184 Diet Wise
deteriorate to sheer illiterate nonsense under the effect of a bad allergen.
The difficulty comes and goes according to diet, and for this reason the
unfortunate child may be judged careless and inattentive at times, or even
willfully disobedient, which is most unjust in the circumstances.
Many retarded schoolchildren start to improve enormously in
performance as soon as their allergy foods are identified and removed. They
were retarded all right, but only by bad diets! It is vital for teachers to be in
possession of this knowledge if they are to avoid meting out unnecessary
and unwarranted punishment. Obviously, if a pupil were to consume
a quantity of food he or she was susceptible to before a class he or she
would be likely to be rendered incapable of useful study. This is particularly
true after lunch. My estimation of school lunches was never very high, but
the modern offerings, with a swing towards fast foods such as sausages or
burgers and cans of soda with caffeine and sugar, are a recipe for disaster.
To me there is no more certain way to ruin the potential of a young
life than to lay such extreme emphasis on academic performance as we do
and yet to expect our kids to succeed while coping with some of the diets
that are forced on them. That the education committees concerned serve
these foods as a ‘convenience’ (to them) and an effort to economize is to
me intolerable. Are we to sell out the future of our children, their aims and
achievements, merely because town hall bureaucrats wish to cut corners in
their financial planning?
The trouble is that the majority of public servants who run our lives
were themselves no great shakes at school, to judge by their obvious lack of
performance in cerebral functions. Perhaps they have ‘tame’ dieticians who
tell them what they want to hear, but by all appearances they scorn advice
from concerned nutritionists and listen only to accountants bleating about
figures and balance sheets. But of course, even here, the deficient reasoning
of the institutional mind is very evident. Cheap, inadequate meals are a
complete false economy. Rather like ‘saving money’ by not servicing a road
vehicle: in the end, the real cost is many times higher than doing it right in
the first place.
The Feingold diet
Hyperactivity in children, also labeled ADD and ADHD, is a new condition
created by the mass technology of our oh-so-smart society: it was not
diagnosed until recent decades. Partly, the reason may have been that no
one knew it existed and therefore didn’t look for it, but that would only
account for a few overlooked cases. The fact is that it is measurably on