Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat: Research with British and US offenders
suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behaviour...
Felicity Lawrence
Tuesday October 17, 2006, Guardian
That Dwight Demar is able to sit in front of us, sober, calm, and employed, is "a miracle", he declares in the cadences of a prayer-meeting sinner. He has
been rocking his 6ft 2in bulk to and fro while delivering a confessional account of his past into the middle distance. He wants us to know what has saved
him after 20 years on the streets: "My dome is working. They gave me some kind of pill and I changed. Me, myself and I, I changed."
Demar has been in and out of prison so many times he has lost count of his convictions. "Being drunk, being disorderly, trespass, assault and battery; you
name it, I did it. How many times I been in jail? I don't know, I was locked up so much it was my second home."
Demar has been taking part in a clinical trial at the US government's National Institutes for Health, near Washington. The study is investigating the effects of
omega-3 fatty acid supplements on the brain, and the pills that have effected Demar's "miracle" are doses of fish oil.
The results emerging from this study are at the cutting edge of the debate on crime and punishment. In Britain we lock up more people than ever before.
Nearly 80,000 people are now in our prisons, which reached their capacity this week.
But the new research calls into question the very basis of criminal justice and the notion of culpability. It suggests that individuals may not always be
responsible for their aggression. Taken together with a study in a high-security prison for young offenders in the UK, it shows that violent behaviour may be
attributable at least in part to nutritional deficiencies.
The UK prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent
offences they committed in the prison fell by 37%. Although no one is suggesting that poor diet alone can account for complex social problems, the former
chief inspector of prisons Lord Ramsbotham says that he is now "absolutely convinced that there is a direct link between diet and antisocial behaviour,
both that bad diet causes bad behaviour and that good diet prevents it."
The Dutch government is currently conducting a large trial to see if nutritional supplements have the same effect on its prison population. And this week,
new claims were made that fish oil had improved behaviour and reduced aggression among children with some of the most severe behavioural difficulties
in the UK.
Deficiency
For the clinician in charge of the US study, Joseph Hibbeln, the results of his trial are not a miracle, but simply what you might predict if you understand the
biochemistry of the brain and the biophysics of the brain cell membrane. His hypothesis is that modern industrialised diets may be changing the very
architecture and functioning of the brain.
We are suffering, he believes, from widespread diseases of deficiency. Just as vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy, deficiency in the essential fats the brain
needs and the nutrients needed to metabolise those fats is causing of a host of mental problems from depression to aggression. Not all experts agree, but
if he is right, the consequences are as serious as they could be. The pandemic of violence in western societies may be related to what we eat or fail to eat.
Junk food may not only be making us sick, but mad and bad too.
In Demar's case the aggression has blighted many lives. He has attacked his wife. "Once she put my TV out the door, I snapped off and smacked her." His
last spell in prison was for a particularly violent assault. "I tried to kill a person. Then I knew something need be done because I was half a hundred and I
was either going to kill somebody or get killed."
Demar's brain has blanked out much of that last attack. He can remember that a man propositioned him for sex, but the details of his own response are
hazy.
When he came out of jail after that, he bought a can of beer and seemed headed for more of the same until a case worker who had seen adverts for
Hibbeln's trial persuaded him to take part.
The researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which is part of NIH, had placed adverts for aggressive alcoholics in the
Washington Post in 2001. Some 80 volunteers came forward and have since been enrolled in the double blind study. They have ranged from homeless
people to a teacher to a former secret service agent. Following a period of three weeks' detoxification on a locked ward, half were randomly assigned to 2
grams per day of the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA for three months, and half to placebos of fish-flavoured corn oil.
An earlier pilot study on 30 patients with violent records found that those given omega-3 supplements had their anger reduced by one-third, measured by
standard scales of hostility and irritability, regardless of whether they were relapsing and drinking again. The bigger trial is nearly complete now and Dell
Wright, the nurse administering the pills, has seen startling changes in those on the fish oil rather than the placebo. "When Demar came in there was
always an undercurrent of aggression in his behaviour. Once he was on the supplements he took on the ability not to be impulsive. He kept saying, 'This is
not like me'."
Demar has been out of trouble and sober for a year now. He has a girlfriend, his own door key, and was made employee of the month at his company
recently. Others on the trial also have long histories of violence but with omega-3 fatty acids have been able for the first time to control their anger and
aggression. J, for example, arrived drinking a gallon of rum a day and had 28 scars on his hand from punching other people. Now he is calm and his
cravings have gone. W was a 19st barrel of a man with convictions for assault and battery. He improved dramatically on the fish oil and later told doctors
that for the first time since the age of five he had managed to go three months without punching anyone in the head.
Threat to society
Hibbeln is a psychiatrist and physician, but as an employee of the US government at the NIH he wears the uniform of a commander, with his decorations
for service pinned to his chest. As we queued to get past the post-9/11 security checks at the NIH federal base, he explained something of his view of the
new threat to society.
Over the last century most western countries have undergone a dramatic shift in the composition of their diets in which the omega-3 fatty acids that are
essential to the brain have been flooded out by competing omega-6 fatty acids, mainly from industrial oils such as soya, corn, and sunflower. In the US, for
example, soya oil accounted for only 0.02% of all calories available in 1909, but by 2000 it accounted for 20%. Americans have gone from eating a fraction
of an ounce of soya oil a year to downing 25lbs (11.3kg) per person per year in that period. In the UK, omega-6 fats from oils such as soya, corn, and
sunflower accounted for 1% of energy supply in the early 1960s, but by 2000 they were nearly 5%. These omega-6 fatty acids come mainly from industrial
frying for takeaways, ready meals and snack foods such as crisps, chips, biscuits, ice-creams and from margarine. Alcohol, meanwhile, depletes
omega-3s from the brain. (continued here)
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medicine, but will interest his patients in
the care of the human body, in diet, and in
the cause and prevention of disease."
Thomas Edison
