The ‘Twinkie defense’: What we know about diet and crime

In 1978, Dan White murdered San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. Of that, there was no doubt. White had turned himself in, then tearfully and remorsefully confessed to shooting each of the men, his former colleagues, multiple times. At White’s 1979 trial, the only question was what his sentence would be.

White’s lawyers put up an able defense during the court proceedings. They stated that their client’s mental capacity was impaired by stress and severe depression. His heinous actions were not completely under his conscious control. Therefore, a charge of first degree murder, punishable by 25 years to life in prison, was too harsh a sentence.

During the trial, the defense team cross-examined a psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Blinder. He told them White was a fitness enthusiast who prided himself on eating well and staying healthy. However, during depressive episodes, White would enter a “vicious cycle” of junk food consumption.

“Whenever he felt things weren’t going well, he would abandon his regular exercise program and good diet and start gorging himself on junk food: Twinkies, Coca-Cola,” Blinder testified.

Blinder later said:

“There is a substantial body of evidence that in susceptible individuals large amounts of what we call junk food, foods high in sugar and lots of preservatives, can precipitate antisocial and even violent behaviour. There have been some studies, for example , where they’ve taken so-called career criminals and taken away all their junk food and put them on milk and meat and potatoes, and their criminal records immediately evaporate.”

The press went wild, dubbing the lawyers’ tactic the “Twinkie defense”: Were they trying to blame their client’s double murder on junk food?

The Twinkie Defense

In reality, White’s legal team only mentioned his unhealthy benders as a sign of his depression, not the cause. Still, the “Twinkie defense” narrative stuck. And it might have paid off: White was only convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to just seven years in prison.

In an article recently published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, a multidisciplinary team of researchers referred to the “Twinkie defense.” In the decades since the Dan White trial, scientists have explored the relationship between nutrition and crime. They have found intriguing clues that the two are related.

One of the first signs materialized in the 1980s. Under the direction of a nutritionist, food staff secretly modified the diet at a juvenile detention center in Virginia to reduce the amount of refined sugar fed the prisoners The social scientist and criminologist Dr. Stephen J. Schoenthaler supervised the trial. He found that prisoners with a better diet had a 45% lower incidence of documented disciplinary actions. The study was small, however, with only 58 young people.

This preliminary success led to a dozen trials in other prisons. Chefs swapped out sugary breakfast cereals for healthier ones. Canned fruits were replaced with whole fruits. Fatty and sweet snacks gave way to vegetables, cheeses and whole foods.

“In the twelve correctional institutions that we studied, going back to 1985, we found that there was a 47 percent reduction in crime, infractions, and other indicators of documented antisocial behavior,” Schoenthaler said in an academic interview published in 2023. “These they included reductions in overt violence, acts of theft, verbal assaults and insubordination to prison staff. In total, these studies involved more than 8,000 youths.”

Schoenthaler conducted two randomized, placebo-controlled trials that gave some prison inmates a vitamin supplement and others an inert pill. There were significant reductions in rule violations among subjects consuming the supplement.

Since then, numerous research teams around the world have found that proper diet and nutrition can help reduce non-compliance and aggression in prison populations.

However, today, most US states spend less than $3 per inmate per day on food. Such meager funding means that almost all prisoners receive fortified and ultra-processed food. Could investing in better prison food save money overall? Schoenthaler thinks so.

“A single preventable offense that leads to an additional four months of jail or prison time could cost US$10,000 or more. If you look at this through the broader lens of prevention and treatment along the entire continuum of justice criminal, then the financial savings would be incalculable,” he said.

What about the general population? Could proper nutrition prevent criminal acts? Several studies have shown that eating nutritious, whole foods instead of processed, high-fat, and high-sugar foods improves mental health, mood, and academic performance, which greatly influences the likelihood of committing crimes.

“It’s just a coincidence that the 10 states with the highest obesity rates in 2021—Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky, West Virginia, South Dakota, Alabama, Missouri, and Ohio—are all at the top of the states with the highest incarceration rates in 2021?” asked the researchers behind the recent review.

Antisocial behavior has no cause, of course, which makes the “Twinkie defense” very dubious. But according to the research done, nutrition seems to be at least an indirect factor. So eat well. It will help keep you mentally fit, and perhaps by extension, out of jail.