Something is happening to our kids, and it's killing them very slowly. It's raising our health-care costs, it’s increasing mental illness, it’s hurting our kids' IQ, it’s contributing to the rise in childhood asthma and diabetes, it’s made homicide happen five times a much as other countries, and much more. You and your kids think this food is good, because of advertising on TV, often in children’s bedroom.

20% of all calories per day now come from one food consumed by Americans, and 9% of the daily diet of Americans is food that inflames every cell in the body.1 All this, this turn, is killing our children (and adults) in America slowly.1 This mysterious ingredient is found in almost everything your child eats at school, at home, fast-food and “good restaurants”, at the neighbors’, at grandmother’s house, or even at church socials. It is not sugar, not additives, nor wheat.

Feeding a child’s brain and body

What is the ingredient or substance? Something called omega-6. No other children in the world consume this much of this ingredient. This item is relatively new in U.S. diet, only becoming a large part of our daily food intake since the mid-1970s. Before World War II, this was not part of our diet.

Kid’s food contains large quantities of omega-6, which does the damage to the brain and body. Omega-6 competes against the good fat needed in our brains and body, omega-3.

What is the food that has all this omega-6? Vegetable oils like soybean oil, cottonseed oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, and corn oil.

Your child consumes about 500 calories per day containing omega-6, coming from just one source: soybean oil.1 Now, this ingredient is in almost all the food your child eats—the snacks, the school food, the salad dressings, the frozen food, baked goods, and all the fast food. This food is even embedded in the meat and the poultry you serve because of feedlots, unless you feed your child wild or grass-fed meats.

This food has replaced and competes against some key food your child's brain needs to make brain cells and create most of the essential brain chemicals like serotonin and dopamine.2 This food causes the stress chemicals in your child to skyrocket and increases the inflammatory response all through the brain and body.1

These chemical changes affect your child's mood, behavior and health. Scores of scientists have been studying the effects of this "bad" food that has replaced "good" in your child's diet. Leading scientists are at the National Institute of Health, and I know one of the leading scientists quite well, Dr. Joe Hibbeln. Someday, I think he will be nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine. He ought to be on Oprah and on the cover of Time Magazine, because what he knows could save the lives of millions of children and adults in America. You can read the hard science in prestigious medical journals like The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, or the Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Hibbeln and others have figured out why there has been a population level increase in major problems like heart disease, asthma, developmental disabilities, depression, bipolar disorder and even suicide in this country: too much omega-6 (soybean oil) and not enough omega-3 (fish oil).1 3-6



What Families Can Do
What Can Be Done Politically