‘There is no way we can have a normal brain today’ – Stolen Focus, Chapter 12 Notes

Posted on: June 16, 2022

Last Updated on: June 17th, 2022

Post Category: Book Notes

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About #onepageonepoint

#onepageonepoint aims to summarise new ideas from books on personal and professional development – with (approximately) one point for each page. Read more about this project here.

Today for #onepageonepoint, we have summary notes for Stolen Focus – for chapter 12: ‘Cause Nine and Ten: Our Deteriorating Diets and Rising Pollution’.

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learn more about the book, click here.

Chapter 12: ‘Cause Nine and Ten: Our Deteriorating Diets and Rising Pollution’

• ‘Achieving sustained attention… is a physical process that requires your body to do certain things. So if you disrupt your body – by depriving it of the nutrients it needs, or by pumping it full of pollutants – your ability to pay attention will also be disrupted’ (Hari 2022, p. 192).

• Dale Pinnock (a popular nutritionist in Britain), along with other experts around the world, explain that there are three ways our current diet is damaging our focus:
  • 1. Our diet consists of foods that cause regular energy spikes and crashes: food with little fibre will release glucose very rapidly, causing blood sugar to go high and crash down very quickly – and thus ‘the feeling of constantly needing a pick-me-up’.
  • 2. Most of us eat in a way that deprives us of the nutrients we need for our brains to develop and function fully: food, now pumped with stabilisers and preservatives, have lower nutritional value.
  • 3. Food now contains chemicals that seem to act like drugs in the body: in a 2007 British study, kids who drank food dyes from a drink were significantly more likely to become hyperactive – leading to these dyes being banned in many European countries.

• In a small study, performed by Dutch scientists in 2009, children who had trouble focussing were split into two groups and had different diets: one cut out preservatives, additives and synthetic dyes while the other group did not. From the study, it was found that more than 70 percent of the children in the first group got improved attention, with an average 50 percent performance improvement. This was repeated with a hundred children and the results were consistent with those from the small study.

• The body absorbs nutrients much more effectively from real food compared to capsules and supplements.

• If you look at any healthy population, there is no secret ingredient, but one common thread: they do not consume junk such as refined carbohydrates and processed food i.e. they eat significantly more whole foods.

• Michael Pollan recommends we should eat only the food that our grandparents would have recognised as food and focus on shopping around the edges of the supermarket – for the fruit, vegetables and meat.

• Professor Joel Nigg explains that the science shows higher intake of processed foods leads to higher likelihood of ADHD in children.

• Professor Barbara Demeneix, a prestigious scientist in France, explains that ‘At every stage of your life, different forms of pollution will affect your attention span [and] we’ve got neurodevelopmental disease increasing exponentially… we are now surrounded by so many pollutants that there is no way we can have a normal brain today’ (Hari 2022, p. 199).

• She also explains ‘if you live in a major city today, every day you are breathing in a chemical soup [that causes brain inflammation]’ (Hari 2022, p. 199). If you get exposed to this ‘chemical soup’ for months and years, this can lead to nerve/brain damage and therefore brain degeneration e.g. dementia.

• In a study from Canada, people were 15 percent more likely to develop dementia if they lived next to a major road.

• Brain inflammation (due to pollution) at early stages of life can have a chronic impact on mental functioning: causing aggression, loss of control and attention deficit.

• In highly polluted areas, there has been evidence of degenerative diseases in young children – causing shrinking volumes of brain tissue and sometimes the formation of plaques and lesions, and underperformance in attention tests.

• Earlier in history, lead was used in pipes, paint and petrol. This caused toxic levels of lead poisoning in the 1970s and 1980s – sometimes leading to hallucinations, violent insanity and death.

• Through a study made by Bruce Lanphear, who is currently professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and other scientists during the 1970s and 1980s, he explained that ‘If you are exposed to lead as a child… you are two and a half times more likely to meet the criteria for ADHD’ (Hari 2022, p. 201) – with the factor increasing with other forms of pollution.

• Because of the ban on leaded products in America, in 1975, the concentration of lead in blood decreased (from 15 micrograms to 0.85 micrograms) and the IQ of pre-schoolers was estimated to have increased by 5 points.

• Other chemicals that damage attention are on the rise: pesticides, plasticisers, flame-retardants and cosmetics. One hazard (of many) of these chemicals is that they affect endocrine signals (signals that help with hormones) by creating a ‘radio interference’ that screws with the development of the brain and therefore damages attention. However, these studies were not accepted by the American Council of Health and Science.

• At an individual level, there is no escape from these chemicals; to avoid them by individual effort alone is ‘a fools game’.

• Bruce Lanphear explains two responses to mitigate high exposure to such chemicals: (1) testing chemicals before it starts being used by ordinary people (at the moment, scientists scramble to study them after they are assumed to be safe and released to the public), (2) band together as citizens and demand its prohibition if independent studies (i.e. studies not funded by industry) show that they are harmful.

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learn more about the book, click here.

Interested in reading more? See my notes for Chapter 13.