Читать книгу They Are What You Feed Them: How Food Can Improve Your Child’s Behaviour, Mood and Learning - Dr Richardson Alex - Страница 18

Ingredients

 Chicken carcasses

 Chicken skin

 ‘Mechanically recovered’ bits of bird

 Artificial additives (colourings, flavourings, preservatives, texture-modifying agents)

 Hydrogenated (bad) fats

Procedure

 Scrape the skin and other bits off the machinery or factory floor.

 Add to chicken carcass and put in high-speed blender.

 Add the bad fats, texture-modifiers and other additives.

 Form into nugget shapes and cover with ‘bread crumbs’ (more additives).

 Freeze and package attractively.

 Sell to parents to feed to their children.

 Sell to schools and restaurants en masse for the same purpose.

*with due credit to J. Oliver and Co for showing that consumers do often change their preferences when you tell them what they’re really eating.

It’s not just what has been added to our food that matters—it’s also what’s been taken away. In Chapter 4 we’ll look at essential nutrients. As you’ll see, there are lots of these—but many are seriously lacking from the diets of children, adolescents and adults in the UK. How would you know? Well, deficiencies in some nutrients lead to well-documented physical symptoms, but these are not always recognized as such—and may be treated with medications that can make matters worse. What about mental symptoms? Can a poor diet alone really cause bad behaviour? Later, you’ll hear more about a rigorous study of young offenders carried out in a high-security prison.³ In this study, giving just the recommended daily amounts of vitamins and minerals (with some essential fatty acids) with no other changes actually reduced the number of violent offences by more than 35 per cent. Can you imagine that effect translated into the wider community? What might be achieved in your child’s school, or your neighbourhood, if aggression and antisocial behaviour fell by that amount? Given the potential implications, wouldn’t you think the Government would be keen to follow up on these kinds of findings? In the UK, sadly the answer is ‘No, not yet.’ The funding for this particular research (including replication studies now underway) has been provided almost entirely by charities.⁴