Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
they had been handed down from Mount Sinai. Our government
book on children's health had been repeatedly taped together as
its pages fell out. The corners were tattered. Key advice was
underlined. It was consulted in every medical crisis. For a while,
my parents gave up smoking - one of the few pleasures available
to them in the Depression years - so that their infant could have
vitamin and mineral supplements. Ann and I were very lucky.
Recent research shows that many children without enough to
eat wind up with diminished capacity to understand and learn
('cognitive impairment'). Children don't have to be starving for
this to happen. Even mild undernourishment, the kind most
common among poor people in America, can do it. This can
happen before the baby is born (if the mother isn't eating
enough), in infancy or in childhood. When there isn't enough
food, the body has to decide how to invest the limited foodstuffs
available. Survival comes first. Growth comes second. In this
nutritional triage, the body seems obliged to rank learning last.
Better to be stupid and alive, it judges, than smart and dead.
Instead of showing an enthusiasm, a zest for learning as most
healthy youngsters do, the undernourished child becomes bored,
apathetic, unresponsive. More severe malnutrition leads to lower
birth weights and, in its most extreme forms, smaller brains.
However, even a child who looks perfectly healthy but has not
enough iron, say, suffers an immediate decline in the ability to
concentrate. Iron-deficiency anaemia may affect as much as a
quarter of all low-income children in America; it attacks the
child's attention span and memory, and may have consequences
reaching well into adulthood.
What once was considered relatively mild undernutrition is now
understood to be potentially associated with lifelong cognitive
impairment. Children who are undernourished even on a shortterm
basis have a diminished capacity to learn. And millions of
American children go hungry every week. Lead poisoning, which
is endemic in inner cities, also causes serious learning deficits. By
many criteria, the prevalence of poverty in America has been
steadily increasing since the early 1980s. Almost a quarter of
American children now live in poverty - the highest rate of
childhood poverty in the industrialized world. According to one
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