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Moms, Intuition, and the Case Against Drugging Our Kids
Food is in the news. From Michelle Obama on the cover of Newsweek declaring her 'Fight Against Childhood Obesity' to Jamie Oliver's 'Food Revolution' on national TV. Everyone's talking about food. As a lawyer-turned-food activist and baker - and especially as a mom - I'm thrilled that we're finally talking about obesity and its devastating consequences for our children's health.
However, a dialogue that focuses exclusively on 'fat' misses a critical piece of the food-diet equation: the link between diet and the hyped-up or distracted behaviors that often get our kids in trouble at home and school. Sadly, when a child starts exhibiting troubling behaviors, schools, physicians and counselors typically offer parents only one choice: a diagnosis of ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) followed by prescriptions for psychotropic drugs like Adderall, Concerta, Cylert, Dexedrine, Dextrostat, Focalin, Metadate, Ritalin, and Strattera. Yet many of the behaviors that mimic ADHD can be directly traced to the food our kids eat - even some foods that for some might be perfectly fine.
As parents, we should be deeply concerned that about 8 million children in the US today are on one or more psychotropic drugs. Recent studies tell us that between 1960 and 2000, the annual rate of ADHD drug treatment increased more than 100-fold. Today, school nurses deliver more medications for behavioral and mental health conditions than for any other chronic health problem. Prescriptions are often written off label, meaning that there have been no studies determining the appropriateness for the use prescribed.
Sales of psychotropic drugs for kids bring in huge profits for Big Pharma. According to Evelyn Pringle, an investigative journalist whose work focuses on exposing corruption in government and corporate America, antipsychotics were the top selling class of drugs in both 2008 and 2009, with sales of $14.6 billion in 2009. In 2008, drug makers sold $4.8 billion worth of ADHD drugs alone.
When I was a practicing attorney representing children, I didn't know the statistics on drugging kids. But I saw the realities. Almost every child I represented was diagnosed with some disorder and had been prescribed some drug. Over time, I became alarmed and spoke out because I didn't see any improvement after the children were diagnosed and drugged.
It wasn't until the issue hit home, that I started digging deeper and ultimately started to look at the relationship between what our kids eat, and how they feel and act.
From the time my son was a toddler, his behavior and general health toggled between 'normal' and inexplicable. He vomited often and caught more than his share of viruses. Sometimes his energy level would soar for no apparent reason, causing his ears to turn red and hot. He might pull at his hair, or flap his hands - signs of his overwhelming frustration. Usually these episodes ended in a total emotional meltdown.
Once he started school, his behaviors worsened. Tests were run. Evaluations were delivered. Then came the multiple diagnoses, a virtual alphabet soup - PDD, SID, ADHD, ASDS - along with the dreaded recommendation: psychotropic drugs.
Having seen more than my share of troubled kids on meds, I was determined that my son would not become a statistic, just another kid on Ritalin, labeled disabled, and in the system. It was only because I resisted - and persisted - that we were able to solve the riddle of his frequent emotional outbursts and physical symptoms. We never went the drug route - though we were pressured and, at times, so run down that we thought that might be the only option. Call it a mother's intuition, but somehow I just knew that loading him up on pills wasn't the answer. Metabolic testing eventually showed that our son could not retain Vitamin Bs, essential for his nervous system to function properly. Under a doctor's supervision, we began supplementing him with a regimen of complex Bs, Omega 3s and antioxidants. We saw some improvement, yet the meltdowns continued. Still, we resisted the pressure to drug him.
Early on, we also resisted one lone doctor's advice to try an elimination diet in hope of identifying specific foods that might be causing him to act up. I confess that at the time, as a busy lawyer and mother of three active kids, I didn't think it was worth the time and trouble. I was skeptical about diet change. We were relatively healthy eaters and I couldn't believe that anything coming out of my kitchen could be the source of such erratic behavior. Unfortunately, I didn't initially connect the dots between those times when our son ate foods containing wheat, artificial additives or high fructose corn syrup, and the times he exhibited what I now recognize as telltale signs of food and toxin sensitivities. All that changed the day I met another mother who described her child's similar behaviors: the same hot ears, meltdowns, and zoning-out episodes. With a knowing look she told me, "You should really try taking wheat out of his diet." She also recommended that we look to artificial additives as possible culprits. That did it. We removed wheat and all artificial additives from our son's diet. Today he is a new child. He no longer carries the alphabet soup of diagnoses, is not on any medications, and is in the gifted program at school. He is healthy, happy, thriving, and very much aware of what he eats.
In my son's case, the inability to digest common wheat interferes with neurological transmitters to the brain. He gets headaches and brain fog to the point where he zones out. The symptoms look a lot like autism. He also reacts to certain artificial additives in foods, specifically red and yellow dyes, certain preservatives and high fructose corn syrup. His reactions to those chemicals look a lot like ADHD behaviors.
There is a study published in the September 2007 Lancet, which is a national medical journal in Britain, that documents the connection between the consumption of artificial additives and a hyperactive response in normal children. There are earlier studies showing similar outcomes, yet they are not highly publicized. It makes you wonder: How many of the millions of kids on psychotropic drugs today could be drug-free with just a few changes to their diets?
Although our son is nearly 13, we still need to remain vigilant. He'll be symptom free for months, and then suddenly have another episode. Not long ago, he started to have trouble in school again. His grades were suffering, he couldn't focus in class. I looked for clues. We finally concluded he was crashing because he was hungry. He ate breakfast at 6:45 a.m.. Lunch wasn't until 12:30 - nearly 6 hours later. When I asked that he be allowed to have a (healthy) snack between breakfast and lunch, school officials initially balked. "We need a diagnosis," they said. "A diagnosis? Really?" Fortunately, the school backed down. Sure enough, as soon as he was allowed a snack, his grades shot back up.
As parents and teachers, when did we stray so far from trusting our intuition that we need a diagnosis in order to do what common sense tells us is obvious: kids need nourishment (and snacking!)
My message on this Mother's Day to all you moms (and dads) out there struggling with a child's frightening behavior is this: Question what the "experts" say. Trust your intuition. Think before you drug. The solution might be right in your breakfast bowl, snack pack, lunch bag, or dinner plate. For an excellent resource on diet and behavior, see the Feingold Association website www.feingold.org.
47 Comments so far
Show All"As parents and teachers, when did we stray so far from trusting our intuition that we need a diagnosis in order to do what common sense tells us is obvious: kids need nourishment (and snacking!)"
That's a good question, Beth.
I would extend that question and ask when we allowed our kids to be warehoused in factory-style institutions when throughout human history it has been parents and the community that have reared the children.
Yes, we live in a different world, but is this world serving us and our children? When our children (and adults) need more drugs to keep us in line, is this world serving us well?
I work in a store that sells Spelt-Right bread. I talk to people on a daily basis and I see an increasing number of them who are having bad reactions to not just wheat, but many of the products we rely on for survival. Three things come to mind as being at the root of the problem: 1. Over-refinement, 2. harmful additives, and 3. GMO. Our systems evolved over a long time and these things have appeared in a relative blink of an eye. Our bodies can't adapt that quickly.
Beth, your son, as well as many other people, are the canaries in the coal mine. They are more sensitive than most, but now, more and more of the rest of us are succumbing to the onslaught of rapid changes in our diets and lifestyles. We cannot take much more of this. We must find a way back to the basics.
Dear Beth. Although my children are grownups and not obese and have never been ritalinized I thank you from the depth of my heart for bringing this issue to the fore. I have always asserted that Mozart, if he were alive in our country today, would be pumped full of Ritalin and would never compose a single piece of music in his entire life.
And then there is the "Attention Deficiency Syndrome". It is the easiest curable so-called learning/class problem. The cure is: "teachers stop asking for attention except when absolutely necessary to maintain order and then only ask for the attention of the disturbers of order".
Sorry: "Attention Deficit Syndrome".
I've been against the drugging of children for decades, and it's caused several arguments between myself and my younger sister, a school administrator. I keep pointing out that when we were kids (I'm 51, she's 49), they didn't drug kids right and left and we seemed to get an education. She tells me that kids are just out of control, now days, and for teachers to have a chance, these kids MUST be drugged.
So what has changed since I was a kid to make this such a problem? I have one suggestion, and it correlates to the increased cancers that we are dealing with, too. We have allowed chemicals to replace sanity in this country. Our food is crap, produced by the most unnatural means possible, and largely so that the rich can get even more wealth while the rest of us lose everything, including our lives. Read ANY label on any "food" product, and you will know what I am talking about. There is very little actual FOOD in there, it's damn near all chemicals and things we can't pronounce, let alone tell you what they actually ARE.
Between that and the increased amounts of chemicals dumped into our environment (thanks to the loosening of regulations and rules that kept things safe before), it's no wonder that we are losing our precious grip on reality. Our kids are the canary in the coal mine, but no one seems to look past making them into good little drug addicts. The longer big Pharma can keep them on drugs, the more money THEY get, and the more "controllable" the population becomes.
At this point, 74% of America is on one prescription drug or another. Is it any wonder that big pharma wants to screw up the remaining ones of us for even MORE profit?
Modern medicine looks at dealing with symptoms, and ignoring the underlying cause. Medicine USED to be about CURING people. Now it's about drugging them until they die. More profit in drugging than in curing. The March of Dimes cured polio in this country. Big pharma was pissed, as they lost out on all those polio drugs they could currently be making money on. They will NEVER let anything like that happen again, too much MONEY at stake.
Remove the crap and the chemicals, return us to an organic system of food production, and stop seeing every ailment as an excuse to drug people. Do those three things, and you will automatically see a HUGE number of problems in this country solve themselves. You won't have to drug kids, and people's health will improve. It's a win win for everyone BUT the drug and chemical companies, which I still consider to be a win win. It's just that it will be for the other 98% of us and not those with more money than brains.
As parents, we need to be confident in ourselves and in helping our children. Some of us parents may have been junk eaters in the past but that shouldn't stop us from encouraging our kids out of junk food and dangerous drugs. The least we could do is keep ourselves as clean as possible. That includes examples such as fathers not drinking after feeling worn out from a long day's work or mothers popping those pills to try to avoid depression. Furthermore, we should give our children a down to earth explanation of the lessons we learned and why they cannot afford to repeat our mistakes. Good luck Beth in helping your son. Don't give up your confidence in doing what is right for your son. The more he sees confidence in you, the more he will likely cooperate.
I think THIS type of problem demands that comparisons are made from country to country in order to arrive at accurate conclusions as to why so many children are now being medicated.
The Statistics seem hard to find but what percentage of Children in Canada, Norway, China, Japan and the like are on such drugs?
If it exponentially higher in the USA it would seem to preclude the notion that there just better techniques of diagnosis then 20 years ago. (As big pharma would claim).
If there dramatic differences then there has to be a reason and it my opinion the underlying causes are related to the enviroment and the contamination of the food supply.
An excellent piece! It should be required reading for the entire US Congress.
It angers me that all the good foods and snacks that could have been made out of hempseed oil have been tough to get all because of our phony "war on drugs" which includes the ban on cannabis. What good is this "war on drugs" when junk food and dangerous drugs such as the ones approved by Big Pharma get their "free" passes while harmless plants such as Cannabis are effectively prohibited? Beth, what all loving mothers and fathers need to do is call for an end to the "War on Drugs" and remove those bans on harmless plants such as cannabis.
"All your Medicare/Medicaid/Insurance dollars go to this nightmare"
Insurance dollars I am in complete agreement with you on. I understand that Medicare and Medicaid have been going red ink as far as funding is concerned with more to come from that health care legislation that passed in March. I do not understand how our dollars going towards Medicare and Medicaid could possibly be causing this nightmare. If Medicare were converted to Medicare for All and there was strict regulation on doctors and medicine, wouldn't that reduce the medical costs significantly enough in addition to practicing root cause medicine? I like the idea of practicing root cause medicine but the recent legislation that passed doesn't support it from what I hear.
maxpayne: I think this is very complicated. Modern medicine does an incredible job with accident/trauma/emergency care--state of the art, plus. We also have great diagnostics and top of the line surgeons (if you really need the surgery)
But chronic disease is different. Medicare and Medicaid, unfortunately, pay for "disease management" which assumes people will suffer forever and must be drugged and tested forever. Let me give you one example, that would, ultimately, save tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Gut pH is the key to treating and actually curing many diseases because of the damage done when you don't digest food properly. It is quite possible that most people treated for "too much stomach acid" actually have too little. Because Medicare and Medicaid will only fund what the AMA orthodoxy supports, they keep subsidizing Nexium, Prilosec, PepcidAC (now OTC, lucky us). Then they pay for the diseases which result from poor digestion because when you don't have enough stomach acid you don't properly absorb iron, calcium, B12 and protein--these are just the most common nutrients that don't get well absorbed. M&M pays for those drugs which are, at best, useless. I know, people will say they feel better when they take those drugs but it is a long term disaster. When they try to stop those drugs the situation gets worse and then you need to find a physician who understands how to stop these drugs correctly.
As noted here,there is also way more than meets the eye regarding treating allergies
that is often ignored becausde the drug "works" If you are allergic to wheat and the drug suppresses the symptoms, does anyone really believe you won't be damaged by the wheat.
There is no way to regulate this. The only way to break the monoopoly is to stop paying for so much primary care (give medical savings accounts to Medicaid recipients) and to stop the AMA and FDA from keeping these alternative solutions from the public. The brainwashing about the nobility and competence of the medical profession is extensive.
Thanks Cassandra for the advice on gut PH. You reminded me of those pH meters I would play around with in high school. Those devices look like they are worth using for testing these pharmaceuticals out there. I am in my 40s so I am way off being qualified for Medicare or Medicaid. I think I am beginning to see why the corporate interests do not really want to kill either M but fudge it. Heavens forbid though, I still might end up taking them for being hooked into feeling entitled for my having paid my portion into it like most people.
maxpayne: the small book "Why Stomach Acid Is Good For You" by Jonathan Wright, MD and L Lenard, PhD is an eyeopener. It is sad and depressing to me that these simple treatments (hundreds of them) are denied to people. I'm not ideologically opposed to M & M but it is beyond disturbing to me how they have been hijacked to serve corporate interests. I am getting close to Medicare, and will have no choice about the basic package. After not having any health insurance for the past 11 years it will be good to have emergency/accident coverage but will continue to pay other medical expenses myself.
Of course, you know most of Washington is working overtime to destroy the supplement industry, at least the honest part of it.
I shall check that book out. I hope it works for my wife though. She has been taking birth control pills for years now though I might be able to prove to her that I will do everything on my part to be a loving father so that she might enjoy being a loving mother. I hope that stomach acid won't affect her after years of going birth control.
People in the United States would do well to improve their eating habits and make lifestyle changes. These would drastically reduce health care costs and lead to better patient outcomes overall. However, simple fact is most of the prescription drugs prescribed today are effective and backed up by clinical studies. ADHD medications have been shown to be effective in the management of ADHD when combined with behavioral type therapies.
Some people act like their is some Cabal of drug companies and physicians sitting around trying to suck as much money out of the US as possible, while keeping them all sick. First off, physicians don't receieve any compensation for the drugs they prescribe, they prescribe them because they have been shown through medical literature to be effective. Modern medical advances are the reason we have continually increased life expectancy even as our behavior have grown more unhealthy.
For every Vioxx or other media sensastionalized drug, there are hundreds of other drugs that have saved millions of lives and improved millions more.
Don' t forget that the reports are written BY the drug companies. Google depopulation by vaccines for fun reading.
How many people died of smallpox last year? Zero, reason vaccines. What are the 5,10, and 20 year survival rates for cancer now compared to 10 years ago? Unless you are mega-dosing Tylenol it is also very safe and effective. I'd like to see these clinical studies you speak of, they sound like made up "facts".
Misuse is the key word when it comes to antibiotics, they are overprescribed no physician argues against that. However, your arguement about the super plague is ridiculously illogical. Ok so the issue with misuse of antibiotics is that bacteria are becoming resistant (MRSA, VRSA, VRE etc.), so that means that currently they are being killed by antibiotics in most cases. So without antibiotic use they wouldn't be resistant, they would just kill us anyway since we wouldn't have anything else to use against them. Instead of someone dying of Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus, they would just die from Staphylococcus. They have also saved millions of lives. I'm not sure how a respect for scientific/medical advancement is right-wing baloney either.
Study by the American Society of Pediatrics on the efficacy of Adderall XR in the treatment of ADHD.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/110/2/258
So lets see your double-blind placebo controlled studies.
Well this, along with vaccination in general being the great cure-all, is a popular misunderstanding. Some of the largest outbreaks of smallpox the world has ever seen have followed on from vaccination programmes. Between 1872 and 1892, following the introduction of the smallpox vaccine, Japan experienced year on year increases in smallpox, culminating in nearly thirty thousand deaths - all vaccinated. In the first decade of the 1900s, the Phillippines introduced smallpox vaccination, with 95% of the population becoming vaccinated - the death rate quadrupled. And here, in England, in late Victorian times, smallpox deaths soared following vaccination programmes and so much so, some cities refused the programme, finding containment and treatment fared far better than vaccination. Diseases can come and go without the aid of vaccination (check out the history of the bubonic plague) and nobody really knows why. The reality probably is that, in the main, improved nutrition, improved sanitation and improved housing are what really combats disease and this is almost certainly the case with childhood diseases, which is evident when you consider that Europe in the early 20th century saw the same disease fall-off rates as America, when it didn't even have a comprehensive vaccination programme.
Ok so if you mega dose or ignore the label direction to limit alcohol intake, you will get liver toxicity, that doesn't make Tylenol an unsafe drug. Medicine is a business as is owning a spelt-bakery. Doctors go through a decade of training before they are allowed to prescribe medical advice to people, but for some reason people trust everyone with an axe to grind over them.
Never had a real job in their entire lives??? So being a physician isn't a real job, you sound like a Republican talking about the Liberal elites. I want my doctor to have the maximum amount of training in biology and medicine, I couldn't care less if they had a "real" job. That also has to be the most arrogant elitist thing I have ever heard (Daddy and loans???), I guess you have a "real" job and think yourself better than them for it. Before you arrive to pratice, you go through 4 years of undergraduate typically in a biology related field, four years of medical schoool (with 2 being clinically based), then a residency from between 1-7 years depending on specialty. So basically the last 3-9 years of a doctors training is in real world situations, they don't hop out of a lecture hall and into practice.
People don't wrack up hundreds of thousands in debt and then work 80+ hour weeks, because they want to be an elite.
Wow, your Tyelnol analogy is pretty weak. The reason behind the bacteria in the Tylenol is because of poor regulation by the FDA, not because it is an unsafe drug. Again, if you want someone to blame for the Vioxx debacle, try again with the FDA. Any, and I mean any, drug, chemical, supplement, etc is only as good as what is was designed for. Misuse on anyone's part in the chain of acquisition is going to make it unsafe (from manufacturer to user). I know a lot of people are angry with what is going on in the world. The injustice seems neverending. Please don't drag us back to the dark ages with all this anti-medication talk. If you have questions about something you've been told to take, ask a pharmacist. Trust me, they don't get kickbacks. Big pharma doesn't pay them. They are just drug specialist who read the relevant literature. I know that some people were taught in school to to "just say no" to drugs and somehow that perverted to ALL drugs, but let's not prevent medications from doing what they were designed to do by this bias.
Red Raider... Learn your facts. Vioxx killed a ton of people and was pulled for awhile until someone was bribed to get it back on the market. So many drugs now are killing people. Crap, just listen to the warnings of all of them. Doctors are still getting paid to push them. Under the table. Read before you make any more posts.
Doctors are not getting paid to push drugs, its simply not true, you can't just make stuff up and then tell someone else to read. There are no under the table payments, drug companies soon won't even be able to give away pens with their names on them. Vioxx is one drug, how many people were saved last year because of prescription drugs?
Thats right. The kickbacks are more fancy and creative than just paying doctors.
sometimes they pay pharmicists. but the doctors get the real hilarious stuff like.
"research grants", "consulting fees". Perhaps a fun game like "points" that can be redemed for free airline tickets. I could go on and on and list the sceems for days but you get the picture.
I am afraid you are misinformed. My husband is a pharmacist and I am in school to become one. They don't ever, ever get kickbacks of ANY kind from anyone. Please. You have some misplaced paranoia. Doctors don't either. Big pharma pushes drugs through commercials and big glossy magazine adds. Much more effective. Personally, I would much rather take my chances with a drug that has been prescribed and gone through trials and peer based clinical reviews before I took any kind of supplement (which has no regulation at ALL). Natural is NOT the same as safe. My family eats healthy, organic, free trade food, but I am agreed with the poster above who disparages all the "new age" crazes. Get informed before you start throwing out accusations you know nothing about.
"...hundreds of other drugs that have saved millions of lives..."
After penicillin...name 20
A physician once told me he wouldn't take half the drugs he prescribed. Drugs treat symptoms, in chronic disease they are very damaging. The ADHD drugs are an abomination and only "work" the way a crutch does except you have to use the crutch forever. This is Big Pharma's plan--drugs that have to be taken forever. The research is often rigged and FDA is in their pocket.
A case history:
A local first grader was doing far better at home, being tutored by mom, than he was doing at school. On quizzes at school the boy might get 1, or 2, or 3 questions right.
Mom talked with the teacher. They agreed to clean up the chemicals in the classroom air. Out went the toxic dry erase markers, the toxic Chinese-made magic marker pens, the perfume sources, the ammonia-based and bleach-based cleaners. There are good alternatives for all of these. In about 3 weeks the boy got 100% of the answers right on a quiz.
No, this isn't a story of allergic reactions to food. It's another thing that your school board should clean up if they want a good learning environment and smarter kids. If your school board actually wants a classroom of de facto airplane glue sniffers, get a new school board.
OK, I'm going to be the skeptic on this one.
The tell in the article is
the fact that the writer is the founder and co-owner of Spelt-Right Bakery in Yarmouth, Maine. In other words she sells food alternatives to wheat. The internet and America in general is being spammed like crazy by the "new age" fake health science industry and it is getting out of controll. Much of the spam comes from multi tier marketing scams. Alot of it comes from disinformation paid for by big food buisness concerns.
Wheat "sensitivity" is one of the latest myths being perpetrated.
google the phrase and you will find hundreds of sites demonizing wheat. like this:
http://www.wellsphere.com/heart-health-article/wheat-would-you-give-your-kids-crack/110098
It's all just new age garbage with no basis in fact.
You have to remember these new age people are people who will and do believe almost anything if it hits an emotional chord. The current new age movement is very similar to the fake biology and fake pseudo mystical religious crap you see so much of when you study nazism in Germany just proir to WW II. Psychologically it's all projections due to a loss of real connections with nature. So people start to romanticise and demonize absolutely everything. It can become quite bizarre. wheat and sugar seem to be huge targets lately.
For a couple of reasons. It's an offshoot of the anti carb weight loss craze. being skinny is falsly equated with being healthy. Also wheat and yeast (bread) form the core staple protien of the historical western diet. So it becomes a projection of everything that makes us "feel bad". Obviously the fact that we are western people makes us feel bad so wheat becomes a projection and a scapegoat or the projected cause for all our troubles.
perhaps if we all just ate spelt we would be connected to nature again and not feel so isolated with all this racial white guilt. on and on -- you get the picture.
In a very serious way the new age movement is threatening to destroy all the gains made over the last 40 years in public education and the organic and health food system and the availability of quality information concerning health nutrition, and herbal medicine.
More and more if you try to look up a real or nutrition heath problem on the intenet all you can find is a flood of bizzare garbage like this article.
please take the time this and every day to help a new age person understand they are exibiting symptoms of mental disorder and need help.
I don't know how you have become an "expert" on this subject, but you appear to be quite misinformed. I suggest a search of "Dr Mark Hyman and functional medicine" or "Dr Mark Hyman and ADHD research"
Large numbers of people do better without wheat--a friend only had "fibromyalgia" when she ate wheat, but spelt has gluten and many many others have resolved their medical "symptoms" (not diseases, altho they are identified by modern medicine as such) with gluten free diets.
The real key is gut pH--taking drugs for digestive problems is probably the worst thing anyone can do (unless gut pH has been tested and found adequate; and taking drugs for behavioral disorders is an unmitigated disaster.
I am not an "expert". The level of understanding needed here is basic C level biology 101.
Mark Hyman is exactly the kind of nuts pedaling new age garbage I am talking about.
I tried to read mark Hyman's uninteligble garbage about your "gut" whatever the heck that is.
It reads like something just made up out of the blue by a sixth grader. It didn't seem to mention ph. Ph is a huge thing for the new age fake health fad. It all started in the 70s as a marketing ploy about shampoo being Ph balanced. This of course leading to 80s big hair. A horror show for shure. I found this statement on a new age health site. "Look around you at society in general. Do you see people getting exhausted, burned out, and quick to anger? Do you see a rise in violence? In part it could be due to the fact that people today lean to an acid pH. As a society we are running hot and fast."
health reasoning by analogy.
Anyone who actually leans to an acid pH. blood Ph of below 7.4 ends up immediatly in an emergency
room and goes straight to ICU on a respirator. If their blood Ph reaches 6.8 then pack your bags cause you are checking out to the great wheat free feast in the sky.
The Ph in you stomach by the way is like 1. If it goes above 1 from the food you eat you body pumps in hydrocloric acid. later in you intestines the goo is buffered to a Ph of between 8 and 9.
No mater what Ph the junk you eat you aren't going to change any of it. Your body if full of redundant systems to buffer Ph at every level.
This has nothing to do with the pH of the food you eat or with blood pH. It is the damage done by the food you eat that produces negative responses to a perfectly normal low pH. The damage also includes reducing the ability of your stomach to produce acid. If the chyme ("goo") going into the intestine is a higher than normal pH it is possible the pancreas will not secrete sufficient enzymes to fully digest what is there.
You are free to believe Mark Hyman is a nut and you are free to be treated by the physician of your choice (at least for now) but believing doesn't make it so. His research indicates a decrease of 80% in the costs of treating ADHD by using diet, supplements and avoidance of individually appropriate toxins. If you want to drug your children you are, again, free to do so but to sneer at others who have other choices is quite narrow minded.
For a more professional explanation see "Why Stomach Acid Is Good For You" by Jonathan Wright, MD and L Lenard, PhD
casandra writes:
"This has nothing to do with the pH of the food you eat or with blood pH. It is the damage done by the food you eat that produces negative responses to a perfectly normal low pH."
These two sentences make no sense at all.
casandra also writes:
"you are free to be treated by the physician of your choice"
"If you want to drug your children you are, again, free to do so"
The fallacy of false dichotomy is committed when the arguer claims that his or her conclusion is one of only two options, when in fact there are many other possibilities.
I don't understand why that wouldn't make sense because it has been scientifically proven. Could you elaborate on that please?
Some of us do have an allergies, including to wheat. There are about a dozen different seeds that seem to set me off, but the wheat is the worst. I don't think it's bad for people in general, but it is hell on Earth for me, and I have no special need to suffer.
There are plenty of hypochondriacs, but plenty of dietary problems as well.
I went through all of this as an adult. Yes, supplements helped, even thought I had always eaten well. And yes, the elimination diet (which, by the way, was designed by the founders of the field of "Allergy" while it was still concerned with the environment and before it became focused on the "defective" body of the individual and renamed "Immunology") also helped. But in the end, that wasn't enough. After generations of our accumulating more and more heavy metals in our bodies, particularly from extensive exposure from amalgam fillings (the metal ones, which are 50% mercury) and vaccines, a larger and larger proportion of our children are becoming highly reactive, highly sensitive to the environment (look up mercurial "erethism" in the dictionary), and cognitively/emotionally (neurologically) damaged. I wish the author's son well, but those cumulative toxins haven't gone anywhere. If that boy wants to be able to eat those foods, if he wants to be able to function without his adrenals crashing unless he has constant small meals, if he wants to avoid being more and more hemmed in as he faces a long-term decline, he's going to have to get them out of his body.
Try here: noamalgam.com
Beth's observations show how important it is for a mom to trust her instincts as she looks for help for her child; when it comes to her child, a caring mom is the best expert.
I had to laugh at the individual who thought she was doing all this for the money! Yeah, sure...give up a job as a lawyer in favor of waking up before the sun rises, to bake! Making a living by selling baked goods is a very tough business, according to many people I have interviewed about this. You really have to be committed since the only extra "dough" you are likely to see will be in the kneading machine!
Like many parents, Beth has combined her passion for helping people with the awareness that there is a real need for this product. The number of people who are intolerant of wheat is growing, and anyone who believes that food allergies and sensitivities are some sort of new age fad is way out of touch with what has been taking place in medicine every since Dr. Clemens Von Pirquet first coined the term "allergy" back in 1906.
Americans are currently spending about 2 billion dollars a year on food products labled “Gluten-Free”. That seems like enough money to generate a few fake news articles.
Good lord, you are an arrogant piece of work. Just because YOUR body tolerates gluten you think others are lying because they tell you they feel better eating a gluten free diet? God almighty, where do you people come from?
I don't think SusanY is necessarily against gluten free diets. I thought her issue was on the labels. It is getting harder to tell which foods are actually safe and which are not and the labels aren't always accurate. On a larger note, some of the foods labeled "organic" are not always organic. The only way to truly tell is to research the product as thoroughly as possible.
The original article promotes gluten-free diets as a solution to a child's behavioral problem not celiac's disease. I pointed out the glaring conflict of interest embedded in the article since the author was part owner of a gluten-free bakery. 25 years ago, I took care of a woman with celiac's disease long before it was well understood and there was easily obtainable gluten-free food. She unfortunately died. There are sophisticated tests to see if you are gluten intolerant and if you should persue a gluten-free diet. If indeed the author's child does test gluten intolerant than she has a valid point but none of this was stated in the article. Children's behavioral problems are complex and many times due to societal expectations, inequalities, and expectations of conformity. These problems, unfortunately, cannot be solved by simple diet changes.
I can't believe that nobody yet has mentioned the "Feingold Program". My family has been on it for ten years now and it has enabled my son in particular to handle "ADD" without using any medications. While I do think that some people might be sensitive to gluten or other otherwise healthy foods, there are a number of people who only need to eliminate the artificial additives lurking in many processed foods: Colors (red #40,...), artificial flavors, artificial sweeteners and the petroleum based preservatives BHA, BHT and TBHQ. Some people are also sensitive to chemical fragrances. This an option which anyone can try easily and (unlike meds) is risk free and inexpensive. And, no, we don't just eat tofu and bean sprouts. (Chili dogs for dinner anyone?).
More information is at ADHDDiet.com.
It's not as intimidating as it sounds. I work full time and have three children and a very busy personal life and I still manage it easily. The Feingold program has truly been the "magic bullet" that any parent with an "ADD" child is looking for. If you look at all the time spent managing the behavior it more than offsets the initial extra time planning your food.