Hi, I’m Liz O’Garvey and one of the only 2 writers for Willie Nelson Peace Research Institute established by Willie Nelson, Jay Greathouse and myself back in 2007. This rare opportunity allowed Jay and myself to conduct years of in-depth research on the roots of violence, war, child abuse and domestic violence.
One area that piqued my interest when I started my own blog, The Real Infrared, and read about the connection between violence and diet. I was researching my eBook I was writing at the time to give away as a gift when you Sign up for my Newsletter Now
and discovered many scientific articles with documented clinical studies that suggest each of us can
Reduce Violence and War by Improving Our Diet
Specifically if you eat a Whole Food Diet Rich in Fresh Fruit and Vegetables along with Omega 3 Fatty Acids you will receive the necessary building blocks that have been shown in clinical studies to
Reduce Aggressive Behavior and Violence
Many people have written to us here at Willie Nelson Peace Research Institute as well as mentioned to us in person that they feel helpless stopping War or Violence. They lament about their lack of power not their lack of will in ending War or Violence.
No longer do you have to wonder about what you can do personally or feel powerless to instigate a peaceful world. If I told you you could reduce Violence and War by Eating your Way to Peace, would you believe me? Well, this is no joke. It’s quite possible.
To Reduce Aggressive Behavior and Violence AVOID specific unhealthy Omega 6 Fatty Acids found in many of the following products. If you want to Eat your Way to Peace, begin by Avoiding:
6. processed foods
7. prepared snack foods
8. convenience foods
9. fast foods
10. deep-fried foods
11. packaged mixes
12. store bought salad dressings including mayonnaise and vegan
substitutes
13. vegetable margarines or shortenings including all hydrogenated
or partially hydrogenated oils
14. all cooking oils except Cold Pressed Extra Virgin Olive Oil
15. all refined oils
Excerpted from page 6 of my free eBook, “If You Want To Eat The Best Food To Cleanse And Heal Your Body, What Do You Eat?” Liz O’Garvey
Go to The Real Infrared, Now and Sign up for my Newsletter. You will receive this free eBook as a thank you gift. My eBook offers simple straightforward suggestions for healthy eating.
Reduce Violence and War by Increasing Omega 3 Fatty Acids In Your Diet
Captain Joseph R. Hibbeln, Acting Chief of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Education and the National Institutes of Health, documented international relationships between decreased Omega 3 consumption and increased rates of depressive disorders.
He published a 2001 study which linked dietary Omega 3 with the extreme form of violence, homicide. The study included 38 countries. The findings showed that countries with high Omega 3 consumption demonstrated less homicides. And that high levels of Omega 6 consumption combined with low levels of Omega 3 (DHA and EPA) correlated with hostile behavior.
The Standard American Diet (SAD) is heavily weighted toward
1. saturated fat from animal and vegetable sources
2. trans fatty acids (hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated) and
3. refined, heated, denatured Polyunsaturated Omega 6 fatty acids
such as
a. corn
b. safflower
c. sunflower
d. soybean and
e. cottonseed oils
used in deep fat frying, high heat cooking, salad dressings, sauces and processed foods.
Excerpted from page 6 my free eBook, “If You Want To Eat The Best Food To Cleanse And Heal Your Body, What Do You Eat?” Liz O’Garvey
Go to my blog, The Real Infrared, Now and Sign up for my Newsletter You will receive this free eBook as a thank you gift. The eBook offers suggestions for increasing your Omega 3 Fatty Acids, decreasing some Omega 6s and generally increasing your nutrient uptake with whole foods.
From the Guardian:
Over the last century most western countries have undergone a dramatic shift in the composition of their diets in which the omega-3 fatty acids that are essential to the brain have been flooded out by competing omega-6 fatty acids, mainly from industrial oils such as soya, corn, and sunflower.
In the US, for example, soya oil accounted for only 0.02% of all calories available in 1909, but by 2000 it accounted for 20%. Americans have gone from eating a fraction of an ounce of soya oil a year to downing 25lbs (11.3kg) per person per year in that period. In the UK, omega-6 fats from oils such as soya, corn, and sunflower accounted for 1% of energy supply in the early 1960s, but by 2000 they were nearly 5%.
These omega-6 fatty acids come mainly from industrial frying for takeaways, ready meals and snack foods such as crisps, chips, biscuits, ice-creams and from margarine. Alcohol, meanwhile, depletes omega-3s from the brain.
To test the hypothesis, Hibbeln and his colleagues have mapped the growth in consumption of omega-6 fatty acids from seed oils in 38 countries since the 1960s against the rise in murder rates over the same period. In all cases there is an unnerving match.
As omega-6 goes up, so do homicides in a linear progression. Industrial societies where omega-3 consumption has remained high and omega-6 low because people eat fish, such as Japan, have low rates of murder and depression.
Of course, all these graphs prove is that there is a striking correlation between violence and omega 6-fatty acids in the diet.
For Hibbeln, the changes in our diet in the past century are “a very large uncontrolled experiment that may have contributed to the societal burden of aggression, depression and cardiovascular death.”
…the evidence from the UK prison study and from Hibbeln’s research in the US on the link between nutritional deficiency and crime is ” strong”, although the mechanisms involved are still not fully understood.
Hibbeln, Stein and others have been investigating what the mechanisms of a causal relationship between diet and aggression might be. This is where the biochemistry and biophysics comes in.
Essential fatty acids are called essential because humans cannot make them but must obtain them from the diet.
The brain is a fatty organ – it’s 60% fat by dry weight, and the essential fatty acids are what make part of its structure, making up 20% of the nerve cells’ membranes. The synapses, or junctions where nerve cells connect with other nerve cells, contain even higher concentrations of essential fatty acids – being made of about 60% of the omega-3 fatty acid DHA.
Communication between the nerve cells depends on neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and dopamine, docking with receptors in the nerve cell membrane.
Omega-3 DHA is very long and highly flexible. When it is incorporated into the nerve cell membrane it helps make the membrane itself elastic and fluid so that signals pass through it efficiently. But if the wrong fatty acids are incorporated into the membrane, the neurotransmitters can’t dock properly.
We know from many other studies what happens when the neurotransmitter systems don’t work efficiently. Low serotonin levels are known to predict an increased risk of suicide, depression and violent and impulsive behaviour. And dopamine is what controls the reward processes in the brain.
Laboratory tests at NIH have shown that the composition of tissue and in particular of the nerve cell membrane of people in the US is different from that of the Japanese, who eat a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids from fish. Americans have cell membranes higher in the less flexible omega-6 fatty acids, which appear to have displaced the elastic omega-3 fatty acids found in Japanese nerve cells.
Hibbeln’s theory is that because the omega-6 fatty acids compete with the omega-3 fatty acids for the same metabolic pathways, when omega-6 dominates in the diet, we can’t convert the omega-3s to DHA and EPA, the longer chain versions we need for the brain. What seems to happen then is that the brain picks up a more rigid omega-6 fatty acid DPA instead of DHA to build the cell membranes – and they don’t function so well.
Other experts blame the trans fats produced by partial hydrogenation of industrial oils for processed foods. Trans fats have been shown to interfere with the synthesis of essentials fats in fetuses and infants. Minerals such as zinc and the B vitamins are needed to metabolize essential fats, so deficiencies in these may be playing an important part too.
There is also evidence that deficiencies in DHA/EPA at times when the brain is developing rapidly – in the womb, in the first 5 years of life and at puberty – can affect its architecture permanently. Animal studies have shown that those deprived of omega-3 fatty acids over two generations have offspring who cannot release dopamine and serotonin so effectively.
“The extension of all this is that if children are left with low dopamine as a result of early deficits in their own or their mother’s diets, they cannot experience reward in the same way and they cannot learn from reward and punishment. If their serotonin levels are low, they cannot inhibit their impulses or regulate their emotional responses,” Hibbeln points out.
Prison Trial
Aylesbury was at the time a prison for young male offenders, aged 17 to 21, convicted of the most serious crimes. Trevor Hussey was then deputy governor and remembers it being a tough environment. “It was a turbulent young population. They had problems with their anger…”
Although the governor was keen on looking at the relationship between diet and crime, Hussey remembers being skeptical himself at the beginning of the study.
But quite quickly staff noticed a significant drop in the number of reported incidents of bad behaviour.
But when the trial finished it became clear that the drop in incidents of bad behaviour applied only to those on the supplements and not to those on the placebo.
The results, published in 2002, showed that those receiving the extra nutrients committed 37% fewer serious offences involving violence, and 26% fewer offences overall. Those on the placebos showed no change in their behaviour. Once the trial had finished the number of offences went up by the same amount. The office the researchers had used to administer nutrients was restored to a restraint room after they had left.
“The supplements improved the functioning of those prisoners. It was clearly something significant that can’t be explained away…”
Gesch believes we should be rethinking the whole notion of culpability. The overall rate of violent crime in the UK has risen since the 1950s, with huge rises since the 1970s. “Such large changes are hard to explain in terms of genetics or simply changes of reporting or recording crime. One plausible candidate to explain some of the rapid rise in crime could be changes in the brain’s environment. What would the future have held for those 231 young men if they had grown up with better nourishment?” Gesch says.
Excerpted from the Guardian, Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat.
Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies
may play a key role in aggressive behavior
In 1995, Dr. Norman Salem at the National Institute of Mental Health said low levels of Omega 3 fatty acids, especially one part called DHA, abundant in wild cold water fatty fish such as sardines, halibut, salmon, herring and albacore tuna are linked to depression, aggressive behavior, brain damage from alcohol, attention deficit disorder, and possibly Alzheimer’s disease. Deficiency in DHA and other Omega-3 fatty acids in brain cell membranes, says Dr. Salem, may compromise optimal brain functioning in a multitude of ways.
Want Peace?
Increase your consumption of Omega 3 Fatty Acids
and Nutrient Rich Fruits and Vegetables AND
Decrease your consumption of specific Omega 6 Fatty Acids found in
refined, heated, denatured oils such as
soybean, corn, safflower, sunflower and cottonseed
Want to learn more? Sign up for my Newsletter Now at The Real Infrared and receive my free eBook, “If You Want To Eat The Best Food To Cleanse And Heal Your Body, What Do You Eat?” by me, Liz O’Garvey
