It all starts with jelly doughnuts, says Naura Hayden, or maybe candy bars, consumed too often by too many children. And before you know it, says Hayden, those children are teenagers on drugs, and then they're in prison.
In San Francisco they called it the Twinkie Defense: the notion that junk food can so alter your brain chemistry that you might even commit murder.Hayden thinks it happens all too often. So two years ago she convinced the Maryland Penitentiary to start giving its inmates a drink she concocted that she believes supplies the nutrients they need.
Since then she has convinced seven other institutions, including a nursing home, to try the drink. Hayden says she provides the drink free to any state-run institution that wants it.
She calls the concoction the Dynamite Milkshake and says it is full of large amounts of B vitamins and lecithin, which she says help relieve tension, anger and depression.
Recently, she says, she received a card signed by 80 prisoners at the Maryland Penitentiary thanking her for the changes they say they have seen in themselves since they began drinking the Dynamite Milkshakes.
Hayden, who was in Salt Lake City recently to promote the powdered drink, says that her own life was turned around by good nutrition. "I don't think I would be alive today if I hadn't changed my life."
An actress who had roles in Westerns such as Bonanza and Gunsmoke, Hayden says she was a 10-cups-of-coffee-a-day person for years. "My body was a wreck," she says about this time of her life, when she was on both "uppers" and "downers" to regulate her mood.
At the end of shooting a Bonanza episode 16 years ago she had a physical collapse, ending up in the hospital, where a friend gave her a book on nutrition that changed the way she looked at junk food.
The book recommended a brewer's yeast drink, which made Hayden feel so well she wanted to share it with her friends. But brewer's yeast is not exactly yummy, and Hayden's friends politely refused. That's when she decided to come up with a drink of her own.
Hayden is sure that the Dynamite Milkshake is the answer to many of the world's problems. "Once (people) get their body chemistries evened out, their problems will disappear."
Profits from the powdered drink, which is sold in health food stores, goes to the John Ellsworth Hayden Foundation, which then gives the drink to any state-run institution that wants it. She hopes especially that nursing homes will try the drink.
"Older people are always depressed," she says. "And the Dynamite Milkshake is fantastic as a mood elevator."