They Are What You Feed Them: How Food Can Improve Your Child’s Behaviour, Mood and Learning. Dr Richardson Alex
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nerve transmission. We can’t make minerals, so we must get them all from a healthy, balanced and varied diet. Junk food diets often don’t contain enough minerals to meet your child’s needs.
A table of essential minerals and some of their roles is in the Appendix (page 375). It’s not important to learn these, just to be aware of why minerals are so important to your child’s health. Here I’ll describe a few that are known to affect brains and behaviour, but may well be lacking from your child’s diet.
Advertising Junk Food to Children
Massive advertising of foods and drinks that lead to childhood obesity and behavioural problems is part of our ‘free, civilized’ society. Who is looking at the costs to our children, our future economy (less able work force), and the cost to our health and education services? Help your children become aware of what advertising aimed at them is really doing. Lobby your MP—and meanwhile the Which? kids’ food campaign website is a great place to start. See www.which.net/campaigns
Iron
Iron deficiency leads to anaemia, because iron is needed (with copper) to make the red blood cells that carry oxygen around your body. Even a mild lack of iron can cause physical fatigue and lack of energy, and can also impair mental performance.
Many children in the UK, especially teenage girls, don’t get enough iron. Around 10 per cent of children under 4 years of age and almost one in two girls aged between 11 and 18 years had seriously iron-deficient diets, and biochemical measures of iron status and metabolism painted a similar picture.25 One study from France reported low ferritin (used by your body to store iron safely) in children with ADHD,26 but controlled trials are still needed to find out if more dietary iron might help in this condition. As we saw in the last chapter, different children with this diagnostic label can vary greatly, and in another study from Taiwan, both dietary and blood measures indicated increased iron in children with ADHD.27
The frequent occurrence of ‘restless legs syndrome’ and disturbed sleep patterns in children with ADHD may be because of a deficiency in iron.28
Only about 10 per cent of dietary iron (mainly from meat) is in a readily absorbed form called ‘haem’ iron. The other 90 per cent comes as ‘non-haem’ iron (found in fruits, vegetables, dried beans, nuts and grains); how much of this you absorb varies with your iron status and other factors.
Vitamin C helps considerably (giving yet another reason why your child should eat her fruits and vegetables!). The presence of any haem iron (or even the use of cooking pots made of cast iron) can also boost absorption.
By contrast, substances called ‘phytates’—found in bran, soya, whole grains and legumes—can reduce absorption, as they bind to iron (and other metals like zinc and calcium). Tannin and other substances found in tea and coffee can also reduce iron absorption, so don’t let your pale, tired child try these for ‘energy’.
As meat is the best source of absorbable iron, vegetarians need to take care to get enough, particularly as some staple vegetarian foods are rich in phytates. Some foods (like breakfast cereals) are fortified with iron—but do weigh this against the rest of their content! If they’re high in sugar, for example, don’t bother. Find some healthy sources instead.29
If your child does seem pale, listless and lacking in energy (and/or unduly inattentive or hyperactive), try asking your doctor to test for iron deficiency. Iron supplements aren’t necessarily the best solution, though. This is because if there’s an imbalance of gut bacteria (see the next chapter) some of the ‘bad’ bacteria love iron, and may gobble this up so it doesn’t even reach your child. Discuss this with your doctor, and take further advice if needed.30
Calcium
You’ve probably heard that you need calcium for strong bones and teeth, but this mineral does a good deal more for you as well. Calcium helps contract your muscles, regulates your blood flow, produces hormones and enzymes and helps the body send and receive messages throughout your brain and nervous system. In fact, calcium is so important for these jobs that your body will take it from your bones if it has to, in order to keep your blood calcium levels up to speed.
Again, many children (and adults) in the UK don’t get enough calcium from their diets. Milk, cheese and other dairy products are rich sources of easily absorbed calcium, but other sources include tofu, green vegetables (particularly broccoli, kale and spinach), canned salmon and sardines, shellfish, almonds, Brazil nuts, sesame seeds and dried beans as well as grains and dried fruits. Remember, too, that your child also needs both magnesium and vitamin D to get calcium into her bones.
Magnesium
Magnesium carries out hundreds of biological functions for you, and is absolutely essential for good health. It helps keep your bones and teeth strong, and your heart rhythms steady. It also helps you to make proteins, is important in energy metabolism (including blood-sugar control) and helps regulate muscle and nerve function, immune reactions and control of blood pressure.
If your ADHD or ADD child suffers from light or restless sleep and daytime sleepiness, try adding calcium and magnesium-rich foods to his diet. These include: milk products, cocoa, sardines, green leafy vegetables, tofu, brown rice, whole grains and beans.
See also: 10 Effective Ways to Help Your ADD/ADHD Child by Laura Stevens, and her excellent website with dietary tips at http://www.nlci.com/nutrition/.
Magnesium powerfully affects ‘nervous excitability’, and deficiency states are characterized by tension, agitation and stress. Lack of magnesium is linked with many psychiatric conditions, including anxiety and panic disorders, Tourette’s syndrome (involving involuntary movements or speech utterances known as ‘tics’), autism and ADHD.31 There’s preliminary evidence of benefits from magnesium supplementation in ADHD children, although this still needs confirming in rigorous randomized controlled trials.32 Early signs of magnesium deficiency include loss of appetite, fatigue, weakness, nausea or vomiting, muscle contractions and cramps, numbness and tingling. Severe deficiencies can lead to seizures, personality changes and heart rhythm abnormalities.
Unfortunately, magnesium deficiency in the diets of UK children is even more common than lack of calcium. As the national surveys show, average daily intakes of magnesium fall short of ‘reference nutrient intake’ levels in all except those under 6 years of age. In boys aged between 11 and 18 years, one in every four or five has a frankly deficient intake of magnesium; for girls of the same age, it is more than half of them.33
All green vegetables provide magnesium (it’s in the chlorophyll that gives plants their green colour), as do most nuts, seeds and grains. A wide range of different foods containing magnesium is needed, though, as no one food is a particularly rich source. Along with a lack of fruit and vegetables, this is where many children (and adults) go wrong, of course—but I hope you can see once again why it’s so important that you encourage your child to eat a wide variety of whole, fresh, unprocessed foods.
Copper
Copper, along with iron, helps form your red blood cells—so a lack of this mineral can actually be another possible cause of ‘iron-deficiency anaemia’. It’s also very important in keeping your bones, blood vessels, nerves and immune system healthy, as well as your skin. Copper deficiency has been implicated in thyroid abnormalities, cardiovascular disease, thrombosis,