Why Do 20 Percent of Boys in America Get ADHD?
This is insane. A New York Times article chronicles how up to one in five American boys get an ADHD diagnosis. Most of these kids are prescribed medication, stimulants similar to amphetamine (like Ritalin or Adderall):
Rates of ADHD diagnoses in children
NYT: A.D.H.D. Seen in 11% of U.S. Children as Diagnoses Rise
Why? This is certainly not normal. Something is very wrong. But what?
Have a look at this US map of the rates of ADHD in children:
ADHD
Doesn’t it look eerily familiar? It does.
Here are a few other maps:
Obesity
Hmmm… the obesity epidemic matches the ADHD epidemic. Interesting.
And how about these maps:
Soda and disease
Of course, it could be one big coincidence. Perhaps soda, obesity, diabetes and ADHD have nothing to do with each other.
Or perhaps too much sugar and other processed carbs is the main cause of least three different epidemics: obesity, diabetes and ADHD. That’s my guess.
What do you think?
PS
At least one well-designed study has shown that reducing sugar and other processed carbs (among other things) in the diet improved kids with ADHD.
Adding some omega-3 fats could help too.
Sugar addiction is the worst epidemic in our culture. It's made worse by the fact that it's openly promoted by our capitalistic political structure. The lobbies for big food corporations are much more powerful than the health organizations fighting against them. Also, the health "Industry" is a slave to big pharmaceutical companies that make more money keeping us sick, than getting us well. It's a lose lose situation.
Sorry for being so pessimistic, but it frustrates me constantly. Especially when my friends, and relatives are being diagnosed with cancers, and dying around me. All of them preventable through proper diet.
Thank you Diet Dr. for the awareness!!!
1. RESISTANT EPILEPSY. Children who suffer from resistant epilepsy may have more than 50 seizures per day despite massive doses of medication. They usually improve dramatically when they are started on a ketogenic diet (to give a ball park figure, that is less than 50 grams of carbohydrates per day). The brain has no choice but to feed on the ketone bodies provided by the fat in the diet (and the small area of the brain that absolutely needs glucose gets it from transformation of protein into glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis). Oftentimes, the number of seizures falls to zero. But some researchers made an interesting discovery: kids that were started on an Atkins diet (low carbs, high fat, not ketogenic) did almost as well. It is as if carbohydrates were toxic in high doses for these kids brains. Initially, it was thought that the ketone bodies were necessary to control the epilepsy. This research has shown that this is not true. Cutting the sugar alone does the job.
2. ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE. There is NO medication that improves people who suffer from Alzheimer...Medication, when it works, only slows the descending spiral of decrease in mental function.Recently, it was discovered that the brain of these people have great difficulties to process glucose and when one looks at a SPECT scan (google this), their brain seems "moth eaten". It is not. The brain tissue is there... It is simply "dormant" as it cannot process glucose. it is like a computer without power: the hardware and the software are there but the power is not on... When this brain is fed ketone bodies (either through a ketogenic diet or by feeding medium chain triglycerides (coconut oil) that are the best to transform into ketone bodies, many areas of this brain "wake up" and oftentimes, one can see major improvement in the intellectual performance of these people. No medication can achieve this.
3. ADHD. Johnson and colleagues published in Post Grad medicine in 2011 an interesting paper titled "Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Is it Time to Reappraise the Role of Sugar Consumption? They made an interesting hypothesis, that "we present the hypothesis that the chronic effects of excessive sugar intake may lead to alterations in mesolimbic dopamine signaling, which could contribute to the symptoms associated with ADHD". In their conclusion, they state: "We postulate that sugar acutely increases dopamine, which, over time, leads to a reduced number of D2 receptors and possibly a reduction in extracellular dopamine itself, leading to desensitization of this dopamine signaling axis. These effects would not be due to the acute effects of sugar, but rather would occur over weeks to months with chronically elevated and intermittent sugar ingestion. If this is true, then children with ADHD may ingest more sugar than other children in an attempt to correct the dopamine-deficient state, resulting in excessive sugar intake that could result in “sugar addiction” and increase their risk for obesity. These children would manifest with slightly higher uric acid levels, reflecting the increased sugar intake. Caregivers may consider that the acute effects of sugar are the cause of ADHD. However, the administration of sugar over days to weeks would be unlikely to induce greater symptoms of ADHD, especially if sucrose intake is compared with artificial sweeteners that can also elicit a dopamine response. Therefore, a potential causal relationship between sucrose and ADHD could have been missed in prior studies."
It is not a mere coincidence that in many neurological conditions (and in all degenerative conditions - metabolic syndrome, diabetes, obesity, heart disease), sugar makes the condition worse and restricting sugar makes all these conditions better.
Sure, it would be surprizing that other causes would not play a role. But study after study, it is more and more clear that the insane levels of sugar we are eating have awful - and major - effects on our bodies.
In the light of the Johnson artcle, the maps presented by Andreas are even more fascinating. This is more than simple coincidence. This is not only "correlation". There is enough evidence that sugar in high doses has some toxic effects on the body. In normal adults, safe levels seem to be anything up to 150 grams per day. Over that amount, side effects will appear.
Of course, the food industry will try to convince people that this is absolutely wrong and that government has found that glucose was perfectly safe... That the cause of obesity is chairs (i.e. inactivity) which is only partly true. In many people, even high levels of physical activity cannot prevent obesity when the intake of carbs is too high, regardless of the Glycemic Index of the foods.
Thank you, Andreas, for your superb blog.