After months of not really getting a grip on anything much, I found that my mind settled whilst in Sweden so that I could go to bed at 22:30, three and a half hours earlier than I generally do at home, sleep like a baby (only without all the crying and pooing oneself), and wake, raring to go (subject to getting a dose of coffee) at 7:00 the next day. I attributed this to fresh air, exercise, and diet.
Since getting back to blighty, I’ve crept back to 01:00 bedtimes, and lack of being able to put my weight behind the jobs I have to do. Last night I decided I’d had it with rubbish food and take-aways, and bought a cabbage, some minced beef and some white potatoes. Chucking in some onion, black pepper, breadcrumbs and egg I came up with meatballs, mash, and boiled cabbage, and it was gorgeous!
I’m convinced there’s a direct and near-immediate link between nutrition levels and feelings of contentment. When you allow yourself to become deficient in something your body needs, or you take an excess of something your body needs to be rid of, it tries to signal this but our skills at reading our own tummies are not sophisticated enough to let us understand the problem. As a result we might get generaly feelings of discontent, worries of inferiority, whatever.
Jamie Oliver has been figureheading work by Jeanette Orrey who has documented the decline of school dinners, and links have been shown between poor diet and ADHD. This morning they were talking about Ritalin on the T.V. someone from Dundee university was concerned that we weren’t giving our kids enough of it. “We would expect roughly 30 in 1000 children to be given drugs. Instead the figure is only 1 in 6 or 1 in 7.” I don’t think we need to pay attention to anything else he said in THAT interview. He sounds like he needs to take something to improve his concentration.
Rather than stirring more mood-altering chemicals into the melting -pots of our young children’s bodies, can’t we just keep an emergency supply of potatoes nearby? Seriously. We’ve had at least 40 million years to get used to eating things that we’ve picked off a tree or pulled out of the ground, and less than two generations to acclimatise to the new, semi-toxic food environment.
8 comments so far...
We’ve got that book, and we’ve tried almost every recipe in it. They taste great, and they’re a huge hit with the Monster. Does it make any difference? Well, even at not quite 2 she’s noticably calmer and more able to concentrate than others her age who eat nothing but chips and ready meals (yes, people really do feed that crap to toddlers). As for Mum and Dad - we definately feel better having ditched most processed foods in favour of real ingredients with flavour, rather than rubbish ingredients topped up with salt.
well said
I’ll second that, very well said indeed.
I can’t believe that guy wants to encourage giving kids more drugs.
I think I’m very luck in that I’ve always hated the taste of fast food (with the exception of pizza) in terms of burgers and fries and fizzy drinks, and growing up we had fish and chips once a week, but everything else was healthy. I also love cooking, so for me eating healthily and limiting the food toxins I consume is easy. For those who hate cooking or can’t find the time, and those children who have been brought up on junk food, I’d imagine it would be very hard to change habits.
I also think part of the problem is people not being aware of where the food their eating comes from and what exactly is in it. Supermarkets advertise they’re food as healthy, but how health is it when there are chemicals in the ingredients list.
I hate buying things that I know I can make myself, and that what I produce will taste far better.
Oh, and I’m impressed U made meatballs, sounds just lik one of our swedish meals :-)
I was a problem kid, and I am so glad I wasn’t doped because of my behaviour. Diagnosis is often just a consensus of conjecture between experts, and experts are too often simply people who talk about a particular thing a lot.
I accept there may be children for whom drugs may prove to be the correct solution, but let’s at least try simplifying the chemical influences on their mind first.
By analogy, if you want to stop a baby crying you can gag it, or you can stop prodding it with pins.
I remember watching a program a while back about a school for children with ADHD. I can’t rememeber whether any of the children were on medication, but their behaviour did vary quite a bit. Interviews with the children and the teachers brought to light the fact that one of the biggest problems the children had was knowing that they were different to other children, but not being able to understand why they were that way, and why they did the things they did. One teenager started to kick another student after a minor argument. Afterwards he was so ashamed of himself because he knew what he’d done was wrong, he was also very frustrated because he couldn’t stop himself. The schools main aim was to try and help the children understand their condition and teach them ways of managing it, and it worked too.
My sister’s seen the reverse of that too. One child in her class attacked his best friend over a trivial matter and the next day asked him what the bump on his head was. He literally could not understand that he had caused it, no matter how often his friend told him.
You can put cabbage on pizza, but it doesn’t taste as good as meat balls.
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