It’s a cliché, but you are what you eat. Unless you’re vegan, if we’re being literal about it all. University of Canterbury Professor Julia Rucklidge is our neurological numero uno of nutrition, our psychological doyenne of diet. Rucklidge’s research shows the benefits of dietary supplementation with micronutrients.
We’ve known for a long time that vitamins and minerals are important for our physical health and psychological wellbeing and Rucklidge has pointed out that we might not be getting all we need from our diet. Modern, intensive farming practices can mean your head of broccoli looks just as green and full of goodness as its ancestors from 50 years ago, but it may not have the same nutrition.
In 2018, she and her team published a summary of their world-first, fully-blinded, randomised control trial of supplementation for children with unmedicated ADHD.
Such trials are often referred to as the gold standard for experimentation. Participants are randomly assigned to a supplement or a placebo designed to mimic the effects of supplementation (as in, turns your wee yellow). A study is single-blind if the participants don’t know which condition they’re in, and it’s double-blind if the researchers don’t know who got what. The equivalent of an envelope is opened at the end that tells everyone who was in which camp.
When this envelope was opened in the ADHD trial and the numbers crunched, supplemented kids were almost twice as likely as placebo kids to demonstrate “much” or “very much” improvement in clinical assessment. Pretty much everyone involved (parents, clinicians, etc) identified notable decreases in aggression, and improvements in kids’ ability to appropriately regulate their emotions.
What is the mechanism for this improvement? I recently became aware (thanks RNZ’s Jim Mora) of a strand of research that takes a similar line, but with another group of people characterised by aggression and emotion dysregulation: incarcerated offenders. Turns out, the suggestion that criminality might be associated with poor nutrition dates back at least to the late-1800s, when European criminologists first made the argument. But it wasn’t until recently that this was tested.
We know there’s a link – studies have shown that children exposed to famine in the womb because of natural disasters or war are more likely to develop antisocial and other challenging behaviours. But can we intervene?
In the early-2000s, social scientist Bernard Gesch managed to wangle his way into an English facility for young male offenders and had a go at randomised supplementation, resulting in a promising reduction of aggressive or violent acts in just over a third of the inmates. Gesch and others have replicated this since, and in other rehabilitative facilities around the world. Seems like the kind of thing that’s so easy, we should be doing it routinely, right?
Coming back to the “why?” There are several possible mechanisms. One involves impulsivity. Many of us get annoyed, but most of us resist the urge to whack our antagonist. Prisons are full of people who react on that impulse. Insufficient zinc, calcium, iron and magnesium have all been implicated in impulsivity, and that appears to be because they’re important for neurotransmitter function – the chemical messengers that zip about our brains making things happen.
Some vitamins, including good old vitamin C, reduce inflammation, which has also been implicated in impulsivity.
Ideally, though, we want to intervene before someone ends up in prison. Cue University of Pennsylvania professor Adrian Raine, who has shown that childhood supplementation with Omega-3 promotes healthy brain development and reduced impulsivity and conduct problems.
I, for one, am starving. Time to make breakfast.
