[This comment is contributed by Bilious Blogg and shouldn't be thought of as anything involving Charlie Moores in any way who is far too polite (and needs his job) to say anything so disprespectful about the passengers he loves and looks after or the world he cherishes and wants to protect.]

"The other day I was reading a report written by child psychologists who estimated that up to 25% of all pre-teen children have some sort of 'mental disorder' - ranging from being "persistently naughty" to shouting, screaming, and being persistently uncontrollable. We are, it seems, in the middle of an epidemic of unbalanced kids.

The same day I read an excellent article forwarded by the insightful people at the Yahoo group Hippoworld (you're not a subscriber? You should be...) on the subject of Omega 3, a fatty acid found in fish oil. Writen by George Monbiot, the article began by saying that, "The more it is tested, the more compelling the hypothesis becomes. Dyslexia, ADHD, dyspraxia and other neurological problems seem to be associated with a deficiency of Omega 3" and went on to state that Oxford researchers had found that in a study of 117 children suffering from dyspraxia (which causes learning difficulties, disruptive behaviour and social problems) the reading age of those children who recieved Omega 3 "rose by an average of 9.5 months, while the reading age of those given placebos rose by 3.3. Other studies have shown major improvements in attention, behaviour and IQ."

It wasn't what what was being suggested here, but it does tie in with a none-too-subtle campaign that's running at the moment: we've all seen the adverts and the sudden emergence of stories in magazines, there's a move afoot - led by food manufacturers - to convince us that if we give the world's children fish oil they'll quickly become well-behaved and turn into model citizens. Yes, there's nothing that can't be cured with a pill...

There are, though, two problems with all of this. The first is that fish oil comes - unsurprisingly - from fish, and because we have the most asinine and wasteful disregard for the ocean's fish "stocks" (we use them as fertiliser, as food for farmed salmon, as bait to catch other fish, as something apparently called a 'McFillet', or we tip them back into the sea as unwanted and very dead 'bycatch' and poison the habitats of the few shoals left) there are - as Mr Monbiot points out - simply not enough fish on the planet to catch and mash up so that our kids can be well again. The second is that even if we were able to give today's horribly behaved children massive doses of Omega 3, their parents would still rather give them chocolate and Coke...

I know this because I've worked on umpteen long-haul flights across the Atlantic and back again over the years and witnessed more children than would fit in the cargo hold of a 747 jumbo jet turning from slightly grizzly and tired (but otherwise perfectly normal) 5 - 10 year olds into absolute little monsters - and always because their nutritionally ill-informed (or deliberately stupid) parents insist that "little Johnny" or "darling Francesca" doesn't like fruit or vegetables and would rather have a chocolate bar and a soda to wash it down with. Fifteen minutes later the little angel is on such a sugar rush that he or she are attempting to kick open the door of an aircraft at 39000' or are swinging from the overhead lockers while their Mommy and Daddy minutely study a movie they''ve probably seen a hundred times already or are burying their heads in a newspaper...

I can see the marketing men stepping in now, producing bars of chocolate impregnated with flavour-enhanced fish oil or soft drinks with just enough sugar to take away the 'nasty taste'. Parents will buy them by the cartload, our kids will continue to consume sugar like freebasing addicts, and within a short time there won't be a single goddam fish left anywhere in the ocean - driven to extinction because we can't look after our own children properly. The experts will scratch their heads and wonder why the latest health initiative was yet another dismal failure, the sugar peddlers will have made enough money to retire on, and the rest of us will still be putting up with everyone else's little brats running riot through our lives..."