De Ja Vu all over again:

Criminals to be fed vitamins to improve behaviour

Gaby Hinsliff, chief political correspondent
Sunday November 28, 2004
The Observer

Criminals are to be given vitamin supplements in an unusual attempt to reduce anti-social behaviour which will test the effect of diet on the brain.

The move is controversial, with many in the prison service sceptical that healthy food could make much difference to hardened criminals.

The proposals being drawn up within the Home Office reflect a growing interest in the potential link between junk diets laced with additives and disturbed or hyperactive behaviour. American research has shown a link between poor diet and aggressive or impulsive tendencies, including a recently published US study of young children from Mauritius which found they were significantly less likely to grow up to have criminal records if fed an enriched diet from a young age.

The Youth Justice Board is helping to organise the British trial, which would involve young offenders who are serving community sentences, or who have recently been released from jail, being given daily supplements of fatty acids, trace minerals and vitamins to see if it reduces anti-social behaviour.

'We have agreed to assist them by facilitating access to young people where necessary,' said a spokesman. 'We are interested in seeing the results of this.'
The project raises ethical questions. While only volunteers will take part, if dramatic results from changing offenders' diets can be shown, that will raise the question of whether prison diets should be altered to 'dose' prison inmates into better behaviour.

Conversely, the approach is likely to be attacked by right-wing critics as allowing offenders to escape responsibility for their own crimes by blaming their diets.

However, a small previous study of teenagers in a young offenders' institution carried out by the research charity Natural Justice, found that boosting offenders' diets with supplements reduced disciplinary incidents - such as attacks on fellow inmates and officers, or breaking prison rules - by a third. While prison menus did offer healthy options, the researchers realised that inmates avoided them in favour of a diet of junk food that left them deprived of nutrients.

The charity wants to try to replicate the findings using a much larger group of young offenders, and examine the effect on their reoffending rates.

Bernard Gesch, chair of the charity, said: 'We are very pleased that they are interested enough to look at this. The implications are fairly massive: the government is forced to pump millions into anti-social behaviour programmes, and surely given the scale of findings we demonstrated [in the young offenders' institution] the dots aren't too difficult to join up.'

Prisons Minister Paul Goggins disclosed recently in a parliamentary written answer to the senior Tory MP Alistair Burt that the Home Office is considering research on offenders' diet.

The Prison Service is currently awaiting the results of a similar study involving offenders in Holland.

- - -

Tough on crime, to hell with the causes of crime if they make money

Research shows a direct link between junk food and violent behaviour. But governments are in cahoots with the industry

George Monbiot
Tuesday May 2, 2006
(Original in The Guardian)

Does television cause crime? The idea that people copy the violence they watch is debated endlessly by criminologists. But this column concerns an odder and perhaps more interesting idea: if crime leaps out of the box, it is not the programmes that are responsible as much as the material in between. It proposes that violence emerges from those blissful images of family life, purged of all darkness, that we see in the advertisements.

Let me begin, in constructing this strange argument, with a paper published in the latest edition of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. It provides empirical support for the contention that children who watch more television eat more of the foods it advertises. "Each hour increase in television viewing," it found, "was associated with an additional 167 kilocalories per day." Most of these extra calories were contained in junk foods: fizzy drinks, crisps, biscuits, sweets, burgers and chicken nuggets. Watching television, the paper reported, "is also inversely associated with intake of fruit and vegetables".

There is no longer any serious debate about what a TV diet does to your body. A government survey published last month shows that the proportion of children in English secondary schools who are clinically obese has almost doubled in 10 years. Today, 27% of girls and 24% of boys between 11 and 15 years old suffer from this condition, which means they are far more likely to contract diabetes and to die before the age of 50. But the more interesting question is what this diet might do to your mind. There are now scores of studies suggesting that it hurts the brain as much as it hurts the heart and the pancreas. Among the many proposed associations is a link between bad food and violent or antisocial behaviour.

The most spectacular results were those reported in the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine in 1997. The researchers had conducted a double-blind, controlled experiment in a jail for chronic offenders aged between 13 and 17. Many of the boys there were deficient in certain nutrients. They consumed, on average, only 63% of the iron, 42% of the magnesium, 39% of the zinc, 39% of the vitamin B12 and 34% of the folate in the US government's recommended daily allowance. The researchers treated half the inmates with capsules containing the missing nutrients, and half with placebos. They also counselled all the prisoners in the trial about improving their diets. The number of violent incidents caused by inmates in the control group (those taking the placebos) fell by 56%, and in the experimental group by 80%. But among the inmates in the placebo group who refused to improve their diets, there was no reduction. The researchers also wired their subjects to an electroencephalograph to record brainwave patterns, and found a major decrease in abnormalities after 13 weeks on supplements.

A similar paper, published in 2002 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, found that among young adult prisoners given supplements of the vitamins, minerals and fatty acids in which they were deficient, disciplinary offences fell by 26% in the experimental group, and not at all in the control group. Researchers in Finland found that all 68 of the violent offenders they tested during another study suffered from reactive hypoglycaemia: an abnormal tolerance of glucose caused by an excessive consumption of sugar, carbohydrates and stimulants such as caffeine.

In March this year the lead author of the 2002 report, Bernard Gesch, told the Ecologist magazine that "having a bad diet is now a better predictor of future violence than past violent behaviour ... Likewise, a diagnosis of psychopathy, generally perceived as being a better predictor than a criminal past, is still miles behind what you can predict just from looking at what a person eats."

Why should a link between diet and behaviour be surprising? Quite aside from the physiological effects of eating too much sugar (apparent to anyone who has attended a children's party), the brain, whose function depends on precise biochemical processes, can't work properly with insufficient raw materials. The most important of these appear to be unsaturated fatty acids (especially the omega 3 types), zinc, magnesium, iron, folate and the B vitamins, which happen to be those in which the prisoners in the 1997 study were most deficient.

A report published at the end of last year by the pressure group Sustain explained what appear to be clear links between deteriorating diets and the growth of depression, behavioural problems, Alzheimer's and other forms of mental illness. Sixty per cent of the dry weight of the brain is fat, which is "unique in the body for being predominantly composed of highly unsaturated fatty acids". Zinc and magnesium affect both its metabolism of lipids and its production of neurotransmitters - the chemicals which permit the nerve cells to communicate with each other.

The more junk you eat, the less room you have for foods which contain the chemicals the brain needs. This is not to suggest that food advertisers are solely responsible for the decline in the nutrients we consume. As Graham Harvey's new book We Want Real Food shows, industrial farming, dependent on artificial fertilisers, has greatly reduced the mineral content of vegetables, while the quality of meat and milk has also declined. Nor do these findings suggest that a poor diet is the sole cause of crime and antisocial behaviour. But the studies I have read suggest that any government that claims to take crime seriously should start hitting the advertisers.

Instead, our government sits back while the television regulator, Ofcom, canoodles with the food industry. While drawing up its plans to control junk food adverts, Ofcom held 29 meetings with food producers and advertisers and just four with health and consumer groups. The results can be seen in the consultation document it published. It proposes to do nothing about adverts among programmes made for children over nine and nothing about the adverts the younger children watch most often. Which? reports that the most popular ITV programmes among two- to nine-year-olds are Dancing on Ice, Coronation Street and Emmerdale, but Ofcom plans to regulate only the programmes made specifically for the under-nines. It claims that tougher rules would cost the industry too much. To sustain the share values of the commercial broadcasters, Ofcom is prepared to sacrifice the physical and psychological wellbeing of our children.

At the European level, the collusion is even more obvious. Last week, Viviane Reding, the European media commissioner, spoke to a group of broadcasters about her plans to allow product placement in European TV programmes (this means that the advertisers would be allowed to promote their wares during, rather than just between, the programmes). She complained that her proposal had been attacked by the European parliament. "You have to fight if you want to keep it," she told the TV executives. "I would like to make it very clear that I need your support in this."

I spent much of last week trying to discover whether the Home Office is taking the research into the links between diet and crime seriously. In the past, it has insisted that further studies are needed, while failing to fund them. First my request was met with incredulity, then I was stonewalled. Tough on crime. To hell with the causes of crime.

www.monbiot.com

etc
http://www.amazon.com/Diet-Crime-Delinquency-Alexander-Schauss/dp/0939764008

The real place to start is with school lunch and involve the PTA from the beginning

Naturally, eating healthy food has a direct affect on thought processes and thus, behavior. That's why our society is so sick. Duh.

There have been many studies over the years showing the effects of diet and chemical pollution on behavior, including violent crime. But these don't fit in with anybody's political agenda, so they simply get ignored. Politicians wouldn't be able to rouse people's emotions in a war on crime, and get people to demand that a police state be set up to protect them. Religious people would be horrified that such a materialistic scientific view of crime might actually be a cause of sin. And everybody would lose the gratifying feeling of revenge that they get by blaming society's ills on evil people instead of the ruling class. Can you imagine a politician running on a platform of cutting crime by improving people's diets and eliminating lead pollution in the environment, even if he could show the scientific basis for it???? (At least in a society like the USA, where millions of people believe the sun goes around the earth, which was created 6000 years ago, and where the Bush administration actually got reelected.)

I recall reading decades ago of a study where all refined sugar was banned from the prisoners' in a US prison for a period of time and prison violence fell dramatically. Then the powerful sugar lobby protested and the ban was rescinded. The former level of violence was promptly regained.

Perhaps that experiment could be repeated in Britain, although perhaps their Food Standards Agency would interfere and get the same results as the US sugar lobby obtained.