They Are What You Feed Them: How Food Can Improve Your Child’s Behaviour, Mood and Learning

One of the very real and fundamental issues that affects every child, and which every parent would benefit from knowing more about, is nutrition. The problem is that information and advice about food and diet currently feature absolutely nowhere in standard practice for either assessing or treating children’s behavioural and learning difficulties. In my view, this situation is simply indefensible.

Over the years I have seen not just hundreds but thousands of children and their parents, as well as many adolescents and adults, all of whom have been struggling with difficulties in behaviour, learning and mood that neither they nor the experts they’ve turned to for help can really explain. I’ve also read and absorbed the findings from a huge and diverse range of the very best scientific research. In addition, I’ve attended and presented my work at many scientific and professional conferences in the UK and abroad, given hundreds of talks and lectures to both public and professional audiences, published numerous peer-reviewed research papers, contributed chapters to several books and written many articles for charities, support groups and the media.

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As a result of the high profile my work has achieved, I receive thousands of enquiries and requests for advice from parents and professionals. These parents and professionals all have the same concerns and aims I have: to help the children they care for, and find some effective, practical ways that can help these children overcome the behavioural and learning difficulties preventing them from achieving their potential.

In my view, all of these people are being badly let down. They are often being told things that aren’t true, and they are not being given the help that they need and deserve. I see huge sums of money being wasted in our health systems, our education systems, our social services and our criminal justice systems (let alone what happens within the worlds of employment and self-employment which generate the tax revenue that pays for most of these systems). It has also become very clear to me that a similarly large proportion of the resources devoted to research in the name of helping people is simply being wasted, because we continue to ignore some of the most basic facts that are staring us in the face.

Nutrition matters!

A Quite Extraordinary Denial

Food and diet are important to all of us at the most fundamental level, because without the right nutrients it simply isn’t possible for our brains and bodies to develop properly, to grow properly and to function properly. It is also a fact that the diets of a huge number of children (and adults) in developed countries like the UK simply are not providing all the essential nutrients they need. Official figures from the latest National Diet and Nutrition Surveys bear this out—but oddly enough, the shocking findings have not been given any media coverage.

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Results from the most recent official survey of the nutritional status of children in the UK, carried out in 1997 and published in 2000, are not even freely available on the Internet (like the results from the adult survey are), despite this research having been funded by UK taxpayers’ money. Perhaps the Government would rather we didn’t know? Later in the book, you’ll read about some of these findings, and I hope you will agree that they really don’t give us any cause for complacency.

We keep being told that ‘a well-balanced diet can provide all the nutrients you need’. That may be true, but the truth is that many children’s diets are a very long way from being well-balanced…and the effects of this malnutrition on their behaviour and learning can be devastating. What I see going on in almost every sphere is a mixture of ignorance and a quite extraordinary denial of how food and diet can influence our brains and our behaviour.

They Are What You Feed Them

In recent years public concern has finally been mounting about the unhealthy nature of many children’s diets, but it took Jamie Oliver’s dramatic exposé about school dinners to put the shocking issues right in front of us. The British Medical Association, not usually known for its radical stance, has since joined in and demanded that something be done about children’s nutrition.

The evidence is now undeniable that poor nutrition is putting children’s physical health at risk. Many children are now expected to die before their parents—as a direct result of their unhealthy diets and lifestyles.

The epidemic of overweight and obesity in children is the most obvious sign that all is not well, and has become rather difficult to ignore. For years, the food industry and its supporters have always got away with blaming the expanding waistlines of our children purely on lack of exercise—but as anyone with half a brain can see, poor diets are equally, if not more, to blame.

The physical health problems that accompany, and in most cases precede, such unhealthy weight gain are not usually so obvious to the naked eye. The underlying problems that are leading to Type II diabetes (in which the body stops responding normally to insulin), even in children, often go unnoticed until this has already caused major health problems. Type II diabetes used to be a rare disease that occurred mainly in old age. If you follow the advice given in this book, however, I can almost guarantee that your child will not fall victim to this ‘silent killer’.

The effects of food on behaviour are also invisible, but very real. The brain is part of the body, and it relies on the same food supply to meet its needs. However, despite this obvious fact, almost no attention has been focused on the importance of nutrition for children’s behaviour and learning.

Many children’s diets are high in sugar, refined starches and the wrong kinds of fats, as well as artificial additives. They are high in calories (energy), but lacking in essential nutrients. The risks to physical health of such a ‘junk food’ diet are now recognized, but their potential effects on children’s behaviour, learning and mood are still largely ignored. The (very limited) research that actually exists into human requirements for different nutrients has never even taken brains and behaviour into account.

Spending on Behaviour Doesn’t Include Diet

In the UK, the Government has recently been forced to spend an additional £342 million on school behaviour-improvement programmes, and the World Health Organization predicts a 50 per cent rise in child mental disorders by 2020.

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The brain, like the body, needs the right nutrients to function properly.

But scientific research aimed at finding out the extent to which better nutrition could improve children’s behaviour and learning is not something that anyone seems prepared to fund—so our ignorance continues.

Nonetheless, as this book will reveal, there is in fact already evidence to show that for many children (and adults) the improvements in behaviour, learning and mood that can follow from some remarkably simple changes in diet can be quite dramatic. The problem is that too many people don’t even know about this research. Instead, far too many parents who actually suspect that food may be part of their child’s problem—and have good evidence of their own to support this—are often told dismissively by the supposed experts, ‘Oh, there’s no evidence that diet can make a difference.’

This is simply untrue. There is quite a lot of evidence, and much of it is first-class…but it tends to be in different places, and is rarely pulled together. If you add it all up, the case for doing something to improve the diets of children in the UK (and other countries) is now overwhelming.

This book will tell you how to go about improving your child’s diet, with particular emphasis on the impact this can have on mood, behaviour and learning.

In my view, it’s actually verging on negligence for any professional to deny to parents that food and diet can affect their children’s behaviour—although of course there will always be other factors to consider, and dietary approaches should always be complementary to other proven management methods. However, I can’t really blame individual professionals for reflecting the training that they’ve been given and the culture in which they live and work.

We Need to Change Our Legacy

The real problem is that we’re dealing with a legacy of ignorance and complacency about nutrition that has now gone on for many decades. In relatively rich, developed countries like the UK, it’s simply been assumed that no one is really likely to be at risk of malnutrition. Rising rates of obesity are taken as evidence to confirm this—but of course there is a big difference between being overfed and being well nourished. What too few people seem to recognize and acknowledge is that our diets—and particularly children’s diets—have changed out of all recognition during the past few decades. To make matters worse, the education that any of us receives about how our brains and bodies work, and what nutrients we need not just to stay healthy, but to allow our minds and brains to function properly (let alone at their best), is extremely limited.

School syllabuses do cover diet, but there is little time to teach children what they really need to know. What’s more, healthy eating messages can easily be subverted by the heavy advertising of ‘junk foods’ and peer pressure that our children face. Generally speaking, most adult education in this area is limited to information in the media. Sadly, most of this actually comes from the food, supplement and diet industries, and is often little more than marketing and advertising for their latest products and services. This doesn’t help anyone to make properly informed choices.

Over the years, many parents have asked me where they can get information that they can really trust on the food and diet issues that most concern them as they try to do the best they can for their children. When you’ve read this book, if you’d like more information about the scientific research in this area that is independent of commercial influences, and any further details on some of the information provided here, you can find it on the website of the charity Food and Behaviour Research (see www.fabresearch.org).

Where to Go Next

I’m not going to pretend that we have all the answers, because we don’t. There’s still a huge amount that we don’t know about how nutrition can affect mental health and performance. Many of the answers to key questions would not actually be hard to find if there were a will to investigate. If this kind of research received just a tiny fraction of the resources that go into pharmaceutical and other approaches that have so far failed to deliver, we would have much of the evidence we need. This is why I’ve dedicated the entire proceeds of this book (which would otherwise go to me, the author) to the Food and Behaviour (FAB) Research charity.

I hope you enjoy this book, I hope you learn something from it that will be useful to you, and I also hope you decide to act on its guidelines. Please know that I’d prefer it to become ‘dog-eared’ and covered in highlighter and notes than put neatly on a shelf to gather dust. There are numerous issues I’ve not been able to include or cover in depth here, and no doubt many corrections that you can help me with. I’m open to your feedback. Please let me know how you get on.

FAQs

My doctor doesn’t believe in food intolerances and pooh-poohs what I say. What should I do?

There are some more enlightened doctors out there who keep up with the research in this field; try to seek one out. To be fair—their workload makes it almost impossible for most doctors and other health professionals to find time to read up on nutrition. What’s more, most of them still receive very little training in this area—and as you’ll see in Chapter 6, the whole area of food allergies and intolerances is a highly complex one that still needs more research. Do tell your doctor about the FAB Research website, though, because many health professionals I know find this a very useful resource, allowing them to see some of the scientific research for themselves. I also don’t think many doctors would take issue with most of the dietary advice you’ll find in this book, but the decision on what to do has to be up to you. If I were you, I’d get a second opinion from a doctor who does listen—but I’d also read up as much as I could, talk to other people and then make my own choices. In any case, I wish you the best of luck.

I’m a teacher and have three main frustrations: because of the crowded syllabus I have so little time to explore the need for good nutrients with my pupils; we have vending machines that sell soft drinks and sweets (the Head says we need them to fund non-teaching staff); since we were forced to put the school dinners out to tender, they have gone from healthy spreads to mainly junk food.

I hear these frustrations a lot. Show this book to your head teacher, other staff and governors. Write to your local MP and the education minister, and join FAB Research and the many other not-for-profit groups who are campaigning for things to change.

Summary

1. This book is mainly written for parents, but it is also for anyone in the health, education and social services who has children in their care.

2. I’ve written this book to share my discoveries with you about how food and diet can affect children’s behaviour, learning and mood. This may be particularly relevant to those affected by conditions like autism, ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia, but the fundamental issues affect all of us—because we all need to get from our diets the nutrients needed for mental as well as physical health.

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.