Headstarts by Cindy Pan

Author:Cindy Pan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Parenting
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2011-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

[G. Giuliano, S. Al-Babili & J. von Lintig, ‘Carotenoid oxygenases: cleave it or leave it’, Trends in Plant Science, 8 (4), 2003, pp. 145–9.]

50. Can vitamins make your kids smarter?

Traditionally, kids took vitamins to keep them healthy. But now it looks like vitamins can make kids smarter too.

Vitamins are chemicals that your body can’t make by itself. Until the twentieth century, humans relied on eating and drinking to give us all the vitamins we needed, and cultures all over the world recognised the benefits of certain foods. The ancient Egyptians knew eating liver could cure night blindness, which is caused by a deficiency in vitamin A. Captain Cook prevented scurvy in his crew by feeding them spinach, which is high in vitamin C.

Now we can take concentrated vitamins in the form of pills, capsules, and powdered drinks. The crucial vitamins are A, B (1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 12), C, D, E, folate, iron, zinc, chromium, manganese, molybdenum, selenium and copper. If that sounds too much like a periodic table to remember, a good multivitamin has most of the vitamins your body needs.

The importance for children is that, amongst other things, vitamins help our brains to function properly. In fact, children who have low levels of vitamins in their blood can show abnormal brain activity. In contrast, children who have sufficient vitamin levels score 2.5 to 15 IQ points higher than children who don’t.

Of course, you can get the same effect with a well-balanced diet. But just to be sure, multivitamins have got it covered.

Thiamine deficiency is a problem for kids, usually teens, who have a truly unbalanced, nutritionally bereft ‘junk food’ diet. It can lead to irritability, aggressive behaviour and personality changes. A study of irritable, aggressive kids with very nutritionally poor diets found that while they failed to respond to medication or psychotherapy, their behaviour improved as a result of thiamine supplementation alone. Supplements are only beneficial if your kid is actually thiamine deficient in the first place, though, hyper-dosing them won’t do anything much as the body stores of thiamine are relatively small and can be depleted within a few weeks of inadequate intake. So they need to eat a normal, nutritious diet on an ongoing basis. Boring but true.

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