Teen Brain
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With their labile and rapidly developing brains, adolescents are particularly susceptible to addiction, and addiction leads to anxiety and depression.
What few parents will know is that what we think of as the most typical addictions and problematic teen behaviours - smoking, drinking, drug taking, sex leading to teenage pregnancy - are on the decline.
The bad news is that a whole raft of addictions has taken their place. Whereas once the dopamine-hungry brain of a teenager got its fix from smoking a joint or sculling a Bundy and coke, it is now turning to electronic devices for the pleasure jolt that typically comes from online playing games and engaging with social media.
What is doubly troubling is that, unlike drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, electronic devices are not illicit. Quite the contrary.
They are liberally distributed by schools and parents, with few restrictions placed on their use.
And, to add fuel to the fire, emerging research shows that if addictive pathways are activated during the teen years, they are there for life, and that what starts as a screen addiction can lead to major substance abuse later in life.
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"Gillespie is academically gifted, a linguist, excellent at most things he turns his mind to...he's a polymath, an old-fashioned Renaissance man, who finds few things dull and everything else interesting." The Courier Mail David Gillespie is a lawyer and the best-selling author of the Sweet Poison books, a series about how we are all poisoning ourselves with sugar. He followed those up with Big Fat Lies and Toxic Oil both of which target the dangers of seed oils in our diet. Having upset the dietetics industry by writing about stuff in which he has no qualifications, he then turned his focus to something else he is unqualified to write about, education. In Free Schools, David takes a parent's eye-view of the research and concludes that all the rolling green hockey fields and architect designed amphitheatres won't make a jot of difference to the education your child is likely to receive. In Eat Real Food, David returns to the topic of human nutrition and delivers the ultimate practical guide to avoiding the two most toxic substances in the modern food supply, sugar and seed oil.
