Читать книгу They Are What You Feed Them: How Food Can Improve Your Child’s Behaviour, Mood and Learning - Dr Richardson Alex - Страница 14

1. This book is mainly written for parents, but it is also for anyone in the health, education and social services who has children in their care.

2. I’ve written this book to share my discoveries with you about how food and diet can affect children’s behaviour, learning and mood. This may be particularly relevant to those affected by conditions like autism, ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia, but the fundamental issues affect all of us—because we all need to get from our diets the nutrients needed for mental as well as physical health.

3. Labels like ADHD, dyslexia or autism can be useful, but they do little or nothing to explain these conditions, and they have many features in common with each other and with what’s considered normal functioning.

4. If your child has been given one of these labels, you may have been told there’s little or nothing you can do. You can do something, and one very fundamental thing that may help is to look at your child’s diet.

5. The latest official survey of the nutritional status of children in the UK shows that many of them are lacking in essential nutrients. Little publicity has been given to these findings or their potential implications for physical and mental health. Results from the survey are not even freely available on the Internet, despite this research having been funded by UK taxpayers’ money.

6. Many school meals are unhealthy, and the limited education that children do receive on food and diet cannot begin to compete with the promotion of unhealthy foods via advertising and other media. Many of the adults who care for them are no better informed.

7. Rising obesity has been blamed mainly on lack of exercise. This can obviously be a contributory factor, but in most cases diet is equally if not more important.

8. This book will present evidence that children’s diets can affect not only their physical health but also their mental health and performance.

9. ‘Junk food’ diets are now being recognized as a serious risk to the physical health of our children, but their effects on behaviour, learning and mood are still largely ignored.

10. You can help to redress this neglect—starting with your own child.