Industry should engage in behaviour and nutrition research
nutrition on behaviour, and the government and food industry should
be more involved, said experts at last week's Healthy Foods Summit
in London.
Bernard Gesch, senior research scientist at Oxford University's Department of Physiology and director of research charity Natural Justice, presented attendees with compelling case studies indicating that addressing nutritional needs can lead to dramatic improvements in behaviour in adults with serious social and mental problems and criminal convictions.
His comments are particularly pertinent at a time when prisons, particularly in the UK, are full to busting point and governments are casting about for ways to reduce the inmate population.
A double-blind placebo-controlled study conducted by Gesch and colleagues from the University of Surrey in 2002 found evidence that giving vitamin, mineral and essential fatty acid supplements to young adult prisoners (aged 18 to 21 years) considerably reduced antisocial behaviour including violence.
Published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the study concluded that the implications were similar for those eating poor diets in the community.
"We urgently need more research," said Gesch. "But we can't do it without the help of the government and the food industry."
Gesch said that it is now thought that humans evolved in an aquatic environment, not in the savannahs of Africa as previously thought. Water in the savannahs is in short supply and there are no rich sources of the omega-3 fatty acid DHA, which figures large in the make-up of the human brain.
"The ability to exploit coastal and lakeside resources is now seen as a decisive factor in surpassing Neanderthals," he said. "It is the reason for the increasing brain size, and our genes probably adapted to that diet and the kind of diet that made us smart."
In developing countries, a deficiency of essential nutrients such as vitamin A, iron, zinc and iodine leads to physical disease and seriously impacts mental development and function.
Back in the modern and developed world, in the USA 84 per cent of the population's essential fatty acid intake is omega-6 and 16 per cent is omega-3. In Japan, on the other hand, 35 per cent is omega-6 and 65 per cent omega-3.
While scientists cannot yet say for sure what the effects of these ratios may be on the human brain, there are suggestions that a lower omega-3 intake may be related to a higher homicide rate.
When it comes to more research into nutrition and behaviour, however, the area falls between the demarcations of different disciplines: the medical community considers nutrition to be part of alternative and complementary medicine, while the nutritional sciences do not cover behaviour.
"Nutrition affects the genes. Are genes alternative?" asked Gesch.
"If the nutritional approach works, it will work irrespective of legislative and social boundaries," he said. "We need a joined up approach. There can be no better investment".
