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Diet and ADHD
I have received several emails from readers in recent weeks about my opinion on diet and ADHD. With school starting back up ADHD is on the front lines of many parents minds. For a parent with a child with ADHD a new school year brings many different anxieties. Will my child like his teacher, will the teacher understand how to work with my child’s difficulties, will this be the year his ADHD changes the way he looks at school? All these questions and fears are unavoidable when you have a child who suffers from ADHD. Many parents want to do everything they can to ease their child’s challenges. I do not know if there is a parent out there with a child with ADHD who hasn’t “googled” ways to lesson the challenges. One of the first areas parents turn is to diet. Diet is an area where we feel as a parent we have some control. We hope and pray that a change in their diet will make a big change in their behavior and their challenges. Unfortunately many find that even with the change in diet many of the same difficulties are still there.
As a parent if you were to google diet and ADHD you would be bombarded with studies that support both sides of the argument. You will have hundreds of studies that strongly support diet and its effect on managing ADHD. You will also find hundreds of studies that conclude that diet has no effect on managing ADHD. Ugh! What is a parent to believe? Now for those of you who have been reading my articles for awhile know that my approach to these types of things is somewhere in the middle. After years of experience in medicine, nutrition, and life I have learned that NOTHING is black and white.
Now before I get started on my opinion let me remind you that I am neither a child behavioral specialist or an MD. I am merely an RN and a friend who has been by the side of many a dear friend who is struggling with this issue. I have spent hours researching and reporting over the years to friends who needed that type of support from me. So with that said,
First and foremost a clean, healthy diet can do no harm for any child including a child with ADHD.
I believe there are various levels of severities when looking at ADHD in children and in adults. I also believe this is why there are various beliefs on how we need to treat these children. What works for one child or adult for that matter may not work for another. My approach when coaching a family through this is to first determine the severity of the ADHD. Much of the current research has focused on looking at the brains of children with ADHD through a brain imaging scan. Their is an excellent article on www.adhd.org.nz about the neurobiology of ADHD. The component to this that is interesting is that these brain scans show proof that the child with true ADHD has a significantly different brain than the child who does not. This is important to know because in these cases a structural difference can not be improved by diet. The other type of ADHD is the child who demonstrates many of the issues associated with ADHD but on a much milder level. These children when scanned did not have the same structural differences. These children often benefit from the change in diet to control their symptoms.
All that being said I believe very strongly that in order for our bodies to function to the best of its abilities we must fuel it with things that encourage that. Whether you have ADHD or not, whether you have cancer or not, whether you have chronic illness or not you need to be feeding your body only the best. Many of us live years without knowing what lies beneath our skin. One day we wake up and our body shows us whats been going on in there. It is usually at that point that people take the necessary steps to “clean” out their life. Imagine what could be prevented if we started “cleaning” out our life today.
My advice to the parent of a child with ADHD is that you need to give them the best foundation for success. That foundation may be a combination of things; diet, activity, behavioral modification, and medication. Every child is different so you will work alongside with your physician to determine your best plan. Changing your child’s diet to cut out processed foods, dyes, and excess sugar can only help to give your child the best nutritional foot forward. If you desire more information on what an ADHD friendly diet looks like you can check outwww.oneaddplace.com or you can follow many of the clean eating websites out there, including mine! 
All my suggestions and recipes focus on limited processed foods and sugar and no artificial dyes or chemicals.
