Today I read an article that said nutrition might influence the ability of children with ADHD to concentrate.
Might?
That’s like putting soup in your lawn mower and discovering that it might not cut grass. Every parent knows that if you want to prevent a kid from tracking dirt on the carpet, just give him three candy bars and he can hover.
I confess there was a time when I didn’t notice the correlation between nutrition and behavior. I thought I had two modes: empty and full. And I thought some days I was tired in the middle of the day for no particular reason. Then I stopped eating carbs until dinner time and discovered that I can go all day on six hours of sleep.
There was a time, and it lasted about thirty years, when I thought I was supposed to get a stomach ache after every meal. Then I became a vegetarian. The daily stomach aches stopped and never came back.
Have you ever been around someone who went on a serious diet? There’s always a big change in personality that accompanies it. And by “change” I mean grumpy.
There’s a fascinating book called The China Study. It centers on a massive study of diet and health in China. The author’s conclusion is that while the big health risks of our time (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.) clearly have a genetic component, they are rarely triggered when people eat a plant-based diet.
http://www.thechinastudy.com/about.html [no longer available]
I have long predicted that sometime, perhaps in our lifetime, we’ll know enough about nutrition to create diets for specific individuals. Apparently some people can eat meat every day and live to 110. Others can’t. It would be nice to know which group you belong in.
For now, awareness of the importance of nutrition is too corrupted by a combination of the food industry’s hold on the government and cognitive dissonance in people who simply prefer tasty food over healthy food. Until that changes, my fellow moist robots, expect to read about more startling “discoveries” that nutrition influences behavior.