[amc] [COMFOOD:] Food and behavior (fwd)
- From: Micheal McEvoy <chewy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Windsor Park Community Garden List <communitygarden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Austin Mennonite Church <amc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2005 12:57:32 -0500 (CDT)
If there is no other reason than this for getting fresh produce into the
schools and ont oour tables, it is well worth it.
Micheal
--
Micheal McEvoy St. Brigid's Gate Farm
chewy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mahomet, Texas
Beautiful Brown Eggs from Free-Range Chickens, Free-Range Broilers & Turkeys
Naturally Raised Grass-fed Lamb, Mutton and Beef
Support your Farmers and Ranchers, Buy Locally Grown Food
Sustainable Agriculture From A Christian Perspective
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ChristianSustainableAg/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2005 09:52:01 -0700
From: Michele Simon <michele@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Community Food Security Coalition <comfood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [COMFOOD:] Food and behavior
This is one of the best articles I've read on the connection between food
and behavior, with excellent citations to research studies. Please spread it
around! - Michele
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/25122/
You Do What You Eat
By Marco Visscher, Ode. Posted September 8, 2005.
Forget tougher punishments and hiring more police. The solution to crime
and violence is on your dinner plate. Tools
At first glance, there seems nothing special about the students at this
high school in Appleton, Wisconsin. They appear calm, interact
comfortably with one another, and are focused on their schoolwork. No
apparent problems.
And yet a couple of years ago, there was a police officer patrolling the
halls at this school for developmentally challenged students. Many of
the students were troublemakers, there was a lot of fighting with
teachers and some of the kids carried weapons.
School counsellor Greg Bretthauer remembers when he first came to
Appleton Central Alternative High School back in 1997, for a job
interview: "I found the students to be rude, obnoxious and
ill-mannered." He had no desire to work with them, and turned down the
job.
Several years later, Bretthauer took the job after seeing that the
atmosphere at the school had changed profoundly. Today he describes the
students as "calm and well-behaved" in a new video documentary, Impact
of Fresh, Healthy Foods on Learning and Behavior. Fights and offensive
behavior are extremely rare and the police officer is no longer needed.
What happened?
A glance through the halls at Appleton Central Alternative provides the
answer. The vending machines have been replaced by water coolers. The
lunchroom took hamburgers and french fries off the menu, making room for
fresh vegetables and fruits, whole-grain bread and a salad bar.
Is that all? Yes, that's all. Principal LuAnn Coenen is still surprised
when she speaks of the "astonishing" changes at the school since she
decided to drastically alter the offering of food and drinks eight years
ago: "I don't have the vandalism. I don't have the litter. I don't have
the need for high security."
The Problems with 'Convenience Foods'
It is tempting to dismiss what happened at Appleton Central Alternative
as the wild fantasies of health-food and vitamin-supplement fanatics.
After all, scientists have never empirically investigated the changes at
the school. Healthy nutrition -- especially the effects of vitamin and
mineral supplements -- appears to divide people into opposing camps of
fervent believers, who trust the anecdotes about diets changing people's
lives, and equally fervent skeptics, who dismiss these stories as
hogwash.
And yet it is not such a radical idea that food can affect the way our
brains work -- and thus our behavior. The brain is an active machine: It
only accounts for two percent of our body weight, but uses a whopping 20
percent of our energy. In order to generate that energy, we need a broad
range of nutrients -- vitamins, minerals and unsaturated fatty acids --
that we get from nutritious meals. The question is: What are the
consequences when we increasingly shovel junk food into our bodies?
It is irrefutably true that our eating habits have dramatically changed
over the past 30-odd years. "Convenience food" has become a catch-all
term that covers all sorts of frozen, microwaved and out-and-out junk
foods. The ingredients of the average meal have been transported
thousands of kilometres before landing on our plates; it's not hard to
believe that some of the vitamins were lost in the process.
We already know obesity can result if we eat too much junk food, but
there may be greater consequences of unhealthy diets than extra weight
around our middles. Do examples like the high school in Wisconsin point
to a direct connection between nutrition and behavior? Is it simply
coincidence that the increase in aggression, crime and social incivility
in Western society has paralleled a spectacular change in our diet?
Could there be a link between the two?
Stephen Schoenthaler, a criminal-justice professor at California State
University in Stanislaus, has been researching the relationship between
food and behavior for more than 20 years.He has proven that reducing the
sugar and fat intake in our daily diets leads to higher IQs and better
grades in school.
When Schoenthaler supervised a change in meals served at 803 schools in
low-income neighborhoods in New York City, the number of students
passing final exams rose from 11 percent below the national average to
five percent above.
He is best known for his work in youth detention centers. One of his
studies showed that the number of violations of house rules fell by 37
percent when vending machines were removed and canned food in the
cafeteria was replaced by fresh alternatives. He summarizes his findings
this way: "Having a bad diet right now is a better predictor of future
violence than past violent behavior."
But Schoenthaler's work is under fire. A committee from his own
university has recommended suspending him for his allegedly improper
research methods: Schoenthaler didn't always use a placebo as a control
measure and his group of test subjects wasn't always chosen at random.
This criticism doesn't refute Schoenthaler's research that nutrition has
an effect on behavior. It means most of his studies simply lack the
scientific soundness needed to earn the respect of his colleagues.
The Prison Test
Recent research that -- even Schoenthaler's critics admit -- was
conducted flawlessly, showed similar conclusions. Bernard Gesch,
physiologist at the University of Oxford, decided to test the anecdotal
clues in the most thorough study so far in this field. In a prison for
men between the ages of 18 and 21 in England's Buckinghamshire, 231
volunteers were divided into two groups: One was given nutrition
supplements along with their meals that contained our approximate daily
needs for vitamins, minerals and fatty acids; the other group got
placebos. Neither the prisoners, nor the guards, nor the researchers at
the prison knew who took fake supplements and who got the real thing.
The researchers then tallied the number of times the participants
violated prison rules, and compared it to the same data that had been
collected in the months leading up to the nutrition study. The prisoners
given supplements for four consecutive months committed an average of 26
percent fewer violations compared to the preceding period. Those given
placebos showed no marked change in behaviour. For serious breaches of
conduct, particularly the use of violence, the number of violations
decreased 37 percent for the men given nutrition supplements, while the
placebo group showed no change.
The experiment was carefully constructed, ruling out the possibility
that ethnic, social, psychological or other variables could affect the
outcome. Prisons are popular places to conduct studies for good reason:
There is a strict routine; participants sleep and exercise the same
number of hours every day and eat the same things at the same time.
Says John Copas, professor in statistical methodology at the University
of Warwick: "This is the only trial I have ever been involved with from
the social sciences which is designed properly and with a good
analysis." As a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study,
Gesch emerges with convincing scientific proof that poor nutrition plays
a role in triggering aggressive behavior.
Sugar's Not the Only Problem
Indeed, the study proves what every parent already knows. Serve soda and
candy at a children's birthday party and you'll get loud, hyperactive
behavior followed by tears and tantrums. It works like this: Blood-sugar
levels jump suddenly after you eat sugar, which initially gives you a
burst of fresh energy. But then your blood sugar falls, and you become
lethargic and sleepy. In an attempt to prevent blood-sugar levels from
falling too low, your body produces adrenalin, which makes you irritable
and explosive.
But sugar can't be the only problem. After all, high blood-sugar levels
mainly have a short-term effect on behavior, while the research of
Schoenthaler and Gesch indicates changes over a longer period. They
suggest it is much more important that you get the right amount of
vitamins, minerals and unsaturated fatty acids because these substances
directly influence the brain, and therefore behavior.
If these findings prove true -- and they do look convincing -- then we
should be sounding an alarm about good nutrition. What are the long-term
implications of the fact that the quality of our farmland has sharply
declined in recent decades? The use of artificial fertilizer for years
on end has diminished the levels of important minerals like magnesium,
chromium and selenium, therefore present in much lower concentrations in
our food.
The eating habits of children and young people also should be a cause
for serious concern. Their diets now are rich in sugar, fats and
carbohydrates, and poor in vegetables and fruit. Add to this an
increasing lack of exercise among kids, and the problem becomes even
worse. The World Health Organization (WHO) talks of an epidemic of
overweight among children. Obesity, the official name for serious weight
problems, is said to absorb up to six percent of the total health budget
-- a cautious estimate as all kinds of related diseases cannot be
included in the exact calculation. Think of what this situation will
look like when the current generation of overweight kids hits middle
age.
The link between food and health is better understood by most people
than the relationship between food and behavior, so health has become
the driving force behind many public campaigns to combat overweight. A
discussion has arisen in a number of countries about introducing a tax
on junk food, the proceeds of which would be spent on promoting healthy
eating. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced in May he
planned to spend an extra 280 million pounds (the equivalent of 420
million euros or $500 million U.S.) on improving school lunches after
the famous television chef Jamie Oliver began speaking out on the issue.
Yet with crime a major political issue almost everywhere, it's
surprising more leaders have not embraced the idea of healthy eating as
a recipe for safe streets and schools. After Gesch published his
findings in 2002 in The British Journal of Psychiatry, the study was
picked up by European and American media. The newspaper headlines were
clear: "Healthy eating can cut crime"; "Eat right or become a criminal;"
"Youth crime linked to consumption of junk food;" "Fighting crime one
bite at a time." Then the media went deafeningly silent.
Perhaps that's because the relationship between nutrition and violence
continues to be controversial in established professional circles.
During their educations, doctors and psychologists are given scant
training in nutrition, criminologists provided little awareness of
biochemistry, and nutritionists offered no hands-on experience with
lawbreakers or the mentally ill. As a result, the link between food and
behaviour winds up in no-man's-land. Even researchers interested in the
subject are discouraged -- not least of all because you can't get a
patent on natural nutrients like vitamins and minerals. Far more effort
goes into pharmaceutical, rather than dietary, solutions.
The Netherlands currently is the only country where Gesch's research is
being explored. Plans to test the findings about nutrition supplements
and behaviour further are being set up in 14 prisons, with nearly 500
subjects. Ap Zaalberg, leading the project for the Dutch Ministry of
Justice, remembers how he and his colleagues reacted when they first
heard of Gesch's study. "Disbelief," he states resolutely. "This was
surely not true. But when I looked into the issue more closely, I landed
in a world of hard science."
Zaalberg knows diet is not the only factor that determines whether
someone exhibits aggressive behavior. "Aggression is not only determined
by nutrition," he states. "Background and drug use, for example, also
play a role. Yet I increasingly see the introduction of vitamins and
minerals as a very rational approach."
"Most criminal-justice systems assume that criminal behaviour is
entirely a matter of free will," Gesch says. "But how exactly can you
exercise free will without involving your brain? How exactly can the
brain function without an adequate nutrient supply? Nutrition in fact
could be a major player and, for sure, we have seriously underestimated
its importance. I think nutrition may actually be one of the most
straightforward factors to change antisocial behaviour. And we know that
it's not only highly effective, it's also cheap and humane."
Cheap it is. Natural Justice, the British charity institution chaired by
Gesch, which is researching "the origins of anti-social and criminal
behaviour," estimates it would cost 3.5 million pounds (5.3 million
euros or 6.4 million U.S. dollars) to provide supplements to all the
prisoners in Great Britain. That is only a fraction of the current
prison budget of 2 billion pounds (3 billion euros or 3.6 billion U.S.
dollar).
Finding Safety Through the Stomach
It seems the link between nutrition and antisocial behaviour shows great
promise as both political issue and human-interest story. How much
longer will politicians concentrate on police and stricter surveillance
as the answer to crime? When will they realize healthy food can help
create a healthier society? After all, people would not only be more
productive, but the cost of health care and of the criminal-justice
system would decline. As is the case for a man's love, the way to safety
may be through the stomach.
As Bernard Gesch notes, "Few scientists are not convinced that diet is
fundamental for the development of the human brain. Is it plausible that
in the last 50 years we could have made spectacular changes to the human
diet without any implications for the brain? I don't think so. Now,
evidence is mounting that putting poor fuel into the brain significantly
affects social behaviour. We need to know more about the composition of
the right nutrients. It could be the recipe for peace."
Marco Visscher is a senior editor at Ode.
-------
Austin Mennonite Church, (512) 926-3121 www.mennochurch.org
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