It is interesting to see the prejudice and closed-mindedness of the
mainstream practice being exposed here and being taken so lightly.
There are well constructed studies that have been published in
mainstream journals decades ago.
Nachum

Experts Revisit Food Additives and ADHD
Research Suggests Limiting Food Additives in Diet May Help Kids With
ADHD

By Salynn Boyles
WebMD Medical News
Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD

May 22, 2008 — The notion that artificial colors and preservatives in
foods may play a role in hyperactivity has been largely dismissed
within conventional medicine, but there are signs that this is
beginning to change.

In a newly published editorial appearing in BMJ, pediatrics professor
Andrew Kemp, MD, of the University of Sydney, called for removal of
food additives from the diet to be part of standard initial treatment
for kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Kemp cited a recent controlled trial showing an increase in
hyperactivity among children without ADHD who were fed a diet high in
food colorings and the preservative sodium benzoate.

Last February, editors of the American Academy of Pediatrics
publication AAP Grand Rounds cited the same study as evidence that it
is time to revisit the issue.

"The overall findings of the study are clear and require that even we
skeptics, who have long doubted parental claims of the effects of
various foods on the behavior of their children, admit we might have
been wrong," the editors wrote.

Kemp tells WebMD that practitioners have largely ignored the clinical
evidence suggesting that dietary modification improves ADHD symptoms
in some children.

"Clearly it doesn't work for everybody, but very few treatments do,"
he says. "(Dietary modification) is certainly something that parents
who want to avoid drugs could try for a month or six weeks."

Additives and ADHD
In the United States, 4.7 million children, including 9.5% of boys
and 5.9% of girls, have ever been diagnosed with ADHD, according to
the latest statistics from the CDC.

Stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall are the most
commonly prescribed treatments for hyperactivity, but family and
behavioral therapy is also used.

In his editorial, Kemp argues that there is more research suggesting
a benefit for dietary modification than for behavioral therapy, yet
dietary modification has been widely dismissed as an alternative
treatment.

He notes that of 22 studies conducted between 1975 and 1994, 16 found
dietary modification to have a positive impact on at least some
children with ADHD.

"In view of the relatively harmless intervention of eliminating
colorings and preservatives, and the large number of children taking
drugs for hyperactivity, it might be proposed that an appropriately
supervised and evaluated trial of eliminating colorings and
preservatives should be part of standard treatment for children,"
Kemp writes.

Food Additives on Trial
The 2007 study cited by Kemp and the AAP editors included 297 British
children from the general population who were either age 3 or between
the ages of 8 and 9 and whose diets were closely controlled for six
weeks.

During the study, the children drank either beverages with food
additives or a placebo drink with no additives.

Neither the children nor the researchers knew which beverage the
children were getting.

The children were evaluated for inattention and hyperactivity by
parents and teachers and through a standardized computer testing.

The researchers reported that for both age groups evaluated, children
who drank the beverages with the artificial additives exhibited more
hyperactivity and shorter attention spans.

That 2007 study aside, pediatrician Mark Wolraich, MD, tells WebMD
that most studies that have examined the impact of limiting food
additives on ADHD are at least three decades old, and these studies
showed benefits in only a small percentage of hyperactive children.

A professor of pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma Health
Sciences Center, Wolraich notes that removing preservatives from many
foods might pose a health problem of its own.

"The preservatives keep the food from spoiling, so there would be
less food available if we removed them from all foods," he says.

Seattle Children's Hospital associate medical director Edgar Marcuse,
MD, says the new study is more rigorous than any research that has
been done before, even though it was not limited to children with
ADHD.

As an editor of AAP Grand Rounds, Marcuse co-wrote the editorial
calling on clinicians to be more open-minded about a possible role
for dietary restrictions in the treatment of hyperactivity.

"This was not a huge study, but the overall findings were rather
compelling," Marcuse tells WebMD. "We don't know what this means for
any individual child at this point, but I think it reopens a book
that has been closed."

SOURCES: Berg, K.M, American Journal of Medicine, May 2008; vol 121:
pp 406-418. Karina M. Berg, MD, assistant professor of medicine,
Montefiore Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine,
Bronx, N.Y. Ethel Siris, MD, president, National Osteoporosis
Foundation; professor of clinical medicine, Columbia University, New
York. Siris et al., The Journal of the American Medical Association,
Dec. 12, 2001; vol 286: pp 2815-2822.Kemp, A. BMJ, May 24, 2008; vol
336: p 1144. Andrew Kemp, MD, professor of pediatric allergy and
clinical immunology, Department of Allergy and Immunology, Children's
Hospital at Westmead, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Schonwald, A., AAP Grand Rounds, February 2008. Eigenmann, P.A., The
Lancet, Nov. 3, 2007; vol 370: pp 1560-1567. National Center for
Health statistics Fast Stats: "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD)." Mark Wolraich, MD, CMRI-Shaun Walters Professor of
Pediatrics, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Edgar
Marcuse, MD, general academic pediatrician and professor, University
of Washington; associate medical director, Seattle Children's
Hospital; editor, AAP Grand Rounds.