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

Chapter 2 Facing The Facts (#ulink_b5fa9fb2-397b-5cf3-b156-5083f478b6ce)

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’).

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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