Название: They Are What You Feed Them: How Food Can Improve Your Child’s Behaviour, Mood and Learning
Автор: Dr Richardson Alex
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Воспитание детей
isbn: 9780007369157
isbn:
Having said this, ‘scientific’ is the word to describe many of the case studies carefully carried out by parents and practitioners I’ve met. Often, these people have observed and experimented with dietary changes for years, and many of them have done so despite the scorn of the so-called ‘scientific establishment’. Although some of them may be misguided or plain wrong in what they have come to believe, it is my view that we would do well to pay more attention to some of their ideas, as I’ve always tried to do. In many cases it’s their insight and observations that have led to some extraordinary breakthroughs, opening up new and highly fruitful lines of scientific investigation.7
Whom and What Can You Believe?
Most of the parents I see have already consulted many other specialists and experts in their search for some effective solutions to their child’s apparent difficulties in mood, behaviour or learning. Some of the advice they’ve received has been helpful; some of it has been anything but. Many have also read numerous ‘self-help’ books and articles from magazines or newspapers, and these days a good proportion will also have spent hours and hours on the Internet trying to find out how to help their children. The feedback I usually get is that when it comes to food and diet, the amount of conflicting information leaves most people totally confused. People ask, ‘What am I supposed to believe when so many people are telling me such different things?’
Well, to start with, just ask yourself, ‘Who really benefits if I believe this?’ Apart from weighing up carefully the potential risks and costs of any course of action, the best advice I can give you is: always consider who will actually gain from your believing any information you are given. Sadly, I’ve come across a great many unscrupulous companies and individuals who are happily making money for themselves by exploiting parents’ desperation.
Rule number one: don’t be too gullible. Always think first about whether anything you are recommended could actually do your child harm, but also be particularly wary when it comes to parting with your money.
Companies’ Influence Isn’t Always Obvious
You can of course get plenty of information and advice about food and diet for free. Quite enough to drown in! In these cases you want to ask, ‘Do the people giving me this information really know any better than I do?’ Let’s start with the newspapers and magazines. Some are more reliable than others, but sadly, very few allow their journalists time to research a story properly.8 Deadlines are the name of the game. Press releases, for instance, are often picked up and turned into articles without anyone checking the sources or their credentials. Basically, the fact that you ‘read it in the papers’ or ‘saw it on TV’ is no guarantee that it isn’t just a cleverly disguised advertisement. I’m sorry to say that much, if not most, of what passes for ‘news’ on food and health in the media is likely to have come from some company that stands to make money if you’ll only believe what they’re telling you. Remember, virtually all papers and magazines and most TV channels are supported by advertising revenues, either directly or indirectly.
It’s well over 10 years now since my own research first started making headline news, and if it hadn’t been for my own personal experience of the media I really wouldn’t have believed the extent to which what you see or hear through these channels is influenced by companies who will benefit when you believe their stories. The food and drinks industry is a massively powerful force to be reckoned with. Quite apart from the direct advertising that they do—which is powerful enough—they exert a huge degree of less visible control over the information you are given and the choices available to you. The name of the game for big companies is sending out press releases, holding press conferences, wining and dining journalists and hiring the experts they need to back the stories that will benefit them.
‘I was looking at websites which talked about the effects of sugar substitutes, as I’d heard that some of them are bad for you. One site in particular did a very good job of listing everything wrong with artificial sweeteners…but it was only later that I found out that this site was hosted by a sugar company! Now I know why they said nothing at all about avoiding sugar itself.’—Sonia
Worse still, the enormous profits that the big food and drink companies make can allow them to ‘buy’ only the research they want to see done (as also happens with pharmaceutical products, of course). And if they know they aren’t going to like the results, they’re just not going to do the study. Truly independent research looking into how food can affect behaviour really has been extraordinarily limited, because, apart from a few charitable trusts, nobody has been prepared to fund this kind of work. There’s just no profit in it for the companies—and Government agencies and other conventional funding bodies have been either too blind, too conservative, or maybe too much ‘under the influence’ to look into this rather important area. As well as the conventional food industries, we have the ‘diet industry’, the ‘health food industry’ and the ‘food supplement industry’. All of them are in the business of making money, whatever else they may tell you. As long as you keep this in mind, you can actually get a lot of useful information from these sources—but always take care to read around, weigh up the different points of view, and make your own decisions.
Read around, weigh up the different points of view, and make your own decisions.
The Pharmaceutical Industry
The pharmaceutical industry is a major beneficiary from the status quo because impoverished diets which will cause or exacerbate all kinds of diseases and disorders suit the drug companies just perfectly! These huge multinationals have an extremely powerful influence on what you are led to believe, and they really do help to set the research agenda in medicine and other health-related areas. Having worked alongside doctors and within medical schools for many years, and attended numerous conferences in the fields of medicine and psychiatry, I have become appalled at the extent to which the influence of so-called ‘Big Pharma’ dominates the medical training that our doctors and allied health professionals receive. Their influence on scientific research has also become so great that any line of enquiry that doesn’t fit with their preferred ‘medical model’ (ideally, one that requires you and your child to take their drugs—in the long term if possible), or which could serve to undermine some of their most profitable markets, is likely to go unfunded by conventional sources. If the research does get done anyway, it can then be very difficult to publish if it might upset these vested interests.9
The Specialists
Do the specialists advising you know anything about food and diet, and its potential effects on brains and behaviour? Sadly, unlike vets, most doctors in the UK and other Western countries still receive very little training in nutrition and its implications for health. They do learn about the basic ‘deficiency diseases’ (such as scurvy, pellagra or rickets) and there is now an increasing focus on ‘preventative medicine’—which usually includes at least some attention to nutrition and diet. But even though good nutrition is essentially about the body’s biochemistry, medical training usually puts far more emphasis on the way in which drugs can be used to manipulate this. Synthetic drugs can be patented СКАЧАТЬ