Junk Foods, Sugar, and Violence

My little great-nephew Alex (the one who became a vegetarian at four years old) has a horrifying reaction to sugar. Within minutes of consuming even small amounts—in drinks or food—a charming little boy becomes an uncontrollable child, shouting and even hitting people. And it seems that he is one of many, as several of his friends at school are also on sugar-free diets.

My son Grub has a friend who was diagnosed with bipolar personality disorder. As he is a very large man there were times when his behavior was frightening—he actually chased his father around the kitchen table with a knife during one of his manic episodes. It was just after this that Grub read an article about the effect of sugar on the metabolism of some people, and convinced his friend to cut out sugar from his diet. The result was amazing—he became a much calmer person immediately. So I was fascinated to read about a study linking sugar and violence among prisoners.

Stephen J. Schoenthaler, Ph.D., a sociology professor at the Stanislaus campus of California State University, had a hunch there was a link between three alarming statistical curves: the number of incidences of useless violence, the increased consumption of fast foods, and the increased consumption of processed sugars. He convinced a large-scale prison facility in Virginia to help him conduct a study with inmates. Initially the prisoners were fed a typical American diet that included white bread, hamburgers, sausages, fried potatoes, cookies, sweet snacks, and soft drinks. After a few days they were switched to a whole food diet that included plenty of fresh vegetables, fruits, whole meal bread, as well as fish and lean meats.

The results were remarkable. Once they moved on to healthy foods, behavior problems, such as violence and verbal abusiveness, immediately decreased. When they were switched back to the soft drinks and fatty foods, behavior problems returned. The findings created a stir in the national prison network, and Schoenthaler became a much sought after nutritional advisor. He also conducted an interesting study with approximately 8,000 teenagers at nine juvenile correctional facilities. In each site, the standard diet—high in sugar and other refined carbohydrates—was switched to include plenty of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, as well as vitamins and mineral supplements. During that year, the facilities reported that the incidence of physical violence, verbal abuse, and escape and suicide attempts decreased by almost half.

After twenty years of studying nutrition and behavior at juvenile and adult correctional facilities and in public schools, Schoenthaler is now convinced that the effects of diet are so powerful that everyone should be held responsible for what they eat, just as they are for what they drink when driving. Which means we must do a better and better job of educating people, and ensuring that all these junk foods that we know are causing so many problems are removed from the stores and from our kitchen cupboards.

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT

One of the main threats to our health and the health of our planet is overconsumption. More than a billion of the most poverty-stricken people in the world are suffering and in some cases dying from lack of enough food. Meanwhile, it's estimated that a billion of the wealthiest people in the world are at risk of debilitating diseases and death partly because they are eating too much of the wrong kinds of food.

A person living in an industrialized country consumes, on average, twice as much grain, three times as much meat, nine times as much paper, and eleven times as much gasoline as someone in a developing country, according to the World Resources Institute. With all this consumption comes a huge amount of waste. Timothy W. Jones, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, spent ten years studying food waste, examining farms and orchards, warehouses and retail outlets, dining rooms and landfills. His research shows that an average family of four currently tosses out $590 per year in meat, fruits, vegetables, and grain products. Nationwide, he says, household food waste alone adds up to $43 billion.

When I first returned from Tanzania, having experienced true poverty firsthand, to the so-called developed world, the thing that utterly shocked me was the waste. The waste of packaging. The throw-away this, that, and the other. And the waste of food. That was the greatest shock of all. The size of the portions of food served, especially in America. The amount left over in restaurants, after school meals, in the homes I visited. And the reason for my distress was not only that I had just spent many years living among people who had almost nothing, but also because I can never forget the lean war years of my childhood. We were taught that waste was one of the greatest sins.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Tempting and convenient as it can be, we should all avoid fast foods whenever possible and I certainly have given you plenty of incentive for doing so. Each one of us can also make a concerted effort to create as little waste as possible, each day. We can remember to start with smaller piles of food on our plates and ask for reduced portions at social gatherings and restaurants. We can always order more food or go back for seconds. Why not begin small and keep adding if you are still hungry?

When we bring groups of students together for a Roots & Shoots summit, we provide buckets for recycling various waste products, including food. After the first meal we carefully weigh this bucket of food scraps. The kids are horrified when they realize how much they have put on their plates, only to throw it out afterward. The amount of waste is then equated to how long that amount of food would feed a family living in poverty.

If you have a garden, you can make compost from food waste, as we do at my home in Bournemouth. But you can compost even if you do not have a garden. I met a group of youngsters from South Central Los Angeles, in the inner city, who collected food scraps from local residents, and broke it down by using worms. This is known as vermiculture—which can actually be located in the living room for there is no smell! Moreover, it gives the very best quality soil, which the children sold to local parks and greenhouses. They had created a flourishing business!

They Have The Corn

Today, the agricultural system in central Nebraska is considered one of the most productive in the world. But it produces mostly the same crop—corn. Nebraska is the third largest producer of corn, after Illinois and Idaho, much of it grown for cattle feed. The next most frequently grown crop is soybeans. The fertile soil of the Platte Valley can also grow other crops, such as sugar beets, dry edible beans, sorghum, wheat, and alfalfa. But because corn is the most responsive to applications of water and fertilizer, some fields have produced only corn for the past thirty years.

There are problems associated with growing this single crop over long periods. For one thing the lack of crop rotation means the potential for loss of soil as a result of wind erosion. For another, it encourages large populations of corn rootworms, corn borers, red spider mites, and others, and these gradually build up resistance to pesticides—requiring ever more chemicals to be used in attempts to eradicate them. These chemicals run off into the surface water, and seep into the groundwater. The aquifer has become increasingly poisoned. Also, with no alternative harvests, farmers suffer terrible losses when the price of corn drops. And this can be manipulated by the big corporations flooding the market, seeking to buy up and control ever more land as small farmers give up the struggle to survive.

THEY HAVE THE FACTORY FARMS

A facility with 40,000 hogs creates as much sewage as 160,000 people—nearly half the population of Omaha. But the distribution of feces produces more than just smell pollution; it also introduces bacteria and toxins into the air and groundwater and—because water sources are invariably linked—also to rivers and streams, where there can be devastating consequences to the local ecology. But all too often, by the time the effects of waste from these facilities are detected, it is too late for local plants, animals, and sometimes humans.

I met a man in Nebraska this spring who had lived and farmed in a small town since 1937. He remembered well the Nebraska hog farms that served an important role in their communities. Legislation for the dumping of hog waste was irrelevant then, because no hog farmer had more hogs than his property could carry. No one would have considered testing the groundwater for contaminants because no one was getting sick—adults weren't developing respiratory problems and babies weren't developing "blue baby syndrome"—and millions of fish weren't turning up dead in their streams.

But things began to change in the 1980s, he said, when big business came onto the scene and the first factory farms, or Confined Animal Feeding Operations, for pigs were established. As these began to raise large numbers of pigs that grew fast, due to hormones and antibiotics administered in the feed, the price per hog quickly plummeted from about $36 to $8. Local pig farmers found it difficult to make ends meet, and many went out of business.

Quite apart from the shocking cruelty of these factory farms, there is the problem of the disposal of pigs' waste. This is dumped in open "lagoons." Sometimes it is diluted and sprayed on adjacent (and often genetically modified) crops—fertilizer laced with residual antibiotics and often antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The stench of this waste is revolting. My friend Tom Mangelsen has his permanent residence in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, but he still maintains a cabin in Nebraska, the state in which he was raised. On one of my visits to Tom's cabin the nearby field had just been treated with the diluted pig waste, and the smell made us both feel quite sick. No wonder the value of properties drops when a hog operation is built within smelling distance. The dung of the pigs on the farms of my childhood did not smell like that, not in the least. No wonder the American pork industry targets poor rural towns where it is cheapest to win political favor and easiest to silence critics.

"You could never dump this stuff in New York City," said Laura Krebsbach, one of the nation's experts on state and federal regulations pertaining to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, "but it's hard to get a big outcry in Cherry County, Nebraska, where the population is one person per square mile."

THEY HAVE THE GLOBAL SUPERMARKET

Farmers here face many other problems. In his insightful book Eat Here, Brian Halweil explains how, as recently as the 1950s, virtually all of the fruits and vegetables consumed in Nebraska cities were grown locally. Then long- distance transport of food became possible with refrigerated long-haul trucks, cheap gasoline, advances in food processing that made long-term storage possible, and a federally subsidized interstate highway system. This heralded the arrival of huge supermarkets appearing in more and more cities and towns selling food from all over the country and from overseas. And so, as local farmland declined in profitability, thousands of family farms in Nebraska (and the surrounding states) went under and farming communities were increasingly replaced by subdivisions and concrete. And the remaining farmers mostly depend on good harvests of corn and soybeans for their survival.