ADHD, the “paleo” diet, and Nutrition Research = Crazymaking

Last week, I wrote about how I had “virtuously” cut my fat intake, with disastrous results.  My trainer/personal therapist told me to eat more fat, especially at lunch.  So I decided to give it a try.

I immediately felt better.  On the first day. I had more energy, less fatigued, and was not tempted to gorge on cookies in the evening, a bad habit which has bee creeping up on me in the last several weeks.  I’ve lost about half of the three or four pounds I gained.  Even my seasonal allergies are better, in spite of the evil trees outside my house continuing to bloom shamelessly.

Yesterday my husband rambled across a blog by a PhD named Stephen Guyenet who studies the neurobiology of body fat regulation, and sent me a link to an post on the health benefits of full-fat dairy products.  It seems that consuming your dairy products full-fat allows you to metabolize fat-soluble vitamins, such as K2, which protects against heart attack.

Wait, what?  Saturated fat PREVENTS heart attack?  That can’t be right, can it?  This needed further investigation.

And so, I spent a few hours on Whole Heath Source that should have been spent on my job search.   I write about what I learned here because of the constant allegations about ADHD, nutrition, and the “ideal” diet that can be used to “treat” or even “cure” ADD.

I’ll begin with fat.  The idea that there are good fats has been gaining credence in recent years.  We all know that unsaturated fat is good, and saturated fat is bad.  Right?  Well, not so much.  According to the Guyenet, whether the fat is saturated or unsaturated is less important than amount of omega-6 fatty acids.  Omega-6’s seem to be the real “bad fats”, whereas omega-3’s are good for your brain and stuff, which is why fish oil supplements have exploded onto the market.

Omega-6’s are present in plenty of vegetable oils, like corn oil, soybean oil, and canola oil, which are ubiquitous ingredients in American food.  They’re also found in animal products derived from animals that live on feed lots — turns out livestock feed has quite a bit of things like corn and soy.  The omega-6’s in the feed makes its way into the food these animals produce, whether we consume their flesh, their milk, or their eggs.  Animals that are pastured (like the laughing cow, pictured above!) eat a more natural diet, and the food that comes from them is much healthier — lower in those omega-6’s.

Guyenet’s take on carbs is also interesting.  We all know about the Demon Carb from the Atkins Craze a few years ago, and, anecdotally at least, many people with ADD have found their symptoms improved by a low-carb, high protein diet.  Guyenet believes that the problem is not carbs themselves, but the kind of carbs consumed by industrial cultures.  Sugar and refined flour are problems, of course — but so is any kind of wheat flour, and grains should be consumed sparingly and carefully.

Throughout most of our evolutionary history, we have not had access to grains, let alone the refined flour from which most Americans get their carbs these days.  Back in the day, we got our carbohydrates in the form of fruit and sometimes tubers.  When we did consume grain, it was fermented and processed in such a way as to break down the gluten, rendering it more useful to our digestive systems.  Apparently sourdough is sometimes a way to do this if the sourdough is “properly prepared”.  I wish I know what that meant.

Which gets me to the crazy-making part.

How is anyone, let alone anyone with ADD, supposed to keep track of nutrition research?  It’s a nightmare clusterf*ck of vested business interests, government subsidies, and tainted science.  And then, even if you do decide to experiment with your diet, it’s not always easy to track down grass-fed milk, eggs, and cheese.  If you can track it down, it’s damned expensive.

However, those of us with ADD are a population that suffers disproportionately from overweight and related metabolic syndrome.  While I do not reduce a complex syndrome like ADHD to a “food allergy” that can be “cured” with diet, the fact is that nutrition plays a huge role in controlling my own symptoms.

Sadly, finding decent information about nutrition is extremely difficult — and that’s why I was happy to find Stephen Guyenet’s site.  Guyenet’s posts are rigorous while remaining accessible to the layperson.  He supports his points with hard data.  When he comes across a flawed study, he takes its authors to task for everything from methodological flaws, to cherry-picking data, to sloppy language (what exactly was in that “high fat diet” that you studied?).

If you’re considering amending your diet to treat your AD/HD, Whole Health Source is absolutely worth perusing.