Another thing I’ve been wanting to write about in relation to my articles about alternative treatments for behavior problems is Omega-3. (See my Resource List for links to research I did.)
Omega-3 is a fat found most commonly in fish, but also in a variety of other sources. Ask your parent or grandparent about something they remember from their childhood, and they are likely to remember the awful taste of codfish liver oil. It was common wisdom in the past that kids needed extra oil in their diets. This is an example where “common wisdom” is actually borne out by scientific research. It turns out that modern kids’ diets are not only lacking in oil supplements that have gone out of favor; they are also lacking in natural sources of the oil. Few children are fed fish on a regular basis. Also, the other sources of Omega-3 that we used to get have been undermined by modern ranching and packaging methods. In the past, a child might be able to get enough Omega-3 from an average diet; now, a family that eats a diet of feedlot-raised meat, packaged food, and no fish is probably denying their children this important ingredient for their mental health.
Omega-3 is used by the brain. Most people probably don’t know how much energy their brains burn — it’s pretty astounding. Kids’ brains burn more energy in relation to total energy burned by the body than adults’ brains do. So unless your child is overweight, you are doing them a pretty big disservice by feeding them a low-fat diet. Kids need fat, and studies have proven that kids with behavioral problems often do better when their diet is supplemented with Omega-3.
A while back I wrote a piece about supplements and how many kids and adults are being mega-dosed by taking them. This is an example of the old generalization, “all generalizations are wrong”! Omega-3 supplements are simply purified fat, the same stuff you get in food. Though no kid should be eating them as a significant portion of their diet, they can’t hurt. (Unlike the huge amounts of vitamin E supplements that are actually lowering some people’s life expectancy!)
I learned about Omega-3 from a friend whose daughter was diagnosed as “high functioning autistic.” We were talking about diet and behavior, and she told me about Omega-3, and then she mused, “You know, we’ve sort of slacked off on giving them to her, but they really did help. I wonder why we’ve stopped giving them?”
I think to a certain extent, parenting is often about the path of least resistence. Like my friend, I sometimes slack off on something that was actually helping, and it’s not till later that I realize that we’ve gone backwards in some area. I saw the same thing with Omega-3: my daughter hated the supplements I was giving her, and it turned out that she was dropping them down the grate of the fireplace next to the breakfast table. We never use it because the grate gets really hot and is right by the table, so when I opened it to clean it, it had probably been a year since I’d last opened it.
I realized that the dropping of the supplements into the grate coincided with new problems that had cropped up at school. Hm…
A lot of what you need to do when you’re treating problems with dietary changes is hunt and peck: you try something and attempt to isolate any changes from all the other things that could be factors (dad got a new job and isn’t at home as much, mom has been sick, we’ve been busy so our diet hasn’t been as good…and on and on). But I have definitely been convinced that omega-3 is one of those things that my skinny, brainy kids benefit from.
We have a rule in our house that everyone is allowed to have likes and dislikes, within reason. So I found my daughter a supplement that wasn’t flavored. She now happily takes it with a sip of water every morning. No more fake-out and dropping it into the fireplace. And it does seem that things are leveling out again.
Now about that advice from another mom to cut wheat out of her diet… eh… I think I’ll pass on that for another month!
