It is easy to sit in judgement on people when they have committed crimes and are in prison.

It is all very well analysing the risk factors in the lives of young offenders and citing parental abuse, failure at school, unemployment or drugs. But what can we actually do in order to cut crime rates quickly?

According to a team from Oxford University, it is really quite simple: Start taking vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids. Their recent study in a maximum security unit found that after giving supplements to prisoners for five months, there was a 40 per cent fall in serious offences, including violence.

Just imagine the outcome if the study had included eating a healthy diet as well.

In the Seventies, an American probation officer called Alexander Schauss claimed a vital link between junk food and antisocial behaviour in his bestselling book Diet, Crime And Delinquency.

His theories were subsequently put to the test by criminologist Dr Stephen Schoenthaler who found the behaviour of juveniles improved significantly when junk food and high-sugar foods were eliminated.

Sadly, the Home Office has no plans to commission similar studies. Presumably this means no dietary changes in prisons or, heaven forbid, any free supplements.

So can we look forward to increasingly anti-social and aggressive behaviour in our prisons?

It is not just the inmates who are nutritionally deprived - consider the number of incidents in schools, hospitals and football stadiums.

Only last month, the American Medical Association warned that people eating a normal diet may not be getting enough nutrients from their food to prevent illness.

Harvard Medical School doctors therefore recommend that everyone, regardless of age or health status, take a daily multivitamin.

Medics are finally admitting that our modern diet fails to provide us with the ingredients we need for optimal physical and mental health.

At the same time, we are witnessing the prohibition of vitamin and mineral supplements on a grand scale.

Make no mistake, various complicated directives being passed in Brussels will lead to the phasing out of safe and popular nutrients and herbs over the next few years.

Others will have unnecessary limits imposed on their potency to render them ineffective.

Those in charge of legislation are neither scientists nor nutritionists. Some are said to have close links with the German pharmaceutical industry.

Less supplements will ultimately mean more ill health, more crime and more money being spent on drugs.

In order to oppose the growing threat to our health and freedom, the independent organisation Consumers For Health Choice (CHC) is organising a major campaign to which Paul McCartney, Elton John, Cliff Richard and others have already given their backing.

You can help by keeping yourself informed and making a donation to CHC.

Better still, write to your MP and ask him to oppose the introduction into UK law of the Food Supplements Directive. For more details on how to do this, contact Consumers for Health Choice, 9 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9JA or visit www.healthchoice.org.uk
Martina is a qualified
nutritionist at the Crescent Clinic of Complementary Medicine, 37 Vernon Terrace, Brighton. Tel: 01273 202221 or email: martina_watts@compuserve.com