LONDON: Improving the vitamins, minerals and fatty acids in the diets of young offenders appeared to reduce their anti-social behaviour dramatically, revealed a British government-backed study.

On Tuesday, it prompted calls for further research into the impact of nutrition on crime.

Results of trials in one maximum security institution for 18-to 21-year-old men suggested that inmates who took special supplements committed more than a quarter fewer disciplinary offences while serving their sentences than those who were unknowingly simply taking dummy pills.

Significant infringements of discipline, including violence, fell by 37 per cent, according to the authors of the study, which was organized with the help of the UK Home Office and prison service.

The results will be published soon in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Hugh Montifiore, former Bishop of Birmingham and chairman of Natural Justice, the charity behind the study at the young offenders’ institution in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, suggested that there was a correlation, if not a direct connection, between the rises in fast food consumption and youth crime.

“More and more fast food is being consumed. More and more made-up dishes are sold in supermarkets. School meals are a matter of choice, and there is less cooking with proper ingredients.”

“None of us claims that lack of proper nutrition is the sole cause of anti-social behaviour. But the evidence does show that it is an hitherto unknown major contributor.”

Bernard Gesch, who led the study while he was at Surrey University, Guildford, said that “The supplements just provided the vitamins, minerals and fatty acids found in a good diet which the inmates should be getting anyway. Yet the improvement in behaviour was huge.”

It was not necessarily long-lasting, however. Shortly after the experiment ended, staff reported that violence against them rose by 40 per cent.

Gesch is now a research scientist in physiology at Oxford University as well as director of Natural Justice, which investigates causes of criminal behaviour.

His team pointed out nutrients were crucial ingredients in the biochemical processes that produced brain transmitters like seratonin and dopamine, which affect mood.

Giving all Britain’s prisoners an improved diet of micronutrients might cost about $5.3 million a year, against an overall prison service budget of nearly $3 billion. Gesch added that “This approach needs to be retested, but it looks to be cheap, highly effective and humane.” The results might be even better in adolescent children, he suggested.

Sir David Ramsbotham, former chief inspector of prisons, said that the Home Office should carefully consider the implications of the study.

Alan Simpson, Labour MP for Nottingham South, called for other studies to be conducted in schools and hospitals.

He said that, “We may be sitting on a timebomb which it is entirely within our ability to defuse. If we choose to feed up our kids rather than just bang them up, we may also discover we have found a better way of bringing them up.”

The British government is trying to find ways of changing people’s eating behaviour without acting like a nanny state.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.