Forum; The effects of vitamin supplements on retarded children;The Correlation between Diet and Crime

Bye. From the Center for Telecommunication Services at the University of Texas at Austin, welcome to Forum. Nutrition plays a vital role in maintaining a well-tuned healthy being. In this week's program, we'll look at two differing experiments in which proper nutrition was essential to attaining favorable results, all coming up on forum.

In the past, little attention has been paid to the importance of proper nutrition. But today, interest is growing in several new areas where nutrition is the foundation that has led to some interesting revelations. Dr. Donald Davis is a research scientist associate at the Clayton Foundation Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Recently, he completed a research project testing the effects of vitamin supplements on retarded children. He participated in an experiment conducted by Dr. Ruth Harrell, Professor Emeritus of Research Psychology at Old Dominion University and Norfolk, Virginia. The experiment was conducted by Dr. Ruth Harrell, Professor Emeritus of Research Psychology at Old Dominion University and Norfolk, Virginia.

The experiment involved recruiting 20 children in the Virginia area who were mentally retarded. They were divided into two groups, with one group receiving a nutritional supplement, which consisted of 11 vitamins and large amounts, and eight minerals and moderate amounts, prepared in pill form. Two pills were given with each meal. The other group took a dummy look-alike tablet or a placebo. The groups took these pills for four months, then eight months, measuring IQs along with height, visual acuity, and so forth, before, during, and after. Dr. Davis. Basically, she found that after four months of getting a supplement that the children's IQs went up on an average of about 10 points, and after another four months of supplementation, they were up on an average of about 15 points. There were other benefits, too, such as they grew faster when they were on the supplement.

These benefits didn't happen in those children who were on the placebo. This was an important part of the experiment that some of the children got dummy tablets that didn't contain any nutrients for a period, and no one in Virginia knew which children were getting these tablets at the time. None of the IQ testers or anything like that. This is an important way to control an experiment, so you don't have biases creeping into it that give you a spurious results. These results have been published and have received a lot of attention from the public and from physicians, and most importantly, from our point of view, from other researchers around the country who are interested in taking a look at these results and carrying out additional experiments to see if our results can be confirmed.

If so, they can begin to elaborate them and learn more about them than we could in just this small short-term experiment and just a few young people. About a third of the children had down syndrome, and one of their characteristics is that they tend to have a puffy puffiness in their face and in their extremities. And two or three of the five children who had down syndrome had noticeable loss of this puffiness in their faces. We have photographs of the children, and I think they just look more intelligent after the study, but that's a very subjective sort of thing and hard to prove. But I think you probably thought that if you saw those pictures. Let's see, another unexpected finding was one child seemed to stop the normal progression of cataracts in his eyes that were discovered at the beginning of the experiment after the end of the experiment.

The cataracts had not progressed the way they normally do. This one case is certainly not convincing, but it's suggestive and it does go along with experiments in animals that we and other people have done which have found that in animals improving nutrition can prevent or slow down the development of cataracts. There was also an indication that three of the four children who wore glasses had their vision improved and two of them after the experiment was over were advised by their ophthalmologists to discontinue wearing their glasses. Again, this is not enough examples to be scientifically convincing, but it's just suggestive. Finally, there were two children who were not a part of the study that I reported on who were being given the same supplement for their mental retardation and unexpectedly it was found that they suddenly quit having seizures which they had for years daily in spite of medication.

They suddenly quit. In one case, it was several weeks of taking this supplement before they stopped, but they stopped and have stayed stopped for two years. We're very excited about this clue and Ruth Harrell is now recruiting subjects in Virginia who are prone to seizures to see whether this result that we found in two children by accident holds up in a controlled study again using a placebo. The results of this experiment have stimulated public interest and excitement among the professionals in the mental retardation field. The results have also raised questions concerning the importance of nutrition under more normal circumstances.

In the past, people in the medical profession and even some people in the nutritional sciences have tended to have a very limited view of nutrition. They think of nutrition as being necessary to prevent things like scurvy and berry berry and that it doesn't have much to do with anything else. I, on the other hand, take a kind of an opposite view and that is to point out the fact that nutrition plays an essential role in everything that we do. There's nothing, no process that goes on in our body that doesn't involve the nutrients that we get or don't get in our diets. And we think that how well those processes are carried on depends on the quality of nutrition and it's not just a matter of being well nourished or poorly nourished. There are all sorts of shades of gray in between having scurvy or berry berry and not having scurvy and berry berry.

Now this is largely a hypothesis right now. Admittedly the experiments are not there to prove this idea in general. But the kind of experiment that we did with retarded children I think is going to cause medical and nutritional researchers to take note and to wonder to themselves. Well, if nutrition can improve life for these unusual abnormal people, what are the possibilities that improving nutrition can improve the functioning, the mental functioning and the other kinds of functioning of more normal people. And just one example of why I think they will find positive results when they do this is based on an experiment that I carried out a number of years ago, Roger Williams and I published this I think in 74 or so. So we took a large number of rats and divided them up into different groups. Forty of them, for example, I fed to them an average American diet, quote unquote, simulated as best I could from about 25 of the most common foods that are used in this country.

And for example, the three most common fruits that are consumed are apples, oranges, bananas. And what we did to simulate all fruits was just increase the amounts of the three most important ones so that the total amount of fruit was equivalent to all fruits consumed in this country. Well, we used ground beef and ground pork and eggs and milk and cabbage and tomatoes and coffee, believe it or not, coffee supplies about 10% of the magnesium in the average American diet. And so we felt it was important to include that in these 25 items. Okay, so there were 40 rats who got this diet from the time that they were weaned and there were 40 more rats who got the identical diet except that a multivitamin and mineral supplement was added to it. It contained 25 nutrients, vitamins and minerals. None of them in large amounts, all of them very modest amounts, but a much larger number than is usually included in supplements that people would take, for example, a typical supplement might contain 10 nutrients in it instead of 25.

Well, we found that after a few months, although if you were to just look at the animals, you couldn't tell any difference between the two groups. Under experimental conditions, there were a number of differences that were statistically significant, meaning that they were caused by the supplement and not just a random fluctuation between the two groups. For example, we anesthetized the animals and removed a small spot of skin from their back and measured the time that it took for this gap to fall from this wound. And we found that the supplemented animals wounds healed more quickly. An unexpected observation was that the supplemented animals recovered from the anesthesia quite a bit more quickly than the non-supplemented animals.

Another unexpected observation was that the supplemented animals re-grew the fur on their back more quickly. In each case, there was considerable variation from animal to animal, but on the average, there were these differences. Another example was I placed a bowl of sugar in the cage with the animals for three days and measured weight it before and after. They had this along with their usual food and water. And we found that on the average, the supplemented animals chose voluntarily to eat 60% less sugar than those animals that were just on the average American diet. This is just an example of something that nobody could predict. Nobody can explain how it happens. We don't know if it applies to humans or not. But here is nutritional quality affecting something that nobody thinks of as being related to nutrition.

So it's examples like this that make me think that when medical and nutritional researchers begin to pay serious attention to the relationship between nutrition and essentially any aspect of life, they will find it makes a difference. The average American diet is far from being the epitome of well-balanced nutritional intake. Ironically, our wealth and abundance of foodstuffs also leads us to having opportunities for eating very poorly. In some cases, in ways that less well-off countries don't, they simply don't have the capabilities that we have of eating tremendous quantities of highly partitioned refined foods. Dr. Davis. The dramatic fact about the average American diet, and I didn't find this out until I did this experiment with rats that I just told you about, the dramatic fact is that well over half of the weight or the, that's the dry weight or well over half of the calories of the American food supply consists of just three things, which have had most or all of their nutrients removed from them. These three things have a lot of things in common. One of them is that they bear no nutritional relationship to anything that ever grew on earth.

No food that grows is nutritionally like these three things. Another thing they share in common is that they're not fed to animals by the professionals who want to take care of animals. These three things are purified sugar, refined grains, mostly white flour, but white rice is another example, and separated fats, purified concentrated fats that have been separated from the original animal or vegetable source that they came from, whether it's corn oil or soybean oil or lard or butter. Those are all examples of separated fats. Another thing that those three things have in common is that they're very concentrated calories. Only small amounts of them, it only takes, as I recall, about a cup of these three things a day to supply over half of a person's calorie needs. So that little cup doesn't look like over half of their calorie intake, and that's because most foods contain a large amount of water, and so they're big and bulky.

Vegetables and fruits, for example, are 90% water, meats are 2-3rds water. I didn't mention alcohol. This is the fourth thing that some people consume considerable amounts of, and it's in the same category of a purified substance that is not available to animals in nature, it's not available to animals who are fed by professionals, but it contains a lot of calories and not much else. When you add alcohol in this brings the total up to about 65% of the calories on the average in the American food supply coming from these essentially refined substances. Dr. Donald Davis, research scientist associate at the Clayton Foundation Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Social, hereditary, and economic factors are usually the agreed upon components for the causes of crime.

Now, several people are looking toward new evidence that can be a contributing factor. An increasing number of scientists and physicians are concluding that malnutrition, food allergies, and other nutritional deficiencies can set off aggressive and mind-warping behavior leading to criminal acts. In some instances, the food allergy or malnutrition can unbalance mental processes leading to violent behavior. In other cases, an ailment known as hypoglycemia, a lower than normal level of sugar in the blood, can trigger irrational behavior that can be controlled through the diet. Earl Staling has been a lawyer for the past 15 years. About 10 years ago, when he was an attorney with legal aid in Toledo, Ohio, he became interested in the connection between nutrition and environment and his clients' health and behavioral problems. While currently working on his PhD in nutrition, he is a nutrition and ecology counselor at the Austin Wellness Center. He explains how certain diets can potentially lead to criminal behavior.

Well, a diet that involves highly refined foods, which, like white sugar, white flour, is highly deficient in various nutrients that enable the nerve system to function normally, can be a cause of serious nutritional depletion and of disordered body chemistry. When the nervous system is disordered, the brain, which is part of that system, is more irritable. Also, if a person through poor nutrition or from overuse of particular foods that they just have too much of, it might even be sometimes a nutritious food. All of sugar might be a more common worst defender. Let's take, for example, milk. If someone has something like that that maybe they've been allergic to all their lies or maybe through overuse, they become sensitive to it. The body can't break it down properly. Some fractions of that get into the bloodstream and when they reach maybe the brain, or it might be any other part of the body where this irritation occurs, there tends to be a swelling of tissue, including nerve tissue. Now, if that's in parts of the brain that govern behavior, the emotional seat, why someone can become very irritable, very angry, out of control. They might simply be hyperactive and unable to concentrate.

Their thought processes may not be functioning properly. They may not even know what they're doing. And in that case, behavior can be very severely affected by nutritional intake. Because each person's body chemistry is unique, there is a variety of foods which can cause these adverse or allergic reactions. Yet the foods which are found to be the worst offenders and most common causes of this behavior may surprise you. Wheat is one of the most common causes. Wheat and corn are at the top of the list, closely followed by milk. And other foods that are high on the list include eggs, oranges, peanuts, beef, potato, and you go on down the list. And it depends a lot on the individual's own frequency. There are people who, and it tends to be foods that crave a great deal. People apparently tend to become addicted to things that they either have very frequently or that are irritating to their system, just like tobacco.

Most people, the first time they smoke, cough or feel busy or something like that. And the body tries to build up some kind of a defense to that. The hormone system is involved. And that defense is getting them hyped up to handle the physical stress of the tobacco or the food. And it can be a chemical, which is very often part of this whole picture. And as long as they're hyped up, they feel good. But to remain hyped up, they have to keep having the substance. If they don't have it for a while, they start to go into something like withdrawal, comparable to drug withdrawal. And they crave the food and they may get bad symptoms. But once they're through that four days or so of being without the food, they feel much better. Dr. William Philpott, a psychiatrist and specialist in cerebral allergies, has done extensive studies in relation to food and violent behavior. For example, a 12-year-old patient of his became so aggressive after eating a banana that he picked up a stick and tried to hit another patient. After eating an apple, the boy started a fight.

A 52-year-old woman, tested on wheat, said that she felt like hitting and punching someone. An 18-year-old, tested for a reaction to tobacco, struck the examiner after having a hallucination that the examiner had horns on his head and was the devil. Dr. Philpott has noted another process that occurs in the body when addiction is present. One of the other factors that one of the physicians in this field, Dr. William Philpott, a psychiatrist, has pointed out, is that when this addictive phenomenon is going on in the body, involving foods or chemicals or whatever, it's a severe stress to the body, uses up large quantities of vitamins and minerals. In the process, the metabolism is altered some, and a byproduct of this interference with normal metabolism is a production of substances that are described as endorphins by research in the past several years.

These are the body's own production of morphine-like substances. One of these entitled methion and kephalon, according to a report that Dr. Philpott cites, is 100 times as potent, as morphine. Well, it's understandable in that case that a person could be very addicted to a food. As a lawyer, Earl Staling has worked extensively with clients that have had these food addictions, and with proper diet correction, many have achieved successful results. I found that one client who had been convicted of rape, for example, and had pled guilty to that, had a lot of symptoms, physical and nervous digestive problems he had. He had asthma, and was taking the drug for that incidentally that has an amphetamine-like compound in it to relieve those symptoms.

He felt extremely tired most of the time, and he is reported to be very belligerent and hostile and uncooperative, kind of a hopeless case by the prison officials where he was being treated by psychologists for several years. When he went on a diet that avoided the white sugar, white flour, after this physician had given a report on this, why we got an order from the court that the prison was to give a diet that avoided these foods for him. We knew it was necessary to make the prison cooperate. It wasn't for the clients to benefit solely, but so that he could stay on the diet. They also recommended that the doctor recommended that he cut caffeine consumption and also tobacco consumption. The experience of this client was that he felt much better. He didn't need the drug for his asthma, and he still did not get asthma attacks.

His behavior was greatly improved, became virtually model behavior. He had much more energy. At one point, I even got a call from his wife who indicated that she might get back together with him. He was beginning to see him and letting him see their child, and he also continued work on a GED program for his high schooling, which he'd never been able to complete. That's just one example of a case I had numerous others. A researcher who studied inmates in the Morris County, New Jersey, jail concluded that the inmates' high degree of restlessness resulted from their use of significantly more sugar, alcohol, and caffeine than non-inmates. A special dietary program administered to some of the inmates significantly reduced the number of disciplinary reports and improved the inmates' performance in academic and vocational classes. Today, it is becoming more evident that our environment and biochemical condition play an important role in our daily physical functioning.

As additional research is conducted, more can be learned as to the importance proper nutrition plays in our lives. Well, I think that one thing that's been learned is that the physical environment is part of the overall causation of people's either feeling good or not feeling good and of their behavior, which can include in some people anti-social behavior. I'd like to see the time when cases like that of John Hinckley, for example, shooting President Reagan don't occur. Hinckley was reported, a recent report to have been very addicted to junk food, which of course fits this, it doesn't prove anything, but I think those things should be explored. It doesn't mean that everyone who consumes them is going to become this way because different people are affected very differently by these kinds of things. When people have their biochemistry straightened out, they have much more energy, they're more calm, and they're able to listen better and benefit much more from psychological counseling or just from other personal relationships.

And when these things are tried routinely in the criminal justice sphere, I think you'll get a marked reduction in crime rates. And in addition, I think the general public will become aware that from the time of conception, the nutrition of parents, that they provide each other and their children will have a dramatic effect in improving the health and behavior of their children. Earl Staleen, a nutrition and ecology counselor at the Austin Wellness Center. The research findings involving food and criminal behavior, while still limited, suggest that juvenile delinquency and crime can be traced partly to biochemical factors. Whereas in the past, these theories have been rejected by criminologists. Today, this correlation is being looked at more seriously and researched more extensively.

I'm Mary Sullivan, and you've been listening to Forum. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing, Forum, the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, 787-12. That address again is Forum, the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, 787-12. Forum is produced at Public Station KUTFM and distributed by the Center for Telecommunication Services, all at the University of Texas at Austin. This is the Longhorn Radio Network. You