Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional ADHD, diet, and neurofeedback

I think this is an important point (and it just happens to align well with my abhorrence for misdiagnoses... sigh).

Food sensitivities can look like ADHD - so I think trying these diets can be helpful to rule these things out on your way to a correct diagnosis.

Epoh - when you say "slower" development, is that actually ADHD as well, or is that just developmental? To me the condition is only truly ADHD when there is a long term brain abnormality that isn't resolved with time and "catch up" development (but then again, I'm not a doctor - I could be wrong).

Take my son, for instance: he's just been assessed as not having CAPD, because he's outgrown his audio processing delays. He had an audio developmental delay, not the actual disorder. Is it the same for ADHD?

You can grow out of CAPD. My son age 9 is hearing impaired and he has CAPD. With the specialized testing the audiologist/PhD did at age 7 for CAPD, she said that his auditory processing system in his brain was immature but intact. She feels he will "catch up" with that when he is a teenager. We are also doing piano and will this year start viola, if that helps at all.

Ok - end of week 1 - I have to say - this restrictive diet is making a difference. My retired FL parents are visiting for the summer and even they noted that my DS6.5 is not as angry/tantrum prone/irritable. My father even noticed. This is a person who wouldn't notice if I permed my hair!

I've been analyzing this diet all week; my formal science education ended in high school so I'm doing this from a layperson perspective. Here's what I think:

ADHD are at greater risk for addictions than the general population, from what I understand. They're novelty seekers. I think as soon as food hits the tongue and palate, a message is sent to the brain.

Serotonin includes the regulation of mood, appetite, and sleep. Serotonin also has some cognitive functions, including memory and learning.

Serotonin levels are affected by diet. If we compare what Native Americans or other indigenous tribes (or even rural poor in Africa/Asia) today, you'll find differences in the what/how people eat. Millet is actually older than rice or wheat, but when humans moved from being hunter/gatherers to city/states they specialized labor and developed new crops to avoid spending days hunting/gathering. So there is a connection with food, history, and our diet today.

From a historian's perspective, I think hunter/gatherers were much more in tune with food, and how it affected the mind, body, spirit/universe. You needed to know in order to survive; food provided sustenance and perhaps not so tied to emotion like it is today. With the rise of city/states, you no longer needed to know the ins/outs of mind, body, universe/spirit. City/states enabled division of labor and specialization of work so you no longer had to retain such knowledge.

I came across these 2010 articles on rice, alcohol, diet, and how it's adapted from Neolithic times and affecting China today:
http://phys.org/news183153307.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090123164359.htm

The issue is that rice takes up a lot of land and water and scientists are trying to find alternative crops to feed people and not use up so many resources.

I've lived all my life on cow's milk and cow products. I never thought about alternative milks and the history or why some people (Asians and Africans in particular) have remained lactose-intolerant today. I'm finding it fascinating.

CD, I agree that food history is fascinating in principle, and I'm not shocked that a dietary change made a difference. I just think that without a rigorous elimination diet-- where you track carefully what you took out, and add back in only one thing at a time-- you can't tell what you eliminated that made the difference.

The theory behind the "eat like your ancestors" diets leaves much to be desired, in my opinion. They lived short and mostly horrible lives. Not that healthy. Not that in tune with anything I want to replicate in my own existence.

DeeDee

CD - as I said before diet has had a profound effect in my family, particularly for my child with the most issues. But I really strongly believe that you need to do a proper scientific elimination diet. Even prehaps reading the online portions from the handbook we have used might help you :

http://www.sswahs.nsw.gov.au/rpa/allergy/resources/foodintol/handbook.cfm

My personal take on all of the more out there things that seem to help with ADHD and / or ASD is that these are people who are both physically and mentally very sensitive. It's easy to upset their apple cart and see a negative effect from things that just don't impact other people (diet, electromagnetic fields, whatever). It's easy to think diet has "cured" ADHD. Personally I think that is rarely the case. But you can eliminate a stressor that is exacerbating everything and see significant day to day improvements as a result. For us (and anecdotally I think it's quite common) the diet has had the biggest impact on hyperactive/impulsive/mood related issues, not so much on the inattentive portion.

I'm not saying diet has 'cured' my son's ADHD. I'm saying that diet has been a contributing factor in my son's ADHD and I have seen some results from the elimination diet. Genetics is another contributing factor in my son's ADHD. Neurological wiring is also contributing factor in my son's ADHD. Creating a stable, calm, stress-free environment helps to improve my son's ADHD. So there are many factors at hand with ADHD or probably any disorder.

If you read, Healing Young Brains, they suggest that neurofeedback seems to work best in treating ADHD if you take a multi-modality/holistic approach to treating the mind, body. NFT isn't a magic cure. If the environment remains chaotic, NFT will likely not work or be as affective as it potentially could - because our brains/bodies interact with our environment.

My DS6.5 was born with severe sensory processing as well as torticollis (neck) and severe plagiocephaly (head). We learn to regulate how we think, act, behave from our senses, brain/neurological wiring, and environment. If our sense of taste, smell, hearing, sight is compromised (as it was with my son), then our development and perception of reality is altered.

Without vision therapy, my son's visual processing deficits could not have been overcome. No drugs would have restored it, period, because visual processing is based on how the eyes, brain, and body interact with one's environment. It's an individualized process on how you interpret the world based on how your brain and body works.

I'll say again that I'm a historian and operate on a different reasoning/perspective. That's me. I can't speak for others.

Not completely, but substantially off topic... re: the caveman diet, now researchers are beginning to look at what microbes are in our guts, which ones adapted to what your ancestors on continent x were eating, that now either hinder or help digestion in your present day gut.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/ancient-humans-vegetarians-paleolithic-diet_n_1695228.html

eats, leaves and bugs!

The new paleo-diet seems to be to eat only what was available back then (which makes you avoid processed foods and fillers anyway). And the other ancestor diet, the one I mentioned, says it's better to eat according to your race because your family evolved over thousands of years to thrive on a set of nutrition that's in your regional cuisine. There's another fad diet I like better, "the bodies many cries for water" by someone Batman (really, that's his last name). No it's not, it's Batmanghelidj. He argues that you need to drink more actual water, not just coffee, tea, and juice that contains water.
Now I treat drinks more like a snack and water more like a drink. But I snack on coffee a lot.

Anyway I just end up eating whatever tastes good. Sometimes I get a pang of conscience and quit eating anything that had eyeballs for a while.

I agree with DeeDee and others on this point. Over the years I've read a lot about all sorts of different "diets" (plus know quite a few folks who've tried different diets for themselves and their kids. FWIW, I think that sometimes what happens when a person tries a special diet such as paleo, gfcf, salicylate-free, etc and sees a positive benefit, rather than the benefit coming from the specific diet, it's a happenstance that the foods that were problematic for that individual are no longer part of their diet, and sometimes it's simply a person taking a closer look at what they are eating on a meal-by-meal basis. I've also known a few families where I suspect a really good elimination diet could have helped pinpoint problem foods who instead gave up because they looked at the issue as "let's try gfcf because that might work" and not seeing any kind of positive changes.

For a child who seems to have behavior symptoms related to food, my recommendation is to simplify their diet to the point you know exactly what ingredients are going into each meal and snack, and keep a very detailed food/behavior diary.

polarbear

my favorite food rule is eat things that look like what they are.
that eliminates alot of processed foods and chemical preservatives and sugary drinks.
i think keeping in mind the placebo effect and that few people only change a diet when dealing with behavior issues.
Parenting a kid with ADHD and especially a gifted one is complicated and is about the long haul.
keeping a too stringent diet may sap off parental energy that will be needed later for other things. also to broad a diet change may miss something simple that is a specific trigger. (some red dyes in drinks and red icing were a trigger for us for instance).
but go with what works for now. keep and open mind about what might work better in the future is what worked for us most of the time.