[pronut-hiv] Nutrients: Reducing Crime?

["George M. Carter" <fiar@verizon.net>]

A fascinating article.

If governments are willing to let television revenues take precedence over 
children's lives, it is little wonder that major governments are little 
interested in providing food, clean water and a decent multi to people in 
developing nations. Or the incentivizing systems to sustain distribution 
programs (which sensible governments put into place). Let alone opening 
western markets to agricultural goods from Africa.

Follow the money.

And so, nothing will get done. And the kids will continue to suffer and die horribly. Needlessly. While my government wrings its hands, pats the 
corrupt on the head and assures that all the money in PEPFAR goes to paying off big Pharma. (Like the simple equation of spending MUCH less on generics and using the savings for a multi, etc., is just, well, gosh, too damn difficult....we need to have another fundraiser since Hank McKinnell's bonuses and stock options are at risk!)

I'm tired of living in such a relentlessly ugly, stupid, self-destructive 
world. It's always going to be a struggle. Life isn't easy. But that there 
is such an assiduous effort to make it SO much worse for so many is 
unconscionable.
George M. Carter

****
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
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.

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