Can Better Diet Prevent Antisocial Behavior?

A few months ago, C. Bernard Gesch of Oxford University and coworkers reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry that vitamin-mineral-essential fatty acid supplements appeared capable of dampening violence in a prison population (Psychiatric News, October 2, 2002). However, J.S. Zil, M.D., J.D., chief forensic psychiatrist of the State of California Department of Corrections, told Psychiatric News that he was skeptical of their results. To which Gesch replied: “I don’t feel that Dr. Zil’s cynicism is a problem. It’s only natural to be cautious about such provocative findings.”

And now here comes another study with similar thought-provoking results. It suggests that taking nutritional supplements during childhood might reduce antisocial behavior later.

The study was headed by Adrian Raine, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and a scientist noted for exploring the brain biology of criminals (Psychiatric News, March 3, 2000). Raine reported the investigation at the 9th International Congress on Schizophrenia Research, held recently in Colorado Springs, Colo., in a session on the neurobiology and management of violence in schizophrenia. The study is also in press with the American Journal of Psychiatry.

This study, Raine explained, took place on a tropical island where the standard of living was quite low. It included 176 3-year-old children. Half the children served as a control group and received, from ages 3 through 5, their usual diets, usual exercise, and usual education. The other half served as an experimental group and received good nutrition, increased exercise, and an educational boost. The educational boost consisted of efforts to improve verbal skills, visuospatial skills, visuomotor coordination, creativity, conceptual skills, memory skills, and sensation and perception.

Raine and his colleagues then tested the subjects for conduct disorder when they reached 17 years of age and found that there was significantly less conduct disorder in the experimental group. They also found that this effect was especially prevalent in the experimental subjects who had been malnourished at the start of the study.

Raine and his coworkers again assessed subjects for criminal behavior at age 23. Self-reported crime was significantly reduced, by about 34 percent, compared with the control group. There was a trend for official crime to be statistically reduced to about a third of the levels of the control subjects.

Thus, environmental enrichment appeared to reduce the incidence of conduct disorder, and perhaps also of criminal behavior, in these disadvantaged children, Raine and his colleagues concluded.

Peter Buckley, M.D., chair of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia and chair of the congress session, described the results as “provocative.” E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., the discussant for the session, said, “Something is going on in those children.”

The question is, of course, what?

Raine told Psychiatric News that the educational boost given the subjects may have made a difference. He also said, however, that he suspects that education is not the explanation since “past attempts [at using education to prevent antisocial behavior] have not been very successful in producing long-term change.”

He said that exercise may have made a difference, since Salk Institute scientists recently found that rodents that exercised early in life had enhanced growth of neurons in the brain’s hippocampus.

And how about nutrition? This is the explanation that Raine favors, particularly fatty acid supplementation. The experimental group ate lots of fish, he noted. Fish are rich in omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, and these acids influence the levels of serotonin and dopamine and are deficient in violent offenders. ▪