The symptoms of a person suffering from ADHD have direct relations with his food intake. Most people do not have a balanced diet and suffer from food allergies due to the insufficiency of important nutrients in their diet.
ADHD sufferers are usually allergic to food dyes and wheat. People worry that food allergies will make them have to go to the hospital if they eat that particular food. However, the symptoms one may have when eating a food one is allergic to is usually a runny nose, feeling tired all the time or having headaches often. The symptoms are rarely severe enough to go to the hospital.
ADHD sufferers can narrow down the list of the foods they are allergic to by keeping a food diary where they should write down in detail what they eat every day for a week. Bread, milk and cheese are staples on most peoples’ diets. After seeing which foods you eat on an everyday basis, eliminate those food items for about two weeks. Then you can put one at a time back into your diet and see how you react to them. If this does not help you to understand what foods you are allergic or sensitive to, get a blood test done by a doctor. This will give you a breakdown of the 200 food items you eat most frequently.
Things like added flavorings and colorings which do not belong in the food we ingest are the most common reasons for being sensitive to some kind of food which contains them. ADHD sufferers should adopt a diet which eliminates these harmful ingredients. If taking off commonly eaten foods from your diet for about a week and putting one at a time back is not working for you, you could go on a diet such as Feingold diet, which will make you eat whole foods. You can still have all your favorite foods, but now you will have to make them from scratch, instead of buying them from the supermarket.
Parents vouch for the efficacy of eating whole foods. Thus, one should try and stick to the healthy whole food diet even though it will be tough initially switching from processed foods to whole foods. But since many tests show that ADHD sufferers’ symptoms are directly associated to their diet, it is of prime importance that the family’s diet should be healthy and nutritious.
