Disorderly Conduct
On
There are difficult children, and there are children with conduct disorder (CD). CD is defined as a consistent pattern of severely antisocial and aggressive behaviors. If the kid from next door bullies others, kicks the cat, lies, steals and uses drugs and/or alcohol, you may have a CD player on your hands.
CD is more serious than opposition defiant disorder (ODD), which is mostly about defiance to parental and school authority; but both can worsen over time before eventually emerging in young adulthood as antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), particularly if drugs are involved and social support is lacking.
There is some symptomatic overlap with intermittent explosive disorder (IED) (1) and ADDD/ ADHD (2); and like both of these conditions, CD (3) appears to be increasing. This has long-term consequences for the affected individual and for society as a whole because all these disorders, like ASPD, tend to lead towards crime and punishment (4, 5).
(Trend data for ODD are unclear, perhaps due to the diversity of social codes and a significant degree of misdiagnosis. As ODD involves the transgression of cultural norms which are intrinsically variable, and manifests behavior which may be appropriate or at least logical in some circumstances, it is easy to see how the label can be misused.)
I wasn’t particularly interested in conduct disorder until I stumbled across a list of obviously interacting risk factors for this condition. They include poor prenatal care, low education level, deviant peers, disadvantaged and crime-ridden neighborhoods, community violence – and poor infant nutrition (6, 7).
As our nutritional standards are in a long-term decline (8, 9) it seems likely there will be more disorderly conduct in our future. The brains of the next generation are in our hands, and on our plates.
Poor infant nutrition has long been associated with cognitive and behavioral impairment during childhood and adolescence, with some abnormal traits extending into adulthood (10), so the idea that malnutrition might increase the risk of CD seems entirely reasonable. Infant malnutrition contributes to a number of neurological abnormalities (11) including reduced cerebral volume (12); so a recent paper which found consistent neurological changes in CD cases, also including reduced cerebral cortical volume (13), appears to make sense too.
The findings of changes in brain structures involved in emotional processing and decision-making suggest that CD should be added to the growing list of neurodevelopmental disorders, which, according to DSM5, now stretch from intellectual disabilities to autism spectrum disorders and ADHD to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Considering the deep complexity of the developing brain and the ways in which it grows towards the relatively steadier state of young adulthood, it would be surprising if early malnutrition and related metabolic problems such as dysbiosis (14) and chronic inflammation (ie 2) did NOT result in measurable and meaningful changes in later life.
It is not necessarily a good idea to focus on a single indicator of maternal and therefore fetal malnutrition, but two possible candidate markers are toxic pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes.
In one recent study, a diet containing significant amounts of solid fats and refined grains (ie large amounts of ultra-processed foods) was strongly associated with preeclampsia during pregnancy, while a diet containing more fruits, vegetables and oils (a more traditional diet) was protective (15). A second study found that the same dietary profiles similarly increased and decreased the risk of gestational diabetes (16).
Both preeclampsia (17-19) and gestational diabetes (20-22) increase the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders in children, including autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia and conduct disorder (23, 24). They are also associated with neuroanatomical and functional changes in children whose mothers were affected (25-27).
Another candidate marker for maternal and child malnutrition is stunting, which affects over 150 million children worldwide (28). This sad phenomenon has recently re-emerged in North America and the UK (29-31), due to our increasingly ultra-processed diet and correspondingly reduced intakes of growth-essential micronutrients (29-32).
Stunting is another problem linked to reduced intelligence and altered psychosocial behaviors (ie 33-40). It is associated with increased anxiety and depression, increased distractability and oppositional behavior, poor self-esteem – and abnormal brain structures (35). These children, too, are more likely to manifest ODD and CD in later life (36).
Do vaccines play into this? This hot-button issue inevitably comes up at meetings …
I prefer not to play under the guns of Pfizer and Moderna, who purchased total immunity from legal liability under the PREP Act and who destroy, wherever they can, those who criticize them; but there does seem to be a link. I have seen too many infants with what appeared to be vaccine damage. And, there is form.
In the UK, the Vaccination Act of 1853 made it compulsory for all children born after 1 August 1853 to be vaccinated against smallpox during their first 3 months of life. Parents who refused to get their children vaccinated were fined and ultimately jailed. Their testimonies make it clear that they were willing to go to jail to protect their children, many of whom were displaying post-vaccine symptoms we would now term autistic (41). And they did so in the total absence of social media.
This was dismissed by the medical establishment of the time (sound familiar?) but it remained a huge issue into the twentieth century. The Labour Party made its breakthrough by standing on an anti-compulsory vaccination platform, creating the legal definition of conscientious objection in the 1898 Vaccination Act and doing away with compulsory vaccination altogether in 1946.
That was back when the Labour Party was respectable and led by Ramsay MacDonald, a moral and intellectual giant compared to the coercive, corrupt, and small-minded sack of excrement that is Keir Starmer, a thing who was only prevented from initiating WW3 recently by last-minute back-channel communications between Moscow and Washington (41).
If our diets continue to degrade the next generation will be less intelligent, and will have more neuropsychiatric problems. Our children will manifest more neurodevelopmental problems, there will be more conduct, intermittent explosive and opposition defiant disorder, there will be more adults with antisocial personality disorder and society will become more dangerous and more criminal than it already is.
This is happening at a time when prisoner rehabilitation, which was literally built into 19th C penal institutions, has effectively been removed from the prison system. The accelerated downgrading of rehabilitation after 1945 (42) was fueled inter alia by increasingly violent behaviour in prisons and increased rates of recidivism. This likely reflected increasing numbers of prisoners with neurodevelopmental problems, due to the dietary decline which gained speed after the war.
I do not know if we deserve a better future, but our children deserve a better start.
For the generation that is to come, there is a straightforward answer. Extensive reform of the food industry will help us raise healthier children and grandchildren, and put society as a whole on a better path. It is not a simple answer, as the lobbying power of the great corporations holds us all in check, but it is attainable if enough of us work together.
For the generation already affected, there is hope too. The nutritional hand dealt to the fetus and child may do initial damage, but this damage can be reduced or even undone. In malnourished infants, many of the signs of brain damage can be remedied by psychosocial stimulation (36). This implies that the plasticity of the brain can be harnessed therapeutically, and even better effects are likely achieved if combined with neuro-supportive nutrition.
In adult black cab drivers, learning ‘The Knowledge’ of London’s streets reliably increases grey matter in specific areas of the hippocampus where spatial information is processed (43). Helping children to learn psychosocial skills and rebuild the parts of the brain where they originate does not seem to be too much of a stretch.
It would explain the dramatic improvement I have witnessed in very many children who were put on a nutritional regime designed to counter neuroinflammation, dysbiosis and type B malnutrition, and whose initial disorder diagnosis was subsequently reversed.
I truly believe there is hope, if you want it.
Endnote: I am no ‘anti-vaxxer’, and in the last year have been vaccinated twice for travel. Most vaccines have an acceptable therapeutic index, and the category is an important one. However ..
Vaccines are not free of harm, current vaccine schedules for newborns appear to prioritise drug company profits over child safety, and drug company immunity to vaccine-related damage is, to say the least, a contentious issue. The enforced roll-out of experimental Covid mRNA ‘vaccines’ was gross public health malpractice.
Next week: Gamble with fatty acids, dice with death.
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