For 64 Percent of Kids with ADHD, Food is the Cause

Over 5 million children are diagnosed with ADHD every year (United States), the number that are medicated drops to 3 million. It's understandable, as Ritalin does a number of adverse effects

And a new study published in the Lancet and reported on Civil Eats, sheds some light on what many of us have been thinking for a while. It's the medication that we take three times a day that can really make a difference and that medication is our diet.

The study's lead author (Dr. Lidy Pelsser) said this:

“Food is the main cause of ADHD.” The study found that in 64 percent of children with ADHD, the symptoms were caused by food. “It’s a hypersensitivity reaction to food.”

It goes on to say, that kids are showing both a sensitivity to foods and to food additives. You see kids all the time eating crap, even at school and it turns out that this does affect them in more ways than one.

Flaxseed oil, on the other hand, has shown signs of correcting some of the negative behaviors associated with ADHD, just by mixing it with some of your kid's favorite foods.

For 64 Percent of Kids with ADHD, Food is the Cause

Restricted elimination diet for ADHD: the INCA study

I couldn't agree more. When my children were young I couldn't help but observe the way they behaved after consuming certain food or drinks. In the end I tried to avoid anything that contained a preservative beginning with number 2. It made a huge difference to their behaviour.

Convenience and excessive affluence are the underlying problems here. Society is spoilt, and unfortunately I don't think any amount of advertising will cause people to change their dietary and lifestyle habits. Life is all too convenient for many people now, and the psychological appeal of the quick-fix is not easy to overcome.

High Fructose Corn Syrup - do a search here on ATS for it... you should treat it like a poison because that is exactly what it is.

It is made from genetically modified corn from Monsanto. Think of how much corn you have to use to produce the corn syrup... have humans EVER ate that way? Yet today, almost everything you can find in the grocery store is damn-near soaked in it. It's disgusting.

The cost of going organic being more expensive is a bunch of crap... I spend less money now having my entire grocery bill be almost all organic than I did for the packaged and processed stuff (most of the money is for the packaging and NOT the food itself). And when my kids and I were eating that garbage, we all suffered from eczema, ADHD, mental fog, anxiety, mood swings, phantom pains.... and this went on for a long time. Within a few weeks of switching over to all organic, and taking some needed supplements (since our bodies were deprived for so long) everything is gone.

It has a lot to do with how lazy people are and the fact that most people don't want to spend the time to prepare and cook their own food. On top of that, most people don't know HOW to cook because the corporations have made everyone so used to eating packaged pre-made foods that people have stopped learning how to choose wholesome ingredients and cook nutritious meals. The body is made of mostly water, but people drink soda and coffee which depletes the body of water and causes your pancreas to freak out while you spike your inner punch bowl with fructose corn syrup, the amounts of which are completely unnatural for human consumption.

Not only that, but essential fatty acids, which you can ONLY get from foods like flax, nuts or cold water fish, is what your brain is mostly composed of. If you aren't getting what your brain needs, the body will follow and will slowly disintegrate, and all the while you will look to doctors for answers, who will just give you pills that make your conditions worse and harder to figure out. Taking a high quality fish-oil has tremendous benefits and is one of the main things that has changed my ADHD son's grades from D's to B's in just a couple of months.

It's really not that hard to do and after a few grocery trips, becomes much easier. There are plenty of sites to help find the better quality whole foods and supplements and you only have one body. By the time you realize you aren't invincible anymore, the damage is already done and you've likely lost many years of your life that you would have had if you took your body more seriously.

The four staples of the human body are:
- probiotics (need them for good digestion, we used to get them from eating dirt and being hunter-gatherers)
- vitamins and minerals (a good diet will do, but us Westerners have to take supplements)
- essential fatty acids (you can ONLY get these from foods)
- enzymes (we start running out of these in our 30's and depend on our foods to give them to us)

Without these 4 basic things, your body deteriorates quickly. We depend on our foods for these things and they are being constantly poisoned and engineered by people who will never consume them in their lifetimes and know that their only purpose is to fatten up the bottom line. Again, it's disgusting. I'll enjoy my organic foods until they dig them up out of my garden.

Garbage in = Garbage out and you surely are what you eat.

~Namaste

Seems correct to me but I would also throw in Vaccines that children now get 24 different kinds of of, some mixed together, but all given before their not developed immune systems are ready for this $hit...which it will never be. Stop the shots and go back to eating off the farm like we did back 40 yrs ago and many, many different things will disappear.....But, that want happen ...they have to kill us off someway so they can manage us...At present we are just to many for them and we could take this world back, but, we want....People have grown to lazy now...Beer, sex and sports is all it takes to control a nation...Thats pitiful....We are nothing more now than "Sugar turned to $hit...".

reply to post by SonOfTheLawOfOne


And stop eating gluten.

Just wait until everything we eat is a gmo crop.
Or gmo pig / chicken / cattle.

Who knows what effects that will have.

reply to post by Griffo


my 8 and 5 year old girls eat as well as we can. avoid HFCS, nitrates/nitrites, hormones/antibiotics in dairy, eggs, and meat. the biggest thing we notice is the red 40 makes my kids go into emotional rollercoasters from hyper to screaming to crying.
THAT RED 40 STUFF literally causes my kids to go "nuts" for a day. we notice the changes within 1 hour of ingestion!!! i would avoid that crap at all costs..

reply to post by Griffo


Try telling that to one of my friends who constantly buys his nine year old and four year old energy drinks, gum and a plethora of other things with exitotoxins and other additives in them...ugh! He won't listen to anyone telling him the crap he's allowing his children to ingest.

If you feed a kid sugar he goes hyper on you. Any parent knows that. You can watch it happen. Most of the "cause" of ADHD is parents not paying attention. Then some shrink or MD puts the ADHD label on them and they get drugged up. If you throw away the cookies and candy and don't feed them junk food, suddenly they get better. Well, duh!

good thread. It was around 7 and a half years ago where Dr. Phil, my newly born daughters Pediatrician, along with a ton of widely known physicians were coming out and saying that this reaction by food was a myth. I find this to be crap because whenever my daughter eats sweets, instant oatmeal, hotdogs, and bologni we have hell to pay. Bless her heart she is so smart but really unable to focus, remember anything, or slowdown at all. Tried diet change and notice a bit of difference in hyper activity, but cannot get her to focus on anything. Straight A student though.

Originally posted by cbaskins
good thread. It was around 7 and a half years ago where Dr. Phil, my newly born daughters Pediatrician, along with a ton of widely known physicians were coming out and saying that this reaction by food was a myth.

Like with most things, the truth lies somewhere between the extreme viewpoints.

I think it's equally absurd to suggest that eating accounts for 100% of behavioral changes as to say it accounts for 0% of behavioral changes.

Clearly, the reality is somewhere in-between those two extremes. And the way a child reacts to the food can be different from child to child. I think some children may get hyperactive from eating a lot of sugar, but I never did, it has almost the opposite effect on me of fatigue and exhaustion which apparently isn't unusual:

Sugar

Unstable blood glucose. Eating too much sugar causes our blood sugars to go haywire. When the sugar levels in our blood fluctuate, they lead us to feeling fatigue and exhaustion. Headaches and mood swings are also apparent when the blood glucose is unstable. Moreover, the more sugar we take in, the more unbalanced our blood glucose becomes, and the more sugar our body craves in order to fix the imbalance it perceives.

That does mention headaches and mood swings, other reactions which again can vary greatly from child to child. So just because one person's child does or doesn't react to foods in a certain way doesn't mean someone else's child won't react differently, or in some cases not at all to the same food.

It certainly seems worthwhile to experiment with the child's diet to see if it can help mitigate ADHD before relying on drugs to treat it. I suspect there's a core number of cases that need drugs to treat, but if I had to guess I suspect that's really less than 10% of the cases that are actually being treated with drugs, while the other 90% could be affected with diet and parental intervention.

A sensitivity to foods, particularly refined sugar or grains, can be a sign of candida overgrowth.

Candida is a type of fungus that lives in the intestines. It feeds on carbohydrates - sugars. A diet high in sugar and low in vital nutrients allows this fungus to thrive and can result in an incredible number of ailments ranging from ad(h)d, cancer, athlete's foot, and many other symptoms.

Candida overgrowth can vastly diminish the ability to absorb nutrition from food. From what I have read, candida overgrowth is under diagnosed. The symptoms will be treated, such as topical creams for the skin; however if the overgrowth in the gut is not treated they will never be cured.

It seems the only way to treat candida overgrowth in the long term is through diet.

The "candida diet" is the same as the suggested ADD diet in OPs article.

reply to post by OptimisticPessimist


Energy drinks are quite bad, I usually drink one called relentless. In one can it contains 52% of your daily sugar allowance (~47g). On top of that is the caffeine content (32 mg/100ml), which equates to 160 mg. I usually feel sick after having one because of the sugar overload

reply to post by JohnnyTHSeed


bragg's apple cider vinegar is magical stuff, or any kind of acv with the "mother" still in it.
I learned about candida 5 years ago and that is the cause of many health problems. Its like having an alien parasite type thing iniside us.

just one of the things I learned from the "fraud huckster" Kevin Trudeau..

DISCLAIMER---- i greatly respect Kevin and personally learned alot from his books. sarcasm was for those who have tried to slight the guy in regards to my fraud huckster comments. K.T. is a brave guy along with A.J.

reply to post by Griffo


25 years ago I was ADHD/ADD. My mom who studied this subject had me taken off anything with food dyes. The ADHD/ADD went away. There were books written back then about this. Doctors said my mom was nuts and I just needed pills. This is how science works...it takes a few decades to prove something that many knew long before any study. So many of the concepts we are now discussing will be proven true within our lifetime. Someone will take the idea that we discuss that has credentials and study it. Thankfully someone that has clout actually proved this finding that so many knew for a long long time. Now the masses will finally accept this and doctors will finally go along with this. Sheep I tell ya.

certainly backs up dr. blaylock and his info on excitotoxins,, which are basically in every product we buy now

my brother has a 2 year old,,, i told him this and he was clueless, excitotoxins???? msg??? what????

we need more people informed

and now the food coloring stuff,,,,,,,,,,, the kid loves bright orange cheetos,,,,,,,, my god, help us!!!!!!!


and they think i'm a crackpot spouting crazy stuff,,,,,, meanwhile our kids are poisoned from childhood on