A Story about Bees

My little family traveled to be with our extended families for Christmas, which meant a 650-mile drive to Illinois. We've done this drive for years (decades!) and I don't mind it at all. I appreciate the subtle beauty of the Midwestern landscape, and the drive is somewhat meditative. This year, once we arrived at our destination, there were some things I needed to take care of, one of which was to stock up on honey.

I know that seems sort of strange, to travel so far in order to get honey. But I like honey and I like knowing where it came from, especially after the news about fake and possibly dangerous honey on our grocery shelves (here's a list of the brands that were found to have no pollen, which allows the source, and therefore the quality, of the honey to be determined). My sister used to keep bees, and she gave her hives to friends, Carolyn and Fred, who are fellow members of the Illinois Beekeepers' Association, when she got out of the beekeeping business. So we stopped at those friends' house one day during our visit and I sat at their kitchen table and watched Carolyn decant the different types of honey into various sizes of honey bears, ranging from the tiniest 2-ounce gift bears to the hefty 8 ouncers. She gave me a taste of the dark and earthy buckwheat honey while I admired the light coming through the pale gold wildflower and amber clover honeys.

As I was tasting the honey and deciding on what to purchase, Carolyn told me about the fields and field lanes where the bees got their pollen.  She recounted that she and Fred kept a hive in a neighbor's yard for years because of the proximity to certain flowering trees - even though that neighbor is allergic to bees. There had been no wayward incidents and the hive industriously kept doing its thing and coexisted peacefully with the neighbor. Recently, though, the neighbor called and asked Carolyn to remove her hive ASAP. The bees had become unpredictable and aggressive, and the neighbor was worried that they would sting her.

For a hive to change behaviors so drastically was strange, so Carolyn and Fred did a little investigating and found that a farmer had planted a field of buckwheat nearby. The bees were traveling to the field, feasting on the nectar from the buckwheat flowers, and returning to their hive all buzzy and aggressive. Apparently buckwheat, even though it is an attractive source of nectar for honeybees, makes  bees more than a little cranky, which makes them difficult to be around.

It was a good story about the provenance of the food I was purchasing, but it got me thinking about how we seem to know more about how food affects the behaviors of animals and insects - or at least we're more respectful of it - than we know about how food affects the behaviors of people.

Of course, no one ever suggested giving buckwheat-crazed bees a stimulant to reduce their hyperactivity and irritability. No, the solution was to move the hive away from the buckwheat. Horses and alfalfa have the same type of bad synergy. Some horses become hyperactive and willful if they eat too much of the protein-laden alfalfa, and a 1,200-pound animal is not something you want to be willful. So people with horses know to limit the amount of alfalfa their horses eat. No one thinks it's a good idea to give the horse strong medicines to reduce the negative behaviors. Just remove the offending food and get on with it.

Years ago, when I realized that artificial colors and flavors amped up my kids (and gave me headaches), I thought for certain my newfound knowledge would be embraced by fellow parents as well as the administration of the progressive preschool my kids attended. I envisioned the word would spread like a winter cold through a roomful of three-year-olds and that soon, the entire school would have guidelines for clean and healthy snacks. Oh, what a wonderful world that would be!

Obviously, I was pretty idealistic, but I really thought this group of super-educated parents would want to know what those petroleum products were capable of doing to their kids' health and behavior. But few parents wanted to hear about the positive changes we were all feeling from a better diet and even fewer parents went out of their way to learn more or support us by bringing in safe snacks. As the years rolled on and some of my kids' friends received diagnoses of ADD or ADHD or anxiety or whatever, I would offer some resources to the parents then let it go. Because to a person, they thought either that nutrition could not affect behavior or even if it did, it would be more difficult to change their diets than to allow their kids to take medications whose long-term effects are still not known.*

So why do we know more about how diet affects the behaviors of animals than we do of children? Perhaps we value animals more? Preposterous, you might say. But actions speak louder than words. I've never heard of bees being medicated for their buckwheat buzz, or horses given stimulants so that they can continue to eat alfalfa. But I've seen plenty of kids prescribed medications without their foods, cosmetics, or household chemicals being evaluated to see if they are contributing to the problem. I just find that so strange.

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Want to learn more about diet/behavior links? Here are some good sources:

• The Feingold Association of the United States. Probably the oldest organization focusing on the link between what we eat and our behaviors, the Feingold Association maintains a website with loads of information and supporting research. 
• Kelly Dorfman, MS, LND, aka the Nutrition Detective, and her book, "What's Eating Your Child?" Dorfman uses her clinical skills and years of experience to help families figure out the connection between what the kids are eating and their mystifying symptoms. 
• The Center for Science in the Public Interest maintains a food additive database and the research behind those additives. 
• This previous HealthTwisty post that contains links to research and highlights the discrepancy between the foods we have in the United States and the cleaner foods available in other countries.

* This is not to say that there are not true cases of ADD or ADHD that reflect a brain chemistry issue. For those individuals, medication can allow them to focus and attend and realize their potential, and can be a wonderful thing. But many cases of food intolerances or allergies masquerade as inattention, anxiety, or hyperactivity, especially in young children.

Yes, Diet Affects Attention. Really.

This past week CNN's health blog ran a post by Sonjay Gupta, MD called "Does ADHD Come From Food?" While it's great that CNN and its well-known doctor have given this important issue such a visible platform, it is more than a little disconcerting that the link between diet and attention is presented as a new and unproven concept. The link is fairly well documented in the scientific literature, including this landmark study in The Lancet that was the basis for the strict EU food labelling laws that I've written about previously. All in all, there is a lot of evidence that while not all attention issues are due to foods, some probably are. 

The Feingold Association, which has been around for decades, was one of the first groups to organize around this issue. I encourage you to poke around that organization's web site, look at the evidence and read the "real life" stories. I especially like the story called Taylor's Fuzzy Brained Mice, in which a kid trained four mice to run a maze, then gave two of the mice small amounts of yellow food dye in their water. The results are pretty astonishing - the rats with the dye in their water took longer to run the same maze that they previously completed with times similar to the mice who drank regular water. Further, this confusion was reversed once the colored water was switched back to normal.

Of course, individual stories (called anecdotal evidence in scientific parlance) do not true evidence make. Therefore, the Feignold site also lists many well-conducted scientific studies evaluating the effects of the Western diet on ADHD and other health concerns. It's pretty damning.

And it's not just artificial colorings, flavorings, and preservatives that are suspicious. Nutritionists and dietitians also speculate that the hydrogenated oils found in many processed foods compete with the good fats, like those found in fish and nuts, for valuable real estate in the body. In what is probably an oversimplification of complex brain chemistry, here is one possible scenario: the neurons in your brain are sheathed in fat, which allows electrical impulses to efficiently travel from one neuron to another, resulting in smoothly functioning nervous system. The substitution of hydrogenated oils for the good fatty acids creates a different type of coating of fats around those neurons - replacing the supple, conducive covering provided by good fats - thus interfering with clear thinking and focused attention. Nutritionist Kelly Dorfman explains it all here.

Unfortunately, what is emerging is that eating optimally is not as simple as choosing fruits and vegetables. An article published last year in the journal Pediatrics (the journal of the American Pediatric Association), showed that even moderate exposure to certain pesticides was associated with ADHD. Time magazine wrote about the article here. The authors of the article hastened to point out that eating conventionally grown fruits and vegetables is still preferable to eating junk food. But it does raise the issue of health equity: if organic produce is truly superior, a healthy diet is out of reach for many people for financial reasons. This pushes the issue from one of choice to one of social justice.

In the past few years there have been a slew of reliable studies on the effects of diet on behavior, learning, and attention. The only thing that's remarkable here is the slowness of the medical profession to get on board with this concept.  It's time to move past the endless debate of cause and effect (which is kept alive by the deep pockets of the food industry, its lobbying leverage, and consumers' appetites for poor-quality food) to actually doing something about it. There are many important avenues to explore: why some people are more susceptible to food impurities than others and how those individuals can be screened; what alternatives exist to current colorings, flavorings, stabilizers, etc; and of course, restricting the presence of those impurities in our foods. That's what the Center for Science in the Public Interest is trying to do by lobbying the US Congress to ban certain artificial colorings used in foods. But until then, consumers can do something on their own: make wise food choices. Voting with your checkbook is a time-tested way to bring about change.

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