It's a Crime: How Food Can Trigger Aggressive Behaviour

Food affects mood. But it can go a lot further than that.

If you Google the question “Why is everyone so angry?”, as I just did, you’ll find plenty of articles dissecting this troubling phenomenon and citing startling facts and figures. CBS News has covered it, so too has the New York Times and most of the British newspapers. We’ve all noticed it: people are angry in shops, on airplanes, in restaurants, and in their cars and homes. And they are not just angry; they are often abusive or violent, and often over the most trivial of slights or infractions.

Why is this happening, and with ever greater frequency and severity? There are the obvious socioeconomic issues: poverty, disadvantaged backgrounds, social inequality, intolerable stress levels. Like so many complex social and behavioural issues, the causes are multifactorial. But one critical component of the whole picture, the one most likely to be ignored, is diet.

The effect of food on the brain is society’s collective blind spot. Nobody bats a cynical eyelid anymore at the suggestion that poor diets, based on ultra-processed foods, are associated with chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. That’s gone mainstream. There’s even expanding interest in what has been called “nutritional psychiatry”, the study of food on mood and mental wellbeing. But mention aggressive or violent behaviour, and you’re the crackpot.

Glory be to Gloria

Even so, the research is there, and it’s been there gathering dust for too long. In the 1950s the concept of food as a modulator of behaviour gained support from the unlikeliest of champions, the actress and fashion designer Gloria Swanson. In her heyday Swanson was (according to Wikipedia) “a symbol of enduring glamour who was perhaps the most glittering goddess of Hollywood's golden youth in the 1920s”. She was also an enthusiastic campaigner for awareness of the link between nutrition and behaviour.

It all began when Swanson chanced upon a paper written by a Dr George Watson, itself a remarkably serendipitous event, considering that virtually nobody had read his work, not even from within the scientific community. Anyway, in 1954, he and a colleague published the findings of a small study that showed how a cocktail of vitamins and minerals could alter behaviour. That was a lightbulb moment for Swanson, who went on to become a passionate advocate for the use of nutrition to prevent youth crime, declaring “I can’t believe juvenile delinquency doesn’t come from the lack of proper nutrition. If the body can become sick from this, then why not the mind?”

Watson had been a voice crying in the wilderness, a prophet without a media platform, until Swanson came along and provided him with one. She made it her job to make public addresses quoting his work. Thanks to her influence, Watson’s work was widely publicised, and his 1972 book Nutrition and Your Mind made it to the cover headlines of Cosmopolitan magazine.

Since then, there has been a steady trickle of research suggesting that “…nutrition might be an underappreciated factor in prevention and treatment along the criminal justice spectrum.”

If they thought certain aspects of diet were bad back in the 50s and 60s, both Watson and Swanson would have burst a blood vessel had they seen what was coming down the line. Ultra-processed food (UPF) is today the monstrous, Frankenstein creation that is part of most people’s daily diet.