I immediately felt better.  On the first day. I had more energy, less fatigued, and was not tempted to gorge [...]]]> 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.

A few weeks back, a feature recently ran in the Shelby Star in which a reader wrote in asking about whether the Feingold Diet might work for her son’s ADHD.  The columnist, John Rosemond, replied that while many mental health professionals believe that the diet is ineffective because of, you know, insufficient evidence.  But, [...]]]>

A few weeks back, a feature recently ran in the Shelby Star in which a reader wrote in asking about whether the Feingold Diet might work for her son’s ADHD.  The columnist, John Rosemond, replied that while many mental health professionals believe that the diet is ineffective because of, you know, insufficient evidence.  But, he says, that’s only “true as far as it goes” — because studies address averages, and even if the participants didn’t improve “on average”, the study might not report that some of the participants did improve.

Well, actually, studies usually do contain that information.  In order to be worth anything, a scientific study must publish all of its data — this is so that readers of that study can evaluate it properly, and so that the study can be replicated by other researchers.  This is a core underpinning of the scientific method.  Any reputable study of the efficacy of the Feingold diet for ADHD treatment would need to indicate how many subjects participated, how many of those participants were diagnosed with ADHD, and how that diagnosis was reached.  The participants with ADHD would be divided into two groups, one using the diet, and one not (to be even more rigorous, the study might then compare these two groups to non-ADHD control groups both on and off the diet).  Finally, the published results would need to indicate exactly how many of the ADHD participants — both on the diet and off — experienced alleviation of their symptoms, and how many did not.

But even more concerning is that the columnist asserts that “perhaps the most convincing evidence” for the efficacy of the Feingold Diet is the testimony of parents.  Sure, the “ADHD Establishment” likes to “dismiss these claims as unscientific”, but “the issue boils down to one fundamental question: Why would these parents say their kids’ behavior improved if it didn’t?”

Mr Rosemond, meet the placebo effect.

For whatever reason, the human brain is subject to “expectancy”, which basically means that it’s prone to producing the results it expects.  In other words, if someone gives you a sugar pill for a head cold, and tells you it will make you feel better, there’s a decent chance your sniffles will clear up.  This person has set you up to expect that you will feel better, and you do.

In fact, human beings are so sensitive to expectancy that if the person giving you the sugar pill believes it will make you feel better, there’s a good chance that you will pick up on this intuitively, in fact you may feel better because of what someone else expects.

This is why clinical trials are required to be double-blind.  A certain number of patients are on the real medication, and a certain number are on the placebo.  The clinicians administering the pills have no idea who is getting what medication.  The only people who know are the researchers, who at the end of the study compare the efficacy of the medication to the efficacy of the placebo.

In the case of the Feingold parents, there are a couple of why the parents in question might report improved behavior.  The first is that they are expecting to see improved behavior, and they interpret their child’s behavior as improving whether it actually is or not.  The second is that the children themselves have been told that this new diet will improve their behavior.  The expectancy has been set up — and their behavior really does improve.

I’m not saying any of this to bash the Feingold diet.  There may not be a lot of scientific validity to back it up, but that could in part be due to the complications of studying something like diet and psychological symptoms.  I certainly support anyone who wants to eliminate synthetic additives from their food.  Furthermore, there’s along and proud history of physicians using the placebo effect to help their patients — in the days before modern pharmacology, it was often the only thing that could.  The Feingold Diet won’t hurt you, or your child, and if it genuinely makes your family’s life better, scientific validity might not be your top concern.

However, before you try Feingold, you may want to make sure that it doesn’t lead to behaviors that do cause harm.  Check out Stephen Barrett’s article on the potential pitfalls.

Nutrition bars are a good thing when you’re out hiking and you need energy.  They are not a good thing if you have ADD [...]]]> I overslept this morning and didn’t have time to eat breakfast.  I had to gulp down a nutrition bar on my way to the gym.  A nutrition bar with lots of sugar.

Nutrition bars are a good thing when you’re out hiking and you need energy.  They are not a good thing if you have ADD and you eat them for breakfast.  If I have sugar first thing in the morning, especially unbuffered by any sort of fiber, my brain suffers for the rest of the day.

I was supposed to run errands, so some work online, and start soup for dinner by the later afternoon.  Instead, I wasted a bunch of time trying to figure out whether I could get some charitable donations picked up (after two hours I finally *gasp* JUST CALLED THEM).  Then I got distracted by my online work.  Then it was already 6:30 and I’d forgotten to start the soup.  Since the soup uses dried beans, it needs several hours to simmer, which means …. NO SOUP FOR YOU!

Thank the gods I have eggs, nature’s emergency back-up meal.