Determinists suggest that offenders commit crimes because of factors outside of their control. For example, a person murders someone because of an exisiting psychological or biological defect which undermines their capacity to make choices. Contemporary research seeks to find causes between various lifestyles and deviant patterns of behaviour based on the assumption that certain factors make one more vulnerable to criminal activity. Drinking, for example, has been shown to increase aggression and thus is correlated with domestic violence, assault, and so on. This correlation suggests that in those cases, 'choice' (or free-will) is underminded by the effects of the alcohol.
The article below details research into the relationship between diet and crime. As you read, I want you to think of a few questions. Please post your reactions in the comments section.
1) what implications does the article have for both determinism and rational calculation?
2) If diet can be proven to increase rates of crime, does this take responsibility away from the offender? In other words, is their capacity to make a choice undermined to the extent that they cannot help what they do?
3) If the research is accurate, should the government interfere in how people eat?
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 bevaviour
Felicity Lawrence
Tuesday October 17, 2006
Guardian
That Dwight Demar is able to sit in front of us, sober, calm, and employed, is "a miracle", he declares in the cadences of a prayer-meeting sinner. He has been rocking his 6ft 2in bulk to and fro while delivering a confessional account of his past into the middle distance. He wants us to know what has saved him after 20 years on the streets: "My dome is working. They gave me some kind of pill and I changed. Me, myself and I, I changed."
Demar has been in and out of prison so many times he has lost count of his convictions. "Being drunk, being disorderly, trespass, assault and battery; you name it, I did it. How many times I been in jail? I don't know, I was locked up so much it was my second home."
Demar has been taking part in a clinical trial at the US government's National Institutes for Health, near Washington. The study is investigating the effects of omega-3 fatty acid supplements on the brain, and the pills that have effected Demar's "miracle" are doses of fish oil.
The results emerging from this study are at the cutting edge of the debate on crime and punishment. In Britain we lock up more people than ever before. Nearly 80,000 people are now in our prisons, which reached their capacity this week.
But the new research calls into question the very basis of criminal justice and the notion of culpability. It suggests that individuals may not always be responsible for their aggression. Taken together with a study in a high-security prison for young offenders in the UK, it shows that violent behaviour may be attributable at least in part to nutritional deficiencies.
The UK prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent offences they committed in the prison fell by 37%. Although no one is suggesting that poor diet alone can account for complex social problems, the former chief inspector of prisons Lord Ramsbotham says that he is now "absolutely convinced that there is a direct link between diet and antisocial behaviour, both that bad diet causes bad behaviour and that good diet prevents it."
The Dutch government is currently conducting a large trial to see if nutritional supplements have the same effect on its prison population. And this week, new claims were made that fish oil had improved behaviour and reduced aggression among children with some of the most severe behavioural difficulties in the UK.
Deficiency
For the clinician in charge of the US study, Joseph Hibbeln, the results of his trial are not a miracle, but simply what you might predict if you understand the biochemistry of the brain and the biophysics of the brain cell membrane. His hypothesis is that modern industrialised diets may be changing the very architecture and functioning of the brain.
We are suffering, he believes, from widespread diseases of deficiency. Just as vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy, deficiency in the essential fats the brain needs and the nutrients needed to metabolise those fats is causing of a host of mental problems from depression to aggression. Not all experts agree, but if he is right, the consequences are as serious as they could be. The pandemic of violence in western societies may be related to what we eat or fail to eat. Junk food may not only be making us sick, but mad and bad too.
In Demar's case the aggression has blighted many lives. He has attacked his wife. "Once she put my TV out the door, I snapped off and smacked her." His last spell in prison was for a particularly violent assault. "I tried to kill a person. Then I knew something need be done because I was half a hundred and I was either going to kill somebody or get killed."
Demar's brain has blanked out much of that last attack. He can remember that a man propositioned him for sex, but the details of his own response are hazy.
When he came out of jail after that, he bought a can of beer and seemed headed for more of the same until a case worker who had seen adverts for Hibbeln's trial persuaded him to take part.
The researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which is part of NIH, had placed adverts for aggressive alcoholics in the Washington Post in 2001. Some 80 volunteers came forward and have since been enrolled in the double blind study. They have ranged from homeless people to a teacher to a former secret service agent. Following a period of three weeks' detoxification on a locked ward, half were randomly assigned to 2 grams per day of the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA for three months, and half to placebos of fish-flavoured corn oil.
An earlier pilot study on 30 patients with violent records found that those given omega-3 supplements had their anger reduced by one-third, measured by standard scales of hostility and irritability, regardless of whether they were relapsing and drinking again. The bigger trial is nearly complete now and Dell Wright, the nurse administering the pills, has seen startling changes in those on the fish oil rather than the placebo. "When Demar came in there was always an undercurrent of aggression in his behaviour. Once he was on the supplements he took on the ability not to be impulsive. He kept saying, 'This is not like me'."
Demar has been out of trouble and sober for a year now. He has a girlfriend, his own door key, and was made employee of the month at his company recently. Others on the trial also have long histories of violence but with omega-3 fatty acids have been able for the first time to control their anger and aggression. J, for example, arrived drinking a gallon of rum a day and had 28 scars on his hand from punching other people. Now he is calm and his cravings have gone. W was a 19st barrel of a man with convictions for assault and battery. He improved dramatically on the fish oil and later told doctors that for the first time since the age of five he had managed to go three months without punching anyone in the head.
Threat to society
Hibbeln is a psychiatrist and physician, but as an employee of the US government at the NIH he wears the uniform of a commander, with his decorations for service pinned to his chest. As we queued to get past the post-9/11 security checks at the NIH federal base, he explained something of his view of the new threat to society.
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. They don't prove that high omega-6 and low omega-3 fat consumption actually causes violence. Moreover, many other things have changed in the last century and been blamed for rising violence - exposure to violence in the media, the breakdown of the family unit and increased consumption of sugar, to take a few examples. But some of the trends you might expect to be linked to increased violence - such as availability of firearms and alcohol, or urbanisation - do not in fact reliably predict a rise in murder across countries, according to Hibbeln.
There has been a backlash recently against the hype surrounding omega-3 in the UK from scientists arguing that the evidence remains sketchy. Part of the backlash stems from the eagerness of some supplement companies to suggest that fish oils work might wonders even on children who have no behavioural problems.
Alan Johnson, the education secretary, appeared to be jumping on the bandwagon recently when he floated the idea of giving fish oils to all school children. The idea was quickly knocked down when the food standards agency published a review of the evidence on the effect of nutrition on learning among schoolchildren and concluded there was not enough to conclude much, partly because very few scientific trials have been done.
Professor John Stein, of the department of physiology at Oxford University, where much of the UK research on omega-3 fatty acid deficiencies has been based, agrees: "There is only slender evidence that children with no particular problem would benefit from fish oil. And I would always say [for the general population] it's better to get omega-3 fatty acids by eating fish, which carries all the vitamins and minerals needed to metabolise them."
However, he believes that 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 foetuses and infants. Minerals such as zinc and the B vitamins are needed to metabolise 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.
Mental health
Here too you have one possible factor in cycles of deprivation (again, no one is suggesting diet is the only factor) and why criminal behaviour is apparently higher among lower socio-economic groups where nutrition is likely to be poorer.
These effects of the industrialisation of the diet on the brain were also predicted in the 1970s by a leading fats expert in the UK, Professor Michael Crawford, now at London's Metropolitan University. He established that DHA was structural to the brain and foresaw that deficiencies would lead to a surge in mental health and behavioural problems - a prediction borne out by the UK's mental health figures.
It was two decades later before the first study of the effect of diet on behaviour took place in a UK prison. Bernard Gesch, now a senior researcher at Stein's Oxford laboratory, first became involved with nutrition and its relationship to crime as a director of the charity Natural Justice in northwest England. He was supervising persistent offenders in the community and was struck by their diets. He later set out to test the idea that poor diet might cause antisocial behaviour and crime in the maximum security Aylesbury prison.
His study, a placebo-controlled double blind randomised trial, took 231 volunteer prisoners and assigned half to a regime of multivitamin, mineral and essential fatty acid supplements and half to placebos. The supplement aimed to bring the prisoners' intakes of nutrients up to the level recommended by government. It was not specifically a fatty acid trial, and Gesch points out that nutrition is not pharmacology but involves complex interactions of many nutrients.
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. They were all crammed into a small place and even though it was well run you got a higher than normal number of assaults on staff and other prisoners."
Although the governor was keen on looking at the relationship between diet and crime, Hussey remembers being sceptical himself at the beginning of the study. The catering manager was good, and even though prisoners on the whole preferred white bread, meat and confectionery to their fruit and veg, the staff tried to encourage prisoners to eat healthily, so he didn't expect to see much of a result.
But quite quickly staff noticed a significant drop in the number of reported incidents of bad behaviour. "We'd just introduced a policy of 'earned privileges' so we thought it must be that rather than a few vitamins, but we used to joke 'maybe it's Bernard's pills'."
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. I was disappointed the results were not latched on to. We put a lot of effort into improving prisoners' chances of not coming back in, and you measure success in small doses."
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.
He said he was currently unable to comment on any plans for future research in prisons, but studies with young offenders in the community are being planned.
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". To ask whether we have enough evidence to change diets is to put the question the wrong way round. Whoever said it was safe to change them so radically in the first place?
Young offender's diet
One young offender had been sentenced by the British courts on 13 occasions for stealing trucks in the early hours of the morning.
Bernard Gesch recorded the boy's daily diet as follows:
Breakfast: nothing (asleep)
Mid morning: nothing (asleep)
Lunchtime: 4 or 5 cups of coffee with milk and 2½ heaped teaspoons of sugar
Mid afternoon: 3 or 4 cups of coffee with milk and 2½ heaped sugars
Tea: chips, egg, ketchup, 2 slices of white bread, 5 cups of tea or coffee with milk and sugar
Evening: 5 cups of tea or coffee with milk and sugar, 20 cigarettes, £2 worth of sweets, cakes and if money available 3 or 4 pints of beer.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
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19 comments:
Part of me is on the fence on whether to agreee or disagree with this. I do believe that certain things cause imbalnaces in the brain that can trigger a person to exhibit odd behavior. Just like drinking alcohol, some people get silly and some get angry and violent. The point to remember is trying to maintain self control, but I also think that part of the persons true personality comes out when there are imbalances. I dont believe the BS that someone is violent or deviant because it happened to them because there are plenty of people who have been abused that dont hurt other people or themselves. I dont know everything though and I dont pretend to, but if these studies are definatley correct than it would be nice to see them help control the violence issues we have.
1) In regards to the determism this study kind of throws that theory out the window. If someone's diet effects whether they perform deviant acts then it isn't really how the determinists look at things. They look at it as if something within the indvidual compels them to perform a deviant act. While I don't think that these studies support Rational Calculation either. Rational calculation makes it seem that you choose whether or not to commit a deviant act. Your diet isn't what determines your behavior. Maybe it supports the theory because if you eat fatty foods your brain function changes so you make different decisions then you would have if your brain was working properly.
2) If this whole diet thing was true then it does take away a lot of the blame from the offenders. Except that maybe if you know that if you eat that way you will perform deviant acts, thus it will be illegal if you ingest the fatty food. Just like it is illegal to drink and drive, maybe it will be illegal to consume too much fatty foods because you will become impaired. Yet, there are plenty of people in the US that eat crappy food and live perfectly normal lives. If everyone that ate fatty foods was violent then we would have an epidemic of violence, not an epidemic of obesity. I don't think that eating fatty foods takes away all of your ability of choice. I feel that it is just a cop out, another way for people that commit crimes to try and get out of trouble.
3) If the evidence is right I think it would be ridiculous if the government intervenes. I don't think that it will make that much of a difference because people will still be deviant. It might be a good idea to have food manufacturers make their food healthier more for the greater good then because it is making people deviant. It would be a better idea to work on diabetes and other diseases that are affected by diet, instead of worrying about stopping criminals who eat poorly.
I do believe that what we eat affects us but I don't think I would go as far to as to say it makes us prone to aggressive and violent behavior because there are a lot of people who eat junk food but not all of them exhibit this type of behavior. I don't think it is reasonable to think that we can prevent people from eating junk food either. However, if they are going to stick with, the food made me do it, and it is proven then yes that does take a lot of the blame of a person but I would hope that people would take that information and make a conscious effort to stay away from it, knowing its harmful effects. And I would also hope that people wouldn't use it as an excuse. People are violent whether they eat junk food or not, you cannot blame your behavior solely on junk food.
In my opinion, this article does not have a correlation with determinism or rational calculation. If someone is dieting then is it looking at something other then a characteristic within the individual. I think that regardless of someones diet, you are going to act in a certain way. So, I believe that rational calculation is not apparent here either. If diet can be proven to increase rates of crime, I do not think that this takes away responsibility from the person committing the act. If the research is accurate then I think that the government should intervene. Regardless of what is proven, deviant people will continue to perform deviant acts just as they do today.
Neither determinism nor rational calculation are fully supported by the studies. the article states that behaviors are effected by what people eat. this doesn't say that the behaviors are cause by the food eaten or that the behaviors are fully thought out. Absolutely, i do think that what goes into the body has an effect on how people behave. too much sugar or causes people to become hyper sometimes resulting in impulsive actions. so it would make sense that with lack of or excess of other vitamins, minerals, and other supplements will effect peoples impulses, behaviors, and reflexes. But, i do not think that these behaviors cannot be controlled. i don't think that eating to much sugar is a legitimate excuse for ones behavior.
i do not think that the government should interfere with the way people eat. it is their right to eat what they want. however if the government did find this study reliable and they wanted people's behavior to improve, they could assist and make healthier foods more available to everyone. they could pay a certain amount of the cost that it costs people to buy fruits, vegetables, meats, and organic foods. healthy food is significantly more expensive than foods high in fat and sugar.
I believe that this article may have some validity in saying that a person's diet can affect how they think and act. I would not go as far as to say their diet is the direct cause of their actions, but if the information about the omega 3 fatty acids is true i think an alteration in a person's brain activity might lead to poor decisions. There is also the view that everyone has a rational choice to do what they do. Yet if the information in these studies says that the fatty acids can affect the brain. If for some reason brain function is somehow altered, it might also be safe to say that such a change could bring a person's rationality into question. I do not think that the food a person eats has the power to take away someones guilt, except in maybe extreme situations of life or death, in which i don't think it is possible to make judgment based on natural instincts. Many people are however forced to eat unhealthy diets due to their economic status in which case i feel it is the governments job to step in and help improve the diets of lower class individuals by tackling the economic problems of overpriced healthy foods and cheap junk food. In order to get to the root of the problem you have to look at the bigger picture. I don't think diet can directly influence anyone to become violent, except as i said in very rare cases. It is however more likely to me that as a society we place certain groups of people at a greater risk to encounter enough negative stimuli to at some point push them over the edge. Everyone has the ability to think irrationally, it just takes the right sequence of events to set people off. However it is hard to make any concrete statements regarding this since most of the studies are rather new and seem to focus mainly on prison populations. A more detailed study over a wider population of individuals might do a better job of pinpointing the answer this article brings up.
Although it would be nice to associate deviant acts and diet, I think there needs to be some more research in the area. It was interesting that since the early 1900's society has replaced omega 3's with omega 6's. If omega 3's really do have an impact on behavior it would make sense that depression has risen in modern society as well. As far as determinism goes, it makes sense that the lack of omega 3's would cause human events. Rational calculation could also apply as a person chooses whether to commit the crime and if they are choosing to be deviant with a chemical imbalance of the brain, then they are choosing, just not in the right mind. I don't think responsibility of the crime should be taken away from the offender due to diet, but possibly prevent habitual offenders. The government already tries to interfere in how people eat, for example the extra taxes passed for junk food. If research is accurate the government will interfere whether its a good thing or not.
Although I found this article and the studies done in it to be interesting, I can't say that I completely buy it. The one thing that stuck out in my head about how they were saying that violent behavior may be attributable to nutritional deficiencies, was that they weren't looking at other factors in peoples' lives that correlate with a poor diet. There is a good chance that if you are raised on a poor diet and have such nutritional deficiencies that they affect your brain's physiology, it probably goes along with other factors in your life that may also lead to increased aggression. For example, a poor diet may be correlated with a low economic status or a broken home. Maybe as a kid you were left alone for long periods of time and you had to feed yourself and we all know that young children aren't going to feed themselves fruits and vegetables.
I also didn't really agree with that statement that there is a direct link between diet and antisocial behavior in that bad diet causes bad behavior and good diet prevents it. If you look at the case of people with body image problems, they may have a good diet because they always see themselves as overweight, but also may be antisocial because they have those self-confidence issues and may think no one wants to socialize with them because of how they look.
Another thing that bothered me about these studies was that they were all done on prison populations or alcoholics. It seems to me that if they want these results to be valid they need to conduct them on more "normal" populations. They definitely need to conduct experiments on more than just those people who have already committed a crime and are in prison because if this is true, it will affect people in all ways of life, not just criminals.
Also, they concluded that as omega-6 goes up, so do homicides in a linear progression and that in 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. I think this is sort of a ridiculous statement because there are MANY other things besides different diets that are completely different between our society and Japan's society. I think they are overlooking way too many extraneous variables in this situation and to say the reason there is less violence in Japan versus the U.S isn't valid.
I think this article goes along with the nature/nurture argument in that some people are born with more aggressive tendencies than others but it is the way that these people are brought up that can affect whether or not they act on this violence, diet being ONE of those outside factors.
Can a fatty acid Omega-3 really cause a one third difference in a persons aggression score combined with a helathy diet? I do beleive so. I beleieve this article has relevent evidence supporting the theory that people who have a healthier diet can control anger more. If one thinks about it rationally, a person who is consuming daily suggested values of vitamens and minerals would rationally be a healthier fitter person. This person's body will handle stress and be willing to cooperate more with the environment assuming. Therefor when a stresful situation arises, the body has a "healthier" way of dealing with it. When the body is malnurished or has high drug/ sugar/ crud levels in it, the body thusly will not be able to handle accordingly like it should. A negative outcome, angry/ violent outburst, is liekly to occur. So can a deviant/ criminal person become "sober" from their deviant/ criminal acts? In essence yes, but i also beleive once a criminal, always a criminal, therfor the instinct will always be there, but it will take more to set them off. More to get them to recommit. Again, in essence it will take more "anger" to make them do something negative and act deviantly, but when provoked enough, they will still commit the act.
I think that this study is just another thing for criminals to use in court to try to get a lighter sentence or to not go to jail. It is a tactic for them to get people to think that they really arent bad people they just do bad things because they have an imbalanced diet. I know many people including myself who do not eat correctly and do not consume the right amount of nutrients and minerals everyday. That doesnt give me an excuse to go kill somebody because im an unhealthy person. Its just another thing for lawyers to use like the insanity plea in court to justify the actions of their clients. People need to start taking responsibilty for their own actions and realize that they are making their own choices that have consequences and that its not due to other external or internal influences. Pretty soon there wont be anybody in jail because every criminal will be able to justify their behavior with some outrageous excuse and reason for their behavior. They need to realize that what they are doing is wrong and that their is no justifiable reason or alterior motives behind it. Crimes are crimes and its that simple.
I think that there needs to be more evidence that diet and behavior go hand in hand. Sure there might be a small correlation between the two but that doesn't mean there aren't other factors that could be causing the behavior. This is also a way for the people who commit the crimes to try to get away with it. They can say that they can't help to do it because their diet is poor. But I do believe that their capacity to make the choice is not undermined by their diet and it is their responsibility. It was an interesting article but I think that more research should be done on it, including going outside the prison into the "real world." Doing the research on other people than ones in prisons might show the true facts of diet and behavior.
Susan, good point: many people are subject to the same 'determining variable' and they do not commit crimes. What does this suggest about 'determinism?'
Also, you mention self-control... How many of us are able to maintain perfect self-control at all times? Who didn't eat perfectly, yesterday?!
lwheldon - you're right that the sort of determinism we've been looking at concentrates on biological and psychological conditions which determine people's actions, but a determinist might also argue that a substance (sucvh as food, alcohol, drugs) causes a psychological effect which causes one to act deviantly. IN other words, it's still within the individual (their psychology) but it's taking into account how psychology (internal processes) can be affected in a deterministic ways by a digested substance.
Many of you have commented on how this sort of theorizing around crime is a way to take the blame off the criminal's/deviant's shoulders. That is, it's a way for someone to allude responsibility for their actions.... What does this say about your own perceptions on crime? Does it suggest that most of you think that crime IS a rational calculation?
Another question: if you do agree that diet has an effect but it doesn't CAUSE crime in the way determinists suggest, is there another way to think about the relationship between diet and crime? A way that is neither determinisitc nor based in complete rationality?
Alex
I think that the second question Alex posted is very interesting, whether blame can be removed from an individual if they ate something. I think that no blame can be moved and that the individual was in control when the ate or drank whatever the substance was and they should still be held accountable. The idea that diet directly relates to violence makes sense when I think about me on an empty stomach. I'm not violent but i'm sure i'm not as pleasant. So I think that it makes sense that food plays a part in how we act but everyone still has their choices. There are always other options
I do believe that the foods that we eat effect our actions and our moods, however i don't believe that eating certain foods can make someone more likely to commit a crime or a deviant act. There are many people who eat foods that are not so good for them who have never committed a crime. I definitely do not think the government should try to control the foods people eat to try to control the amount of crime.
Both rational calculation and determinism are not supported by this study.
Although an interesting concept, this offers no significant proof or conclusive evidence proving one thing or another. The diets of these criminals are highly unlikely to be a major variable in predicting behavior. However, it may be a piece of the puzzle and it seems to have convinced the former chief inspector of prisons that it is true. This gives the idea a bit more credibility than it otherwise would have.
The notion that any sort of governmental regulation will come from this is ridiculous. Laws like this would need to be based on concrete facts. Overall, this study is incomplete at best.
I will agree with the article in saying that I do believe that what we eat effects us, however I will not agree in believing that what we eat effects aggressive and violent behavior. I think that behavior has a correlation to your past. If you look at a lot of offenders, their family lives and past have been off road. Anything from dysfunctional families to abandonment, etc, I believe that all of that effects aggression and behavior.
I don't think that consumption of certain things will initiate aggressive behavior.
However, if by chance what we ate did affect behavior, I don't think that that justifies crimes. Killing someone because you lacked your omega 3-fatty acids today and not being able to control yourself is acceptable, nor is it a valid excuse.
I think that everyone is responsible for their actions and that anyone can decide what is right and what is wrong at any given time, with the exception of outrageous pyschological problems diagnosed by physicians.
I do not believe that food causes imbalances in the brain and cause people to show aggressive behavior. I believe that there is no true, strong correlation between these variables. There are many people that show aggressive behavior and eat a healthy diet and there are also people who consume a lot of junk food, yet do not show high amounts of aggressive behavior. I think that this is a bogus idea.
This article screams determinism, arguing that a certain diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids lowers the rate at which people commit crimes. Although the research is compelling, I am still skeptical. The prisoners in the study who were taking the supplement committed 26% fewer offenses, yet they are still committing offenses. A person is still a murderer if they kill one person rather than two. Also, the fact that people of lower socioeconomic status are more prone to commit crimes is more likely related to their living conditions, frustration with society, and general unhappiness rather than their diet. Lastly, there are many people whose diet is lacking in omega-3s that do not commit crimes. This defficiency does not cause crime, and correlations are not enough to bring in government regulation of diet.
I accept the article and study for exactly what it says and take nothing more from it. I think it would make sense that diet would have SOME effect on behavior. At a very basic level and from an evolutionary/survival perspective you would conclude that our attitudes and actions would change according to whether or not we were receiving food and nutrients. At the same time, numerous other factors are involved and I personally feel that people as individuals need to take responsibility for the way they act. I don't think there is any one solution to the problem of violence and crime; I think its causes contain a myriad of issues and all should be considered. Eitherway, if attempts are successful to curb violence (even in a minor way) why not take advantage of them? In this situation where suppliments don't have a negative effect when taken as directed why not administer them for the possible benefit they may have to some.
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