Diet and Criminality

by Richard Burton - 2002

Of all the increasingly clear connections being made between poor nutrition and disease, the link between junk food and crime is perhaps the most disturbing. A recent UK study re-confirms longstanding suspicions that the criminally antisocial behaviour that lands many people in jail may be due largely to their appalling diet. The report, in the British Journal of Psychiatry , revealed that a group of inmates in an institute for young offenders in Aylesbury experienced a 35% reduction in antisocial behaviour after taking pills containing nothing more than recommended levels of vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids.

The first disturbing thing is how this came to be regarded as a major news story at all, Findings such as these have been published over and over again in reputable scientific journals for the past 20 years or so. Following pioneering work by Alexander Schauss in American prisons , Dr Stephen Schoenthaler, now professor at California State University, set out to rigorously test the emerging hypothesis that poor diet could have a significant adverse effect on behaviour and brain function. In one early trial he managed to reduce the amount of sugars, fats and additives in the diets of 8,000 delinquents in New York remand homes. The effort was rewarded by a 47% reduction in antisocial behaviour.

Further successful studies often demonstrated even greater beneficial effects. Sceptics the began to question the findings by claiming the subjects were only behaving better because their participation in the study was attracting unusual amounts of therapeutic attention and care. Schoenthaler's team had to prove it was diet alone that was causing the improvements. They abandoned changes to food and meals, and started using mineral and vitamin supplements instead to upgrade the nutritional intake of their subjects. This approach allowed them to design double-blind, placebo-controlled trials, in which half of the subjects would receive genuine supplements while the other group took a 'dummy' placebo supplement. Who had taken the real supplement would not be known by anyone until all the results were in, and so the 'attention' criticism would not apply.

In later studies, the method was refined even further by grouping the subjects according to whether or not their blood levels of vitamins and minerals had actually responded to the supplementation. A trial reported by Schoenthaler in 1997 involved 62 confined delinquents aged 13 to 17 years over three months . Both violent and non-violent rule violations were measured before and during the trial and, as before, nobody knew which of the two groups was receiving the genuine supplement and which the placebo. The results showed a net reduction in violent rule violations of almost 30% in the supplemented compared to the placebo group subjects

But the findings revealed by the blood tests were far more spectacular. Twenty-six habitually violent subjects had donated blood both before the trial and after it began. Among the ten active-group subjects whose blood levels of vitamins remained unchanged during the trial (probably because they failed to actually take the supplement) there was no marked change in violent incidents (39 before and 37 during). In contrast, the 16 subjects whose low blood vitamin levels were corrected during the trial were involved in only 11 violent acts during the study period, compared with 131 in the three weeks preceding the trial.

Bernard Gesch, author of the study that has prompted the latest fuss, is another researcher with a long-term commitment to similar research in the UK. Back in the 1980s, then working for social services, he impressed magistrates by demonstrating marked improvements in the behaviour of troubled youngsters, simply by improving their nutrition. "We found that nearly all had problems with their blood sugar levels. When we corrected that by giving them the vitamins and mineral they needed to handle glucose properly the results were striking. Once or twice the magistrates said they couldn't believe it was the same person. One juvenile with dozens of court cases to his name made up with his family; another stopped stealing vans and got a job, a wife and children"

Another disturbing dimension of this issue is the obvious questions it raises about youngsters who are not - as yet - in trouble with the law for their antisocial behaviour, but often exhibit such problems in school or home. Schoolteachers throughout Europe and N America continually complain of rising levels of classroom disruption and violence. In 2002, Schoenthaler's team decided to see if their findings from incarcerated delinquents who already had a history of antisocial behaviour would still apply to normal children aged 6 to 12 years in an Arizona school setting . During this four-month long, double-blind and placebo-controlled trial, half the children received a low-dose (50% of RDA) vitamin-mineral supplement. By the end, those on the active supplement had been disciplined once on average, compared with 1.9 times for the placebo group. The children who took the active supplement produced lower rates of threats/fighting, vandalism, disorderly conduct, defiance, obscenities, refusal to work or serve, endangering others, and non-specified offences.

There is no disputing that the nutritional profile of the junk-food-based diet common in Ireland is as dire as that in Britain, and not far behind America's. Neither can we deny that our heart disease and many cancer rates are well up there with the leaders, along with a matching tide of obesity and diabetes. And everyone now agrees that these two things are linked. Unfortunately, however, when it comes to the commonsense and, as we have seen, repeatedly demonstrated connection between poor diet and antisocial behaviour, we still seem far from a consensus view that would surely allow huge progress in this area. If heart, colon and kidney can be wrecked by poor diet, why is it so hard to accept that the delicate functions of the brain - the most energy-greedy of all our organs - cannot be adversely affected. The minimal cost of nutritionally upgrading the menus of prisons, remand homes and the like would surely be totally insignificant compared with the benefits in terms of reduced violence and antisocial behaviour. If, as research has repeatedly indicated, some people become 'normal' when eating well, we can also confidently expect less recidivism, and thus less likelihood of delinquent youths progressing to adult crime as a matter of course.

So could it really be that thousands of Irish people each year are being locked away not because they are 'bad', but simply because their dreadful eating habits have precipitated criminally antisocial behaviour?