They Are What You Feed Them: How Food Can Improve Your Child’s Behaviour, Mood and Learning. Dr Richardson Alex
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3. Labels like ADHD, dyslexia or autism can be useful, but they do little or nothing to explain these conditions, and they have many features in common with each other and with what’s considered normal functioning.
4. If your child has been given one of these labels, you may have been told there’s little or nothing you can do. You can do something, and one very fundamental thing that may help is to look at your child’s diet.
5. The latest official survey of the nutritional status of children in the UK shows that many of them are lacking in essential nutrients. Little publicity has been given to these findings or their potential implications for physical and mental health. Results from the survey are not even freely available on the Internet, despite this research having been funded by UK taxpayers’ money.
6. Many school meals are unhealthy, and the limited education that children do receive on food and diet cannot begin to compete with the promotion of unhealthy foods via advertising and other media. Many of the adults who care for them are no better informed.
7. Rising obesity has been blamed mainly on lack of exercise. This can obviously be a contributory factor, but in most cases diet is equally if not more important.
8. This book will present evidence that children’s diets can affect not only their physical health but also their mental health and performance.
9. ‘Junk food’ diets are now being recognized as a serious risk to the physical health of our children, but their effects on behaviour, learning and mood are still largely ignored.
10. You can help to redress this neglect—starting with your own child.
When it comes to how much we—the public—usually get to know about the foods we eat, and what we’ve been feeding to our children for years now, I’m afraid it’s rather like the old joke about the ‘mushroom’ style of management, namely: ‘Keep them in the dark, and feed them ****.’
For a long time, both the food industry and successive governments have effectively kept quiet about many things they’ve known (or should have known) about the appalling nutritional quality of much of our food—and children’s food in particular. Many of these appalling facts are available to anyone willing to read up about this subject (although, ironically enough, I’ve found that some of the best books are often in the ‘politics and economics’ section of bookstores rather ‘nutrition’).1 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,2 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.
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