Myomancy ADHD, Dyslexia and Autism

The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children

Carol N. Simontacchi

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A review of The Crazy Makers, How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children, by Carol Simontacchi

By Gregory Ziegler
Professor of Food Science
Penn State University

Rational thought is not what you will find in The Crazy Makers, How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children, by Carol Simontacchi. Instead, what you will read is a quasi-scientific, religious polemic against "food manufacturing." The book's thesis statement is that "diet is the one major change in our culture over the past century that has altered the physical state of our brains and, therefore, altered the state of our minds."

The religious nature of the book is evident from the very beginning, where in the Acknowledgements Ms. Simontacchi thanks most of all her "Heavenly Father, who designed the most wonderful food, perfectly suited to nourishing our brains and our spirits. We have turned aside from Your providence and tried to manufacture our own. How foolish of us."

I must come clean. I am the Director of Penn State's Center for Food Manufacturing, and some would consider me a shill for the "food industry." However, my critique of this book should not be construed as a defense of food manufacturers, but as a guide to those who would like to separate rational thought from opinion.

Though a "board-certified clinical nutritionist," Simontacchi apparently does not know that neither cholesterol nor phosphatidylserine are fatty acids, that glutathione is not an amino acid, or that phytic acid is not a protein. Glutamic acid is a non-essential amino acid building block of proteins. Non-essential means that while we need glutamic acid to build proteins, our body can make its own and, therefore, it is not required in the diet. Mono sodium glutamate is the sodium salt of this amino acid. Simontacchi refers to MSG as an excitotoxin, and writes that "glutamate, is embedded in other ingredients commonly added to baby food," but fails to inform the reader that these other ingredients are proteins or that glutamic acid is by far the most common amino acid in human milk casein.

Is glutamate natural asks Simontacchi. As natural as mother's milk. Might it be harmful in excess? Yes it might. But the idea that something natural may also be toxic goes against Simontacchi's basic assumption of "natural goodness." In the lead-in to chapter 6 Simontacchi quotes Isaiah 55:2, "Why do you spend money for what is not bread." Yet the gluten proteins of bread are about 35% glutamic acid (in the form of glutamine), and says Simontacchi, "[G]rain allergies are one of the most common sources of depression." (More on bread later.)

Glutamic acid is heralded as "brain food" in the chapter "Feeding the Autistic Brain."

While appearing scientific in approach, Simontacchi shows obvious distain for proper scientific methods. She states emphatically that the "influence of a high-sugar diet on brain chemistry is enormous," despite the fact that contradictory "meta-analyses" of the research on the issue were published in both the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and the Journal of the American Medical Association. She refers to these meta-analyses simply as "a review article," and then presumes to "balance" the argument by quoting an article from the South African Medical Journal. The title of the article she uses to assert the effect of sugar on behavior - "Is butter bad for you?" But then she has already warned us not to believe the experts, and "that virtually everything written about nutrition in the mainstream press is wrong." Does sugar affect the brain? Forget science, "just ask Miss Redman or any schoolteacher. Ask mom."

The section "The Current State of Our Minds" appears to be a litany of Ms. Simontacchi's greatest fears and anxieties. Much of what is written is unsupported by data. She quotes Harvard Medical School professor Ronald Kessler as saying, "The trends are sufficiently impressive to fuel speculation that upward trends in mental illness might exist," [emphases mine] and then follows that with the statement "[W]ithin our current mental health epidemic." How did a speculation of what might be end up an epidemic?

Even when the data contradict her assertions - "[R]ates of violence seem to be easing off" - Simontacchi persists in spinning it to meet her expectations - "But the U.S. surgeon general is not letting his guard down." "Even more bleakly," violent tendencies have not lessened over the past fifteen years (nor have they apparently increased), and arrests for aggravated assault "declined only slightly." Definitely a glass-is-half-empty perspective. "Skyrocketing," "growing trend," "taking on major proportions" and "growing numbers" are all phrases used to hype the problems without substantiating data. Simontacchi cites little primary scientific literature, relying instead on secondary references, many of which are not credible.

Simontacchi's lack of scientific integrity is demonstrated when she cites the "Pottenger" study as evidence of the harmful effects of milk pasteurization. Dr. Pottenger's cats became ill due to a lack of the amino acid taurine, which resulted from too little meat in their diets. Simontacchi fails to tell the reader that cats fed on raw milk only fared worse than those on a combination of meat and pasteurized milk. Pasteurization is a mild heat treatment intended to destroy the living cells of potential human pathogens. Along with improvements in hygiene, milk pasteurization probably did as much as anything to improve human health in the 20th Century.

While condemning pasteurized milk as a "highly processed dairy food," Simontacchi seems to encourage the consumption of tofu, despite the fact that many more steps are required to manufacture tofu from soybeans. These steps include heating to temperatures well in excess of those required for milk pasteurization. Furthermore, tofu contains the same phytoestrogens that Simontacchi says make soy-based infant formula even worse than milk-based products. And the magnesium in tofu? Magnesium chloride, technically a food additive.

This begs the questions, what is "processed" food, and why are "manufactured" foods "chilling." Does cooking a meal at home in a manner similar to pasteurization result in a "highly processed" food? Manufacturing simply means to be made from raw materials by hand or by machine, so a home baker is by definition a manufacturer. The Eucharist is a manufactured food, bread does not exist in Nature, and so is the "protein breakfast drink" (likely loaded with glutamic acid) that Simontacchi suggests for the adolescent breakfast.

Like similar polemics on the topic, the book is replete with nostalgia for a bygone era when we all just picked food fresh from our backyard Eden and is heavily laden with inflammatory language, but adds an evangelistic tone. "The epidemic of autism is just one facet of a nation that has lost its moral way." Simontacchi dismisses reports by the Centers for Disease Control and the Institutes of Medicine finding no link between mercury in vaccines and autism*, insisting that it's a matter of "common sense."

So what's the harm in Ms. Simontacchi dismissing the best science and expressing her opinion? It diverts our attention from investigating other more likely causes of our problems. For example, while Simontacchi does mention in passing that physicians often recommend a strict gluten-free and casein-free diet for autistic children, she never discusses the potential relationship between autism and Celiac's disease. Could it be that she can't imagine such a thing could be caused by whole grains, one of God's most wonderful foods?

Nutritionists like Simontacchi once told us to substitute margarine for Mother Nature's butter, a recommendation we have now come to regret. Now they are telling us to eat lots of whole grain. "Whom are we to believe?"


* Since 2001, with the exception of some influenza (flu) vaccines, mercury-containing thimerosal is not used as a preservative in routinely recommended childhood vaccines.

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