It’s well over 10 years now since my own research first started making headline news, and if it hadn’t been for my own personal experience of the media I really wouldn’t have believed the extent to which what you see or hear through these channels is influenced by companies who will benefit when you believe their stories. The food and drinks industry is a massively powerful force to be reckoned with. Quite apart from the direct advertising that they do—which is powerful enough—they exert a huge degree of less visible control over the information you are given and the choices available to you. The name of the game for big companies is sending out press releases, holding press conferences, wining and dining journalists and hiring the experts they need to back the stories that will benefit them.
‘I was looking at websites which talked about the effects of sugar substitutes, as I’d heard that some of them are bad for you. One site in particular did a very good job of listing everything wrong with artificial sweeteners…but it was only later that I found out that this site was hosted by a sugar company! Now I know why they said nothing at all about avoiding sugar itself.’—Sonia
Worse still, the enormous profits that the big food and drink companies make can allow them to ‘buy’ only the research they want to see done (as also happens with pharmaceutical products, of course). And if they know they aren’t going to like the results, they’re just not going to do the study. Truly independent research looking into how food can affect behaviour really has been extraordinarily limited, because, apart from a few charitable trusts, nobody has been prepared to fund this kind of work. There’s just no profit in it for the companies—and Government agencies and other conventional funding bodies have been either too blind, too conservative, or maybe too much ‘under the influence’ to look into this rather important area. As well as the conventional food industries, we have the ‘diet industry’, the ‘health food industry’ and the ‘food supplement industry’. All of them are in the business of making money, whatever else they may tell you. As long as you keep this in mind, you can actually get a lot of useful information from these sources—but always take care to read around, weigh up the different points of view, and make your own decisions.
Read around, weigh up the different points of view, and make your own decisions.
The Pharmaceutical Industry
The pharmaceutical industry is a major beneficiary from the status quo because impoverished diets which will cause or exacerbate all kinds of diseases and disorders suit the drug companies just perfectly! These huge multinationals have an extremely powerful influence on what you are led to believe, and they really do help to set the research agenda in medicine and other health-related areas. Having worked alongside doctors and within medical schools for many years, and attended numerous conferences in the fields of medicine and psychiatry, I have become appalled at the extent to which the influence of so-called ‘Big Pharma’ dominates the medical training that our doctors and allied health professionals receive. Their influence on scientific research has also become so great that any line of enquiry that doesn’t fit with their preferred ‘medical model’ (ideally, one that requires you and your child to take their drugs—in the long term if possible), or which could serve to undermine some of their most profitable markets, is likely to go unfunded by conventional sources. If the research does get done anyway, it can then be very difficult to publish if it might upset these vested interests.9
The Specialists
Do the specialists advising you know anything about food and diet, and its potential effects on brains and behaviour? Sadly, unlike vets, most doctors in the UK and other Western countries still receive very little training in nutrition and its implications for health. They do learn about the basic ‘deficiency diseases’ (such as scurvy, pellagra or rickets) and there is now an increasing focus on ‘preventative medicine’—which usually includes at least some attention to nutrition and diet. But even though good nutrition is essentially about the body’s biochemistry, medical training usually puts far more emphasis on the way in which drugs can be used to manipulate this. Synthetic drugs can be patented for profit. With some rare exceptions, naturally occurring nutrients can’t.
It’s rather ironic that veterinary training involves far more emphasis on nutrition and health than does ordinary medicine—probably because the economic factors surrounding animal health are rather different. When farm animals get sick, for example, dietary considerations and possible nutrient deficiencies or imbalances are usually one of the main factors considered. That said, vets’ patients don’t usually attend their appointments demanding a course of pills that will make them better! We would do well to learn from this.
What other specialists might you and your child see? Clinical psychologists, occupational therapists, education professionals, and those working in social services or related fields receive little or no formal training in how food and diet can affect behaviour and mental health. For this reason these professionals can often be very sceptical about dietary issues, even when parents try to raise these.
Good nutrition is the essential foundation for health—and poor nutrition is guaranteed to lead to ill-health of one kind or another, sooner or later. This is as true for the brain as it is for the body. Unhealthy children generally do not feel well, do not behave well, do not learn well, and—surprise, surprise—do not perform well.
The same goes for unhealthy parents, so I do want to emphasize that this book is written for you, not just for your child. It also applies, of course, to unhealthy teachers, unhealthy doctors, unhealthy social workers or any other unhealthy people whose opinions and decisions are important to your child’s welfare! You may already have met some of these.
You may want to look at what the statistics say about health, life expectancy and job satisfaction among members of our education, health, social service and criminal justice systems. Most of the sad facts are easily explicable in terms of the conditions and the culture in which these professionals are expected to work, the ever-increasing targets they are supposed to meet, the training and resources with which they are provided, and the systems and people that govern them. Most of them know very little about nutrition, as I have pointed out already. Those that do are not usually encouraged (or even allowed) to use that knowledge in their work…
It’s Up to You to Take Charge
It’s easy to blame the health services, your child’s school, the social workers or other professionals for ignoring any dietary issues that you think are affecting your child. In the current climate, though, strict financial controls, superficial ‘efficiency’ criteria and short-term goals have come to dominate. These will obviously colour both the motives and the information available to managers and policy-makers in these areas. I share your frustration—but these are not things that most of us can hope to influence very easily, so there’s little point in dwelling on them for long here.
It’s your life, and your child’s life, that we are focusing on in this book.
You may already have adopted some dietary strategies with your child. If so, I hope you’ve already seen some benefits. You’ll also need some luck, though, because much of what you’ll have read or been told about the effects of food and diet on your child’s behaviour and performance is not actually supported by any reliable evidence—usually because the studies needed to provide this just haven’t been done. This is a real problem that I’ll do my best to help you with in this book. Mind you, the same is also true of a