Nutrition psychology. Higher dose of vitamin D in early childhood may reduce psychiatric symptoms in school-age children, finds study. A comment.

Helsinki Times report on a report from University of Tammerfors, where researchers was using mothers self-reporting to test the correlation between supplementation of vitamin D and children's mental health. Common knowledge is that kids need the Food matrix, 13 vitamins, DHA, EPA, choline, and 15 minerals, and to control for factors in the home environment. The study is interesting from a technical point of view, but: supplementing has never been a solution for children's' nutrient deficiencies. Food matrix is. Psychiatric disorders are rare as opposed to psychological disorders. Sandboge et al. didn't test for factors that are commonly known to influence children's mental adjustment and development. 6 pages.

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The Helsinki Times reports on a Finnish study that claims increasing vitamin D to 2-year-olds will reduce psychiatric symptoms when they reach school age.

Link to source.

Before continuing reading, I use Rational entrepreneurial thinking (RET; Österberg, 2021, in Swedish). RET is a syndrome of three existing models: Epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010), Disjunctive Numeracy (Stanovich, 2009), and Numeracy (Brook and Pui, 2010).

• Epistemic vigilance means being suspicious about the message and why the sender is sending the message, that is, asking the obvious questions: can one micronutrients have an influence on mental health, and why do they refer to mental health as psychiatric symptoms?
  
  
• Disjunctive reasoning means simply to take many different sources into account.
  
  
• Numeracy is the ability to understand, reason with, and to apply simple numerical concepts.

I spent three years exploring the future of Finnish agriculture - food production (Österberg, 2021, in Swedish). That included nutrition. My argument is that if farmers wants to optimize their operations, they should focus on food that benefit physical and mental health.

On Januari 23, 2020, I was invited by the head of department of food and nutrition at The university of Helsingfors to open their seminar series for expert in Food and nutrition. The label of my talk: What’s the Prospect of Sustainable Food: The Case for Mental health:

“The human mind has unique mental abilities. Why? Some 3.6 million years ago, our ancestors change their diet to include bone marrow which contains a number of important micronutrients, e.g. heme-iron, zinc, vitamin A, and some B vitamins, and docosahexaenoic fatty acids, to mention a few. 800 000 later, when the climate changed [again], from Pliocene to Pleistocene, meat was added to ‘the plate’. The consequence of this dietary change was an expansion of the brain, from 405 cc to today's 1300 cc, which opened the door for the ability to experience the future rationally by applying functions such as explorative and disjunctive reasoning as well as metacognitive sensitivity. This includes the ability to combine/blend non-related abstractions into new concepts, like the lion-man (40 000 years ago), the first bread (14400 years ago), beer (13000 years ago), Göpekli Tepe, agriculture, and religion (11 700 years ago). The Swedish Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) suggested meat to be a sin, calling for an all plant-based Garden-of-Eden, or vegan, diet. The idea was picked up by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The 1950s saw the birth of the diet-heart hypothesis, connecting cardiovascular disease with the consumption of saturated fats, cholesterol, and red meat. Diet-heart hypothesis was never validated in experimental trials, but are still the ‘holy grail’ for some believers who continue to promote a Garden-of-Eden diet. The decision to abort animal-sourced food attracts some 1-2 % of a normal population and is explained by a combination of temperament: openness to change and neuroticism - worrying for the future. The consequence of a plant-based diet is lower self-esteem and psychological adjustment, less meaning in life and more negative moods and social experiences compared to people on an omnivore diet. In order to sustain mental health, it seems we need need to consume a plethora of micronutrients. Next time you go shopping for food, put the following on your shopping list: 13 vitamins (e.g. A, several B:s, C, some D, E, K2-Mk4 and Mk7), 15-16 minerals (Heme-Iron, Magnesium, Zinc and so forth). Choline, as well as Docosahexaenoic, Arachidonic fatty acids”.

Finland is at the top of the ranking when it comes to:

• suicide (Fennoskandia and Denmark, or the Nordic countries except Iceland) for the 33rd consecutive year.
  
  
• Alzheimer's. It's a big gap to second place.
  
  
• Finnish school children lack abilities like reading compression and numeracy (Ministry of education, spring 2022).
  
  
• Finnish boys don't finish school (Late summer of 2022).
  
  
• ~265 000 Finnish children and young has mental challenges (Finlands child commissary Dr. Elina Pekkarinen, fall 2022). Dr Pekkarinen, a former social worker, attributed these mental challenges on the climate, and neuropsychiatry.
  
  
• Helsingfors Police claim that women's relational aggressiveness is a huge problem.

Common knowledge in:

• nutrition is that our species need to consume at least thirty micronutrients on a regular basis, and that those micronutrients need to be consumed together - the Food matrix (Allen, 2003; Balehegn et al. 2019). The rationale for that is that the fats (DHA and EPA), choline, the vitamins, and the minerals are interacting.
  
  
• behavioral science, including psychology, is that (1) self reporting is tricky, because the episodic memory is constructive (Schacter and Addis, 2007), (2) mental well-being is seldom explained by psychiatric disorders, but by psychological disorders.
  
  
• Home environment plays a huge role for childrens mental adjustment and development (Baumrind (all); Hart and Risley, 1995).

Where did Helsinki Times get the information about the study from?

The most likely source is from The university of Tammerfors, which posted an article about the study on their home page.

     Photo by Nicolas Solerieu on Unsplash

"Objective. To determine the impact of high-dose (1200 IU) vs standard-dose (400 IU) vitamin D3 supplementation during the first 2 years on psychiatric symptoms at ages 6 to 8 years and whether the impact is different in children with lower vs higher maternal vitamin D3 levels; lower vs higher levels were defined as 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25[OH]D) less than 30 ng/mL vs 30 ng/mL or greater" (Sandboge et al. 2023).

The authors claim that they used a double-blind randomized control trial (RCT), which allow for conclusions about cause-effect. But the information from the University of Tammerfors reads:

(Link to source).

Responses from questionnaries do not allow conclusions about cause-effect, but correlation - co-variation with association. Its nothing wrong to do a correlational analysis, buts its not an RCT.

Why didn't the authors report that they used correlational analysis, and why didn't they control for what the mothers ate as well as the food traditions in the homes to sort out if they used the food matrix or not, and common psychological factors (covariates) like:

1. Parental styles. Diana Baumrind (1927-2018) famously defined three parenting styles:

• Authoritarian: the authoritarian parenting style is characterized by high demandingness with low responsiveness. The authoritarian parent is rigid, harsh, and demanding. Abusive parents usually fall in this category (although Baumrind is careful to emphasize that not all authoritarian parents are abusive).
  
  
• Permissive: this parenting style is characterized by low demandingness with high responsiveness. The permissive parent is overly responsive to the child's demands, seldom enforcing consistent rules. The "spoiled" child often has permissive parents.
  
  
• Authoritative: this parenting style is characterized by high demandingness with huge responsiveness. The authoritative parent is firm but not rigid, willing to make an exception when the situation warrants. The authoritative parent is responsive to the child's needs but not indulgent. Baumrind makes it clear that she favors the authoritative style.

2. Communication in the home environment (Hart and Risley, 1995), the famous 30 million gap (Rosenberg, 2013). Children who experienced academic reasoning during their first three years of living gained 30  million word perception compared to children who suffered from a conflicting home environment. It affects school performance at age 10 (cognitive development).

3. Relational aggressiveness (Crick and Grotpeter, 1995; Hyde, 2005). They do mention "parental single status" five times, but that's socio-economics, not socio-culture. Singel mothers are known for expressing relational aggressivess.

The Food matrix and the home environment are known to explain a decent amount of the variance of the model for children's mental health.

Conclusion. Drs Sandboge, Räikkönen, Lahti-Pulkkinen study is interesting from a technical point of view, but:

• supplementing has never been a solution for children's' nutrient deficiencies. Food matrix is.
  
  
• Psychiatric disorders are rare as opposed to psychological disorders.
  
  
• Sandboge et al. didn't test for factors that are commonly known to influence children's mental adjustment and development.

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