Máiréad Quinn 👩🏻‍🔬

Channel 4 took a ten year old off his ADHD medication on Tuesday night, gave him yoga, forest walks, less sugar and no screens for six weeks, and admitted in a line of text at the end that he had struggled at school. Referrals for assessment in this country are up two hundred per cent in five years. The whole thing has been on fire ever since. The charities say it has stigmatised children. One of the scientists in it has publicly withdrawn her support and said she was cherry-picked. The other side says a sample of one proves nothing. Everybody is arguing about the boy. Nobody is arguing about his plate, and the experiment they ran on him is the reason why. They took things away from that child for six weeks. Screens, sugar, his prescription. They did not put one single thing back. Because a brain is not made of ideas. It is made of fat. The fat that matters is called DHA, it sits in the wall of every nerve cell in a boy's head, and it decides how fast a signal gets across. No plant on earth makes it. It comes out of egg yolk, oily fish, liver, the fat round a chop and the cream on top of the milk, and that is the entire list. A boy in 1976 ate off that list three times a day without one person in his life knowing the word. He woke to eggs and bacon fried in the fat off the bacon, and a glass of milk with the cream still up the neck of the bottle. He walked to school and sat down at nine having eaten meat, fat and yolk. Dinner at twelve was mince with a proper gravy, or liver, or suet pudding and custard. Out at half three, home at four, told he would spoil his tea, back out until dark. Tea at six, cooked. Fish on a Friday because the Pope said so and the whole street went along with it. Then the kitchen shut for thirteen hours. Now his grandson. - 7.30: cereal, or a cereal bar, in skimmed milk - 10.00: a biscuit at break - 12.30: a wrap, crisps, a yoghurt with more sugar in it than a doughnut - 3.30: something out of the machine on the way out - 4.15: the multipack, opened in front of a screen - 6.30: nuggets, or a pizza, or a sauce out of a jar - 8.00: whatever is left in the bag Seven, and not one of them sitting at a table. There is no yolk in that column. No liver. No fat off an animal anywhere in it, and there has not been since he was weaned, because every item on the list is the same two things in different packaging: sugar, and oil pressed out of seeds in a factory. The oil is not simply failing to feed him. It gets in the way. The body builds the fat a brain needs using the same machinery it uses to process seed oil, and the oil takes priority. The more of it that goes in, the less of the other he can make. He is blocked at both ends, seven times a day, from birth. His grandmother is not to blame for a second of it. In 1984 the government's own committee on nutrition reported on fat and heart disease and told the country to cut it out. The yolks went in the bin. The milk was skimmed. The dripping was poured away and the butter dish came off the table, and a nation of women did precisely as they were told by men with letters after their names. So a psychiatrist put a boy in a forest for six weeks and filmed the result. Ten years of that column against six weeks of walking about. He took the child's medication away, which was reckless, and never once put a yolk in front of him, which was the actual experiment and nobody ran it. They changed what a boy is made of, spent forty years denying it, and have now made a television programme asking whether the boy is the thing that went wrong.