BY LAUREN AYERS

In 2005, I was asked to fill a vacancy in a second-and third-grade special education classroom of eleven students. About halfway through the school year, after reading The Omega Diet by Artemis Simopoulos, MD, I approached the principal with a simple proposal: I wanted to introduce a small, nutrient-dense food into our daily routine and see whether it could support my students’ focus, mood, and overall well being.

She gave the greenlight, and so, on a spring day, I gathered the class to talk about a humble but powerful food that comes in a flat metal can with a pull tab: sardines.

My eleven students had never been offered this snack by a teacher before and their eyes were big with doubt. The two classroom aides were also surprised, waiting to see where Ms. Ayers was going with this strange idea that kids would eat sardines.

I told the expectant group that I would eat one sardine then and there—scales, guts, fins and all. (It helped that the TV show Fear Factor was on air back then.) I set the sardine on a plate where the students could all see it, and told them that anyone interested could try one the next day. (I could see them thinking, “No way!”)

Why Sardines?

To help my students understand the significance of this snack, I began with a simple comparison: if a rat—or even an elephant—were scaled to my body weight, its brain would still be only about one-quarter the size of mine.

Humans have unusually large brains relative to our body size—and those big brains require more omega-3 fats than most mammals need. Plus, because our bodies can’t make these fats on their own, we have to get them from food.

Holding up the sardine can, I pointed out that it held three fish, and according to the label, just one of them provides 170 milligrams of omega-3s. Eating all three would give a child over 500 milligrams—a solid step toward the recommended daily intake for brain development.

I also explained that thousands of years ago—long before grocery stores existed—human families survived by foraging for plants and hunting animals for food.

Wild grazing animals like bison have four-chambered stomachs that transform grasses into omega-3s and other beneficial fats. As a result, Plains Indians, who relied on bison, were able to nourish their brains with these essential nutrients.

Coastal and river-based communities had access to an even richer source of brain-building fats: fish. Cold-water fish are especially high in omega-3s, and our ancestors became skilled at catching them using nets, spears, and hooks.

Today, people eat much less fish, and most cattle no longer graze freely on grass-covered hillsides. Instead, they’re fed grain in crowded, muddy feedlots.

As a result, our favorite foods like hamburgers and hot dogs now contain significantly fewer of the omega-3 fats that help our brains work well. (In fact, studies have shown that grass-fed beef can contain up to five times more omega-3s.)

When we don’t get enough of these essential fatty acids, it can slow down how we think, make it harder to remember things, increase nervous feelings, and make it more difficult to stay patient. All of that can get in the way of learning and reading.

To make this real, I asked them to raise their hands if anyone in their family had diabetes. Four or five hands went up.

Knowing that some lived with grandparents, I continued: “How about cancer?” Not as many hands that time, but they understood it was serious.

Then I asked, “Has anyone in your family had a heart attack or a stroke?” More hands.

I brought the conversation closer to home by asking about conditions that affect kids, like food allergies and asthma. I knew that some of my students dealt with those themselves or had siblings who did.

I explained that scientists have found omega-3 fats can help prevent or improve these kinds of health issues. Since most oils in modern processed foods don’t provide omega-3s, that’s one reason sardines are so beneficial—they help our brains work better, improve our energy and mood, and even support memory.

To my surprise, the students stayed with me—perhaps because this was the first time they’d heard such unusual health advice.

Then came the grand finale: I ate the sardine, right there in front of them! After witnessing my amazing survival, one student proudly shared that her grandpa liked sardines on saltines. Another chimed in that his auntie was a fan of tuna fish sandwiches.

Sardine Spring

The next morning, the children waved their Sardine Permission Slips as they came in the door. Those brave souls would get to try a bite, and once they knew what it tasted like, they would have a chance to eat a whole sardine the next day if they wanted. Thus began our Sardine Spring.

Motivated to boost their health, all eleven courageously sampled the first tiny bite in their paper cup. Two of them found the fishy flavor too strong and opted out, but from that point on, at morning recess, nine out of the eleven students happily accepted a Dixie cup containing a sardine.

Looking back, I wish I had thought to bring some salsa or lemon juice—something to make the taste more palatable for those two with sensitive taste buds.

Word of our unusual classroom snack eventually reached Sacramento Bee reporter Laurel Rosenhall, who came to visit and observe. She later published an article titled In Good Taste: Sardines Help Students Learn More, Says a Teacher Who Serves Them as Class Treats. (Her article is no longer available on the newspaper’s website, but you can read it in full below.)

Although it’s difficult to quantify the total impact of the daily sardine routine, I witnessed a noticeable increase in student engagement. They interacted more readily with each other and seemed to participate more fully in the assignments.

For instance, during writing activities with a picture box and lines for text, they eagerly began both drawing and writing. I sensed a heightened energy and creativity in their compositions during the final third of the year, coinciding with the sardine snacks, which surpassed the level I had anticipated based on their earlier work.

I can only wonder what further impact a full year of daily sardines might have had.

A Public Health Opportunity

Now I am retired and living happily in a rural valley amid many organic and regenerative farms. With more time available, I have been presenting data to my local county’s public health department, pointing out that both the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the USDA’s School Lunch Program should include foods containing the essential fatty acids DHA and EPA. Unfortunately, they aren’t interested the least bit.

It is important to ask why there are no minimum daily requirements set for these scarce fatty acids. The problem is that such a guideline would cut into the profits of a very powerful lobby—the processed food industry. They supply cafeterias that serve free lunch as a national program, and now schools also provide free breakfast.

Speaking as both a teacher and taxpayer, it seems fair to me to offer free meals to children in low-income areas because it’s darn hard to learn on an empty stomach.

However, the current system is missing a huge opportunity—it’s simply not enough to fill bellies. We must also feed brains.

Yet, ultra-processed foods dominate school menus, and these foods typically lack the essential fatty acids DHA and EPA, which are critical to neurological development and disease prevention. Without these nutrients, we’re shortchanging our children—especially those who rely on school meals for the majority of their daily calories.

The Moms Across America organization has been conducting independent laboratory testing on school lunches, and the results are troubling. Their reports have revealed that many of the meals served to children contain alarming levels of pesticides, herbicides, and even heavy metals.

In one nationwide sampling of school lunches from public schools in several states, Moms Across America found residues of glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup—in ninety-five percent of the meals tested. One sample even tested positive for four veterinary drugs and hormones.

Their lab reports also reveal that the food for kids who get two of their three daily meals in the school cafeteria is far too low in the nutrients necessary for healthy growth.

Did you know that back in the 1920s and 1930s, the USDA educated parents on the benefits of cod liver oil for their children?

In the 1970s, Senator George McGovern chaired the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs; under the influence of seed oil processors, the committee’s final report deemed vegetable oils to be healthier than butter and lard.

It’s taken decades to wake up from that nightmare, and the WIC program still offers only low-fat or fat-free milk for preschool children over twenty-four months of age!

A Daily Sardine Snack

Let’s be clear: this is not a call for a luxury menu. Sardines are affordable. They’re shelf stable. They’re nutrient-dense. They’re low in toxins compared to other fish and high in the very compounds children need to focus, regulate their emotions, and build resilience. Research, such as the 2004 Oxford-Durham study, shows that omega-3s significantly improve attention, motor coordination, and academic performance.

Pilot programs could offer sardines or other whole-food sources of omega-3s for school meals. Since national reform could take years to achieve, an easy start would be for states to skip the red tape and federal rules by simply starting their own parallel-but-separate programs to fill the huge DHA/EPA gap. A Daily Sardine Snack would prove itself within months, with fewer absences, better test scores, and fewer visits to the principal’s office.

Students would probably demonstrate similar improvements in hand-eye coordination as were found in the famous Oxford-Durham Study. There were noticeable improvements after supplementing students with the omega-3s EPA and DHA for a mere three months—as the “before” and “after” handwriting samples in Figure 1 show.

What else is possible to do today? Charter schools could live up to their claimed innovative spirit by offering students sardines. And even the most conventional schools have Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) that raise funds for art and science programs, so why not raise money for a sardine program?

At the classroom level, lone teachers everywhere could get around bureaucratic inertia by starting such programs on their own, after enlisting administrator buy-in. With every lesson, teachers already aim to engage children’s natural curiosity (the formal term for this is “anticipatory set”); by learning about humanity’s long reliance on omega-3-rich foods and by having a conversation about their families’ health issues, students could be genuinely motivated to try this high-nutrition food.

If we can have Pizza Day every Friday, we can also have Sardine Day once a week. Let’s give our children what they truly need—not just to survive, but to thrive.

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At nineteen, Lauren Ayers read Silent Spring, sparking a lifelong passion for health and sustainability. This led her to Let’s Eat Right by Adelle Davis and the pioneering research of Weston A Price.

Her journey continued through years of hands-on experience—working in natural food stores, raising a family, earning a degree in environmental studies, cofounding a Waldorf school, and later becoming a Waldorf teacher. Each step deepened her commitment to nourishing both people and the planet, ultimately inspiring her to advocate for meaningful policy change in her local community.

Now retired, Lauren spends her time enjoying her grandchildren, regenerating the soil on a small family farm, and working with neighbors to pilot an all-organic meal program at a local public school.

Well Being Journal adapted the above excerpt from Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, Winter 2024. Reprinted with permission from author and the Weston A Price Foundation.

REFERENCES

Chris Venditti, Joanna Baker, Robert A Barton. “Co-evolutionary dynamics of mammalian brain and body size,” Nat Ecol Evol. 2024 Jul 16;8(8):1556.

Heitor O Santos, Theresa L May, Allain A Bueno. “Eating more sardines instead of fish oil supplementation: Beyond omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, a matrix of nutrients with cardiovascular benefits,” Front Nutr. 2023 Apr 14;10:1107475.

Ibrahim M Dighriri, Abdalaziz M Alsubaie, Fatimah M Hakami, et al. “Effects of Omega-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids on Brain Functions: A Systematic Review,” Cureus. 2022 Oct 9;14(10):e30091.