad trans fats when heated). Now the distinctive taste of the fries comes from an infusion of synthetic beef tallow.
In fact, many of the flavourings now used in our foods are synthetic chemicals: you can’t smell or taste the difference, but there is no nutritional value in them.
Slowly But Surely…
Even if policymakers are lagging behind, it seems that consumers are beginning to turn. Sales of bagged snacks, sugar confectionery, fizzy soft drinks, frozen meals and pizzas have apparently declined over the last year, while sales of fruit juices, cheeses, bread and drinking yoghurt have increased. McDonald’s has had to close at least 25 of its UK branches (even though it began to introduce supposedly ‘healthier’ ranges—but let’s not go there!). The media tell us that confectionery and soft drinks companies such as Cadbury-Schweppes may be planning to put health messages on their packaging (is this to provide them with some defence if they find themselves sued like the tobacco companies?). The makers of sausage rolls and pasties are apparently seeing a large drop in profits. And I know I’m not the only one pleased to see that one of the big supermarkets has finally taken a certain brightly coloured, additive-laden drink pretending to look like orange juice off its shelves. ‘Surly Despair’ would be a better name for this one, given the amount of sugar and artificial additives it contains. If I had a pound for every time a parent, professional or support group leader has complained to me about the way that this (and similar drinks) can ‘send our children up the wall’, we could probably fund our whole next year’s research programme on the proceeds. As it is, these kinds of companies have been raking in the money and yet few people have seen the need to finance research to see what these and other ‘junk foods’ might really be doing to our children’s brains.
Not All Sweetness and Light
A survey for Food Magazine in 2004 revealed that a single drink of Ribena or Lucozade could give your child more than a whole day’s recommended sugar intake.
500ml bottle Ribena: 70g sugar (equivalent to at least 15 teaspoons)
380ml bottle Lucozade Energy: 64g sugar
330ml bottle Coca-Cola: 25g sugar
That means a bottle of the soft stuff can give your child the same ‘sugar hit’ as one to four packets of sweets. In some cases, the sweetener may be in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (which is cheaper to produce than sugar).
‘No added sugar’ varieties just put in artificial sweeteners instead, which some good evidence shows may carry different kinds of risks.
Regular consumption of fizzy, sweet drinks can lead to a decline in body levels of important minerals
In the news, we hear that 40 per cent of patients in our hospitals are suffering from malnutrition—which can add serious complications to their treatment and care, and significantly slow their recovery.
In most cases it probably contributed to their illness too—but at least the links between nutrition and physical health are starting to be acknowledged by our health services. (They have long been recognized by top performers in physical sports!) What we need now is a similar acceptance that food and diet also affect mental health and performance. It really should be ‘barn door’ obvious. The brain is part of the body—and has nutrient and energy requirements of its own. But remarkably little systematic effort has so far been devoted to finding out what those requirements really are—and just how our mood, behaviour and learning really can be affected when these needs are not properly met.
Still, it’s encouraging to see that consumers are beginning to wise up to some of what’s been going on, and to change their shopping and eating habits as a result. For the sake of your children, I do hope you are one of them—and I hope this book will give you some of the help you’ll need.
There Is a Good End in Sight
Before we go any further, let’s just consider what’s possible, and what isn’t. Right now, your child’s mood, behaviour and learning (or all three) are probably giving you cause for concern, or you wouldn’t be reading this book. I can guess that what you’d really like to find here are some simple, rapid and effective solutions to your child’s difficulties. Well, I obviously can’t promise that this book will solve all your particular problems. But if you choose to act on the information I’ll be giving you, the rewards could actually be greater than you might think possible. If you’re sceptical—I don’t blame you. But by feeding your child well, you can at least be confident that you’ll be taking some fundamental and necessary steps towards unlocking your child’s true potential.
What’s more, I hope you’ll also apply what you learn here to your own diet. (If you want to improve your child’s eating habits, then ‘Do as I do’ is much more effective than ‘Do as I say!’). If you do, expect benefits not only for your child, but also for yourself and any other members of your family who are willing to join in. Better health is one thing that should definitely follow from this plan—and for that reason alone you’re unlikely to regret it if you choose to take the advice I’ll be giving you. If you understand why you need to improve the dietary choices that you and your child have been making, then learning how to do it is so much easier—although I’ll be helping you with that as well.
Food and diet really are key to making the most of your child’s potential, both mentally and physically. We are what we eat, and our children are what we feed them.
I can give you the information, but putting it into practice is clearly up to you, and I’m not going to promise that this will be easy. Quite a lot of people will probably tell you that you are wasting your time. Some of them may do more than that to try to undermine your efforts. Remember that such an attitude is their problem, not yours. In Chapter 10 you’ll find plenty of tips on how to get in the right frame of mind to move ahead without making it difficult for yourself.
You’ll probably find yourself changing a good deal more than your child’s diet if you choose to follow the plan completely. Whether you’ll want to do this or not is again for you to decide, but presumably what you’ve been doing so far hasn’t been working too well, or you wouldn’t still be looking for new solutions. So isn’t it worth trying something else? Something that is completely natural, involves no drugs and no special equipment, and costs you very little? You’ve already taken an important step by picking up this book.
Hopes and Promises
One other thing I want to make very clear at the outset is that this book is not about ‘miracle cures’. We are all prone to believing all kinds of things that turn out not to be true, simply because they fit in with what we want to believe. It’s called ‘the triumph of hope over experience’ and we are all prone to it. Our society tends to emphasize the ‘quick fix’, and the wonders of modern technology have led to a situation in which we’re surrounded by all kinds of goods and services—from electronic gadgetry to air and space travel—that seem to ‘work like magic’.
Amazing brain-imaging techniques can show you how your brain lights up when you solve a problem; global satellite navigation systems can talk you through the narrowest side-streets in a foreign country; guided missiles are said to need no human intervention to find their target; wonder drugs will apparently rescue men’s failing sex lives and turn them into super-studs overnight. Yes, really. Advertising has become so clever and so insidious that we are all prone to falling for promises of things that either couldn’t possibly be delivered—or which come at a cost (often a hidden one) that none of us can actually afford.
Against this background, we are all too easily fooled into parting with good money for some miracle treatment that will reverse ageing, cure baldness, allow us to eat all that we like and still lose weight, and more. If you’ve already fallen victim to promises like these, you are certainly not alone. But perhaps it’s time to try a different approach. The plan set out in Chapter 11 really needn’t cost you much money, and in fact may turn out to save you a great deal.
Good nutrition (and the avoidance of toxins as far as possible) can of course only provide your child with the basic foundations for better mood, behaviour and learning. Many other factors are important, including general health, physical activity and sleep, as well as a wide range of social, educational and cultural factors. Could parenting skills or the family situation be in need of a rethink? What educational input is your child really getting—and from whom? Does your child seem to be more influenced by his friends, or by what’s on TV, than by anything you or his teachers say or do? Children are exposed to all kinds of influences in our modern age—many of them quite pernicious
—so your child will need all the help you can give him or her. Only minimal guidance on these issues can be provided here, but plenty of good books have been written on these subjects. You’ll find some of these in the References and Resources chapter, which also includes helpful sources of information.
‘Miracle cures’ are certainly not common, but when the dramatic changes that can attract this label do happen, they usually reflect something very important—and often very simple—that has hitherto been overlooked. The story of Patrick, an eight-year-old boy whose moody and defiant behaviour had his loving parents at their wits’ end, is a good case in point.
A highly intelligent and sensitive child, Patrick suffered unpredictable mood swings and temper-tantrums. He was underachieving at school, found it hard to make or keep friends and knew how to manipulate his parents and siblings. Most of all, he was clearly unhappy. Talking about the situation with him just seemed to make things worse.
Patrick also looked unhealthy and tired when I saw him, but, with his mother’s help, we gathered some basic information and drew up a plan that he was willing to try. It quickly turned out that he was very intolerant to cows’ milk and anything made from it. Once milk products were removed from his diet, Patrick’s ‘moody’ spells simply vanished.
His mother Sarah wrote to me: ‘Patrick is a transformed child following your diet. His aunts and uncles just couldn’t believe the change in him after such a short time. They want to know how I did it. I can hardly believe it myself, but I will never be able to thank you enough. Keep up the good work.’
The media are very fond of ‘miracle stories’, of course—and one superb example of how to influence public opinion with no more than anecdotes came from the BBC TV series Children of Our Time. Children born in the millennium year are monitored at intervals for the purposes of this popular TV series. Early in 2004, one episode focused on just two of these children, who had been showing serious behavioural problems. ‘Miraculous’ improvements were reported after their diets were supplemented with fish oils. It certainly made great TV—and the Internet bulletin boards were buzzing for some time afterwards. Sales of all fish oils (many of dubious quality and content, and some quite unsuitable for these purposes) went through the roof, and I found myself on the receiving end of yet another deluge of enquiries from the media, public and professionals, as the only UK scientist who’d actually done controlled trials in this area. As the more responsible journalists pointed out (and as I tried to emphasize), there were many other possible explanations for the improvements shown by these two particular children.
Whenever possible, try not to base any important decisions you make on purely anecdotal evidence. If we want to be able to predict anything with reasonable certainty, we need to adopt ‘scientific methods’.
To be confident that any treatment really does ‘cause’ positive changes, we ideally need what are called ‘randomized controlled trials’ (RCTs), as explained in the Appendix, page 375. These are very difficult to carry out, however, and are in some cases just not feasible. In these cases, other evaluation methods have to be used. Even then, the best we can do is to assess probability. Your child may be different from the ones studied. In short, there are no miracles and no guarantees, I’m afraid.
Having said this, ‘scientific’ is the word to describe many of the case studies carefully carried out by parents and practitioners I’ve met. Often, these people have observed and experimented with dietary changes for years, and many of them have done so despite the scorn of the so-called ‘scientific establishment’. Although some of them may be misguided or plain wrong in what they have come to believe, it is my view that we would do well to pay more attention to some of their ideas, as I’ve always tried to do. In many cases it’s their insight and observations that have led to some extraordinary breakthroughs, opening up new and highly fruitful lines of scientific investigation.
Whom and What Can You Believe?
Most of the parents I see have already consulted many other specialists and experts in their search for some effective solutions to their child’s apparent difficulties in mood, behaviour or learning. Some of the advice they’ve received has been helpful; some of it has been anything but. Many have also read numerous ‘self-help’ books and articles from magazines or newspapers, and these days a good proportion will also have spent hours and hours on the Internet trying to find out how to help their children. The feedback I usually get is that when it comes to food and diet, the amount of conflicting information leaves most people totally confused. People ask, ‘What am I supposed to believe when so many people are telling me such different things?’
Well, to start with, just ask yourself, ‘Who really benefits if I believe this?’ Apart from weighing up carefully the potential risks and costs of any course of action, the best advice I can give you is: always consider who will actually gain from your believing any information you are given. Sadly, I’ve come across a great many unscrupulous companies and individuals who are happily making money for themselves by exploiting parents’ desperation.
Rule number one: don’t be too gullible. Always think first about whether anything you are recommended could actually do your child harm, but also be particularly wary when it comes to parting with your money.
Companies’ Influence Isn’t Always Obvious
You can of course get plenty of information and advice about food and diet for free. Quite enough to drown in! In these cases you want to ask, ‘Do the people giving me this information really know any better than I do?’ Let’s start with the newspapers and magazines. Some are more reliable than others, but sadly, very few allow their journalists time to research a story properly.
Deadlines are the name of the game. Press releases, for instance, are often picked up and turned into articles without anyone checking the sources or their credentials. Basically, the fact that you ‘read it in the papers’ or ‘saw it on TV’ is no guarantee that it isn’t just a cleverly disguised advertisement. I’m sorry to say that much, if not most, of what passes for ‘news’ on food and health in the media is likely to have come from some company that stands to make money if you’ll only believe what they’re telling you. Remember, virtually all papers and magazines and most TV channels are supported by advertising revenues, either directly or indirectly.
It’s well over 10 years now since my own research first started making headline news, and if it hadn’t been for my own personal experience of the media I really wouldn’t have believed the extent to which what you see or hear through these channels is influenced by companies who will benefit when you believe their stories. The food and drinks industry is a massively powerful force to be reckoned with. Quite apart from the direct advertising that they do—which is powerful enough—they exert a huge degree of less visible control over the information you are given and the choices available to you. The name of the game for big companies is sending out press releases, holding press conferences, wining and dining journalists and hiring the experts they need to back the stories that will benefit them.
‘I was looking at websites which talked about the effects of sugar substitutes, as I’d heard that some of them are bad for you. One site in particular did a very good job of listing everything wrong with artificial sweeteners…but it was only later that I found out that this site was hosted by a sugar company! Now I know why they said nothing at all about avoiding sugar itself.’—Sonia
Worse still, the enormous profits that the big food and drink companies make can allow them to ‘buy’ only the research they want to see done (as also happens with pharmaceutical products, of course). And if they know they aren’t going to like the results, they’re just not going to do the study. Truly independent research looking into how food can affect behaviour really has been extraordinarily limited, because, apart from a few charitable trusts, nobody has been prepared to fund this kind of work. There’s just no profit in it for the companies—and Government agencies and other conventional funding bodies have been either too blind, too conservative, or maybe too much ‘under the influence’ to look into this rather important area. As well as the conventional food industries, we have the ‘diet industry’, the ‘health food industry’ and the ‘food supplement industry’. All of them are in the business of making money, whatever else they may tell you. As long as you keep this in mind, you can actually get a lot of useful information from these sources—but always take care to read around, weigh up the different points of view, and make your own decisions.
Read around, weigh up the different points of view, and make your own decisions.
The Pharmaceutical Industry
The pharmaceutical industry is a major beneficiary from the status quo because impoverished diets which will cause or exacerbate all kinds of diseases and disorders suit the drug companies just perfectly! These huge multinationals have an extremely powerful influence on what you are led to believe, and they really do help to set the research agenda in medicine and other health-related areas. Having worked alongside doctors and within medical schools for many years, and attended numerous conferences in the fields of medicine and psychiatry, I have become appalled at the extent to which the influence of so-called ‘Big Pharma’ dominates the medical training that our doctors and allied health professionals receive. Their influence on scientific research has also become so great that any line of enquiry that doesn’t fit with their preferred ‘medical model’ (ideally, one that requires you and your child to take their drugs—in the long term if possible), or which could serve to undermine some of their most profitable markets, is likely to go unfunded by conventional sources. If the research does get done anyway, it can then be very difficult to publish if it might upset these vested interests.
The Specialists
Do the specialists advising you know anything about food and diet, and its potential effects on brains and behaviour? Sadly, unlike vets, most doctors in the UK and other Western countries still receive very little training in nutrition and its implications for health. They do learn about the basic ‘deficiency diseases’ (such as scurvy, pellagra or rickets) and there is now an increasing focus on ‘preventative medicine’—which usually includes at least some attention to nutrition and diet. But even though good nutrition is essentially about the body’s biochemistry, medical training usually puts far more emphasis on the way in which drugs can be used to manipulate this. Synthetic drugs can be patented for profit. With some rare exceptions, naturally occurring nutrients can’t.
It’s rather ironic that veterinary training involves far more emphasis on nutrition and health than does ordinary medicine—probably because the economic factors surrounding animal health are rather different. When farm animals get sick, for example, dietary considerations and possible nutrient deficiencies or imbalances are usually one of the main factors considered. That said, vets’ patients don’t usually attend their appointments demanding a course of pills that will make them better! We would do well to learn from this.
What other specialists might you and your child see? Clinical psychologists, occupational therapists, education professionals, and those working in social services or related fields receive little or no formal training in how food and diet can affect behaviour and mental health. For this reason these professionals can often be very sceptical about dietary issues, even when parents try to raise these.
Good nutrition is the essential foundation for health—and poor nutrition is guaranteed to lead to ill-health of one kind or another, sooner or later. This is as true for the brain as it is for the body. Unhealthy children generally do not feel well, do not behave well, do not learn well, and—surprise, surprise—do not perform well.
The same goes for unhealthy parents, so I do want to emphasize that this book is written for you, not just for your child. It also applies, of course, to unhealthy teachers, unhealthy doctors, unhealthy social workers or any other unhealthy people whose opinions and decisions are important to your child’s welfare! You may already have met some of these.
You may want to look at what the statistics say about health, life expectancy and job satisfaction among members of our education, health, social service and criminal justice systems. Most of the sad facts are easily explicable in terms of the conditions and the culture in which these professionals are expected to work, the ever-increasing targets they are supposed to meet, the training and resources with which they are provided, and the systems and people that govern them. Most of them know very little about nutrition, as I have pointed out already. Those that do are not usually encouraged (or even allowed) to use that knowledge in their work…
It’s Up to You to Take Charge
It’s easy to blame the health services, your child’s school, the social workers or other professionals for ignoring any dietary issues that you think are affecting your child. In the current climate, though, strict financial controls, superficial ‘efficiency’ criteria and short-term goals have come to dominate. These will obviously colour both the motives and the information available to managers and policy-makers in these areas. I share your frustration—but these are not things that most of us can hope to influence very easily, so there’s little point in dwelling on them for long here.
It’s your life, and your child’s life, that we are focusing on in this book.
You may already have adopted some dietary strategies with your child. If so, I hope you’ve already seen some benefits. You’ll also need some luck, though, because much of what you’ll have read or been told about the effects of food and diet on your child’s behaviour and performance is not actually supported by any reliable evidence—usually because the studies needed to provide this just haven’t been done. This is a real problem that I’ll do my best to help you with in this book. Mind you, the same is also true of a remarkable number of ‘interventions’ (treatments or management methods) that are part of ‘standard practice’ in medicine—not to mention the education, social services and criminal justice systems.
Some research into how food and diet may be affecting our behaviour is almost impossible to do—either because the ‘uncontrolled experiments’ have been going on for so long that there is no control group left, or because ethical issues make some types of studies difficult or impossible. For example, in the Western world we have all been consuming ‘trans fats’ for many decades now. (You can read more about these in Chapter 8.) These artificially twisted fats are found in hydrogenated vegetable oils (used in many cheap margarines, fried foods and commercially baked goods of all kinds), and are now known to damage our physical health. Given that the brain is 60 per cent fat, might these artificial fats alter its structure or function, too? Very probably…but it would be extremely hard now to find a well-matched control group who have not been ingesting trans fats for most or all of their lives. What’s more, extracting brain tissue from living subjects to study how its fat composition may relate to psychological well-being or performance is just not an option!
Similarly, a huge number of different food additives have been permitted following individual ‘safety testing’ for potential toxic effects. Do these tests look at how these food additives might act in combination? Well, no, actually—that would be far too complicated. With the number of additives now in use, it’s just not feasible. In fact, it is only very recently that some careful studies have looked into how the growth of nerve cells may be affected by just two common food additives in combination. Even though more work is still needed, the first results (discussed in Chapter 6) will give every parent cause for concern.
Show Caution and Take Practical Steps
Although the scientific studies needed to answer some important questions simply can’t be done, in my view we would often do well to follow the ‘precautionary principle’, especially when it comes to ingredients that are used purely for cosmetic appeal and the convenience and profits of the manufacturers (as is the case with many artificial flavourings and colourings, or hydrogenated fats).
