Читать книгу They Are What You Feed Them: How Food Can Improve Your Child’s Behaviour, Mood and Learning - Dr Richardson Alex - Страница 10

In the UK, the Government has recently been forced to spend an additional £342 million on school behaviour-improvement programmes, and the World Health Organization predicts a 50 per cent rise in child mental disorders by 2020.³

The brain, like the body, needs the right nutrients to function properly.

But scientific research aimed at finding out the extent to which better nutrition could improve children’s behaviour and learning is not something that anyone seems prepared to fund—so our ignorance continues.

Nonetheless, as this book will reveal, there is in fact already evidence to show that for many children (and adults) the improvements in behaviour, learning and mood that can follow from some remarkably simple changes in diet can be quite dramatic. The problem is that too many people don’t even know about this research. Instead, far too many parents who actually suspect that food may be part of their child’s problem—and have good evidence of their own to support this—are often told dismissively by the supposed experts, ‘Oh, there’s no evidence that diet can make a difference.’

This is simply untrue. There is quite a lot of evidence, and much of it is first-class…but it tends to be in different places, and is rarely pulled together. If you add it all up, the case for doing something to improve the diets of children in the UK (and other countries) is now overwhelming.

This book will tell you how to go about improving your child’s diet, with particular emphasis on the impact this can have on mood, behaviour and learning.

In my view, it’s actually verging on negligence for any professional to deny to parents that food and diet can affect their children’s behaviour—although of course there will always be other factors to consider, and dietary approaches should always be complementary to other proven management methods. However, I can’t really blame individual professionals for reflecting the training that they’ve been given and the culture in which they live and work.