ADHD, Is drugging our children the answer?

Drugs such as Ritalin, pro­moted as ADHD treat­ments for some years, have been found to have highly dan­ger­ous side effects and not to be true solu­tions at all. At the same time, many nutri­tion­ists have found, not sur­pris­ingly, that many of the answers to ADHD lie right in a child’s diet in the form of food addi­tives, sugar, and the lack of essen­tial nutrients.

Food Additives and Sugar

In a notable exam­ple (known to the author), one child, hor­ri­bly hyper­ac­tive, “out of con­trol” and diag­nosed as hav­ing ADHD by a school psy­chol­o­gist, was taken off any foods con­tain­ing a par­tic­u­lar red dye. As if by magic, the child’s “hyper­ac­tiv­ity” ceased; she began pay­ing atten­tion and liv­ing a nor­mal life.

Supporting such a result, a study just com­pleted at Yale University School of Medicine’s Prevention Research Center showed a direct con­nec­tion between food addi­tives and hyper­ac­tiv­ity. In the study, 297 chil­dren were given drinks con­tain­ing com­mon arti­fi­cial food col­or­ings and addi­tives sim­i­lar to those found in com­mer­cially avail­able food and candy. A con­trol group was given drinks with­out addi­tives. The chil­dren who drank the addi­tive enhanced drinks dis­played sig­nif­cantly more hyper­ac­tive behav­ior and also had shorter atten­tion spans.

Another very com­mon cause of ADHD symp­toms is chil­dren “over­dos­ing” on sugar. With all the snack-food break­fast cere­als avail­able, and all man­ner of high sugar-content treats, hyper­ac­tiv­ity is no won­der. You can observe a child who ingests a large quan­tity of sugar (just a dough­nut and a soda will do the trick) and watch what occurs with the child. They’ll hit a high of seem­ingly out-of-control hyper­ac­tiv­ity, and then become grouchy and fid­gety and prone to tantrums. This is some­times called a “sugar rush” and is some­how unknown to many par­ents as a source of prob­lems. Taking a child off sugar will do miracles.

In addi­tion to removal of chem­i­cal addi­tives and processed sugar from the diet, a num­ber of note­wor­thy nutri­tion­ists have traced ADHD symp­toms to a lack of the min­eral mag­ne­sium, which is essen­tial to—and miss­ing from—most diets today.

“Kids drink­ing a lot of soda, or even drink­ing fruit juices, are get­ting high amounts of sugar but not mag­ne­sium,” says Carolyn Dean, MD, author of e Magnesium Miracle. “Kids with­out mag­ne­sium suf­fer irri­tabil­ity, insom­nia and con­sti­pa­tion. These symp­toms, usu­ally diag­nosed as ADHD, clear up very quickly when a child is put on mag­ne­sium. You also can’t con­cen­trate in school when you’ve got a mag­ne­sium deficiency—your brain is irritated.”

Daniella Chace, nutri­tion­ist and author of the best-selling book Smoothies for Life, agrees: “It is my belief that many ADHD symp­toms stem from a high sugar diet and also, in many cases, from a mag­ne­sium deficiency.”

Sirena Stever, a natur­opath prac­tic­ing in Augusta, Georgia, also agrees. “Sugar and over stim­u­la­tion, like stress, will actu­ally exhaust a child’s ner­vous sys­tem,” she says. “One of the foun­da­tion prod­ucts we will start them on is Peter Gillham’s Natural Calm. they can tell such a dif­fer­ence. The mag­ne­sium allows the ner­vous sys­tem to rebuild, and will allow the child to relax.” Dr. Stever has actu­ally assisted many chil­dren to come off ADHD med­ica­tions and helped restore them to nor­mal lives.

Children are the future of our soci­ety. Assisting them to survive—naturally—is some­thing for which we must all take more responsibility.