We eat fairly healthy in my family. We're vegetarians, though we probably get a little too much cheese. We have non-American food several times a week, and I've noticed a significant improvement in our overall health since we started this. My mom was in town visiting this week and we had a lot of "American" food and am already feeling rundown. Given, she doesn't pick the healthiest places to eat at, but I'm surprised at how quickly I felt it.
My daughter, when she was younger, would react horribly to having candy that wasn't a simple piece of chocolate (even just 1 small piece of candy). Anything that had food coloring or a lot of processing would cause her to get extremely hyper. We also noticed the same when people gave her overly-processed foods that wasn't candy.
I don't get the sense that on our family's "healthy" diet she can pay attention much more easily, but at least she isn't driving us nuts as often as she would with all the crap in her system. But we never ate all that bad to begin with - even when we did eat meat. I would imagine that just a general feeling of rundown would keep someone from being at the top of their game. But she's 12, so it's kind of impossible to tell at the moment what would be causing her attention problems. I'm getting the sense that System of a Down is more of a distraction than a queasy stomach.
We haven't tried any of the bad processed foods with my son except for the occasional cookie. He's only 16 months old, so still mostly organic fruits and veggies and plenty of breastmilk for his protein. He likes cheese too though, so he gets that also.
