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Section/ADHD
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Food Additives
The Australian Food Intolerance Network is unequivocal in its conclusions that food intolerance affects behaviour.
- The Australian Food Intolerance Network is unequivocal in its conclusions that food intolerance affects behaviour. In a letter to the managing director of the Australian and New Zealand Food Authority, psychologist and nutritionist Sue Dengate states: “About 50 widely-used food additives affect health, learning and behaviour on a daily basis,” and “The use of these additives is increasing, both in range of foods in which they are found and in the total daily intake. Therefore there is already evident an increase in health, behaviour and learning difficulties in the Australian population that is requiring increased public funding to manage.”
- Dengate noted that research “shows that effects are dose-related and that almost everyone will react if the quantities ingested are high enough. Children, women and those who consume the greatest quantities are likely to be the most affected. Several overseas studies suggest that nearly all children will do better in performance and behaviour if they eat an additive-free diet.”80
- Dr. Doris Rapp, author of the New York Times best seller, Is This Your Child? Discovering and Treating Unrecognized Allergies in Children and Adults, says that “...the brain functions of children could be influenced by a food or other environmental factors, for example dust or mold, in such a way that the children would develop so-called hyperactivity or behaviour and learning problems. A wide variety of complaints, including over-activity, fatigue, bed-wetting, inappropriate behavior, and even epilepsy, in some children, may be due to allergies. Allergic infants can be so hyperactive that they rock their cribs about the room or bounce them off the walls and begin to walk earlier than normal. By isolating and correcting this, the child can be helped so that there are no symptoms and no need for drugs.”
Here are some of Dr. Rapp’s examples:
- “At 15, Betsy was depressed and suicidal each year in the late summer when ragweed pollen was in the air in northern Michigan. During her first visit to our clinic she appeared normal until we tested her for an allergy to ragweed. Then she crawled into the office bathtub and refused to come out. She screamed, was untouchable, and complained of so much abdominal pain that she pulled her knees to her chest and held her stomach. After we gave her a neutralizing allergy treatment, she felt entirely normal within a few minutes. Betsy was a persistent school failure until her allergies were recognized and treated, and her academic work and demeanor in school improved dramatically.”
- “Karl was a darling 3-year-old youngster with a charming personality—until he ate sugar. His mother noticed that when Karl ate party food or candy, his total personality quickly and dramatically changed. We videotaped Karl as he gleefully devoured eight cubes of sugar. Just as the mother had predicted, within less than an hour he switched from Dr. Jekyll to a Mr. Hyde. At first he stopped playing quietly and began to whine. Then he became more irritable, stomped his feet, wiggled in his chair, tossed his toys over his head, and threw pieces of a puzzle at his mother. When he was given the correct allergy treatment, within a few minutes he was transformed back into his adorable self. His mother was in tears. She realized she was not a bad mother and he was not a bad kid.”
- Sleep Disorders Australia has discovered that sleep apnoea (difficulty breathing during sleep, resulting in significant loss of deep sleep) causes “behavioural changes during the day–the child may be hyperactive or aggressive instead of sleepy.”
- Sarah Stock, medical reporter for The Australian reported on 1 March, 2001 that children with breathing problems in their sleep can be “hyperactive, cranky, oppositional and have learning difficulties because they are too tired to concentrate.”
- The Sydney Morning Herald also raised the alarm about possible mis-diagnosis of children when Dr. Arthur Teng of the Sydney Children’s Hospital, said “Problems such as sleep apnoea, where there is snoring and pauses in breathing overnight, can have a very big impact on a child’s behaviour, learning ability and attention during the day.”
Additionally, the DEA reports that “physicians need to recognize that chronic marijuana use will produce ADHD symptoms,” and “Some medications like bronchodilators and neuroleptics produce symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity.”
“Hyperactivity is not a disease,” Walker said, “It’s a hoax perpetrated by doctors who have no idea what’s really wrong with these children.”85 He warned: “The medical community has elevated Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to the status of diagnoses, and most people believe that these are real diseases.”
“Prescribing psychotropic drugs for a disease that doesn’t exist”, Walker added, is a tragedy because “masking children’s symptoms merely allows their underlying disorders to continue and, in many cases, to become worse.”
This would be similar to a patient going to see a doctor for a swollen leg and the doctor diagnoses it as a “lump,” gives you an aspirin and never determines if the lump is a tumor, an insect bite, or gangrene. Or prescribing cough drops for a “coughing disorder” without worrying whether you had strep throat or tuberculosis.
Tutoring:
Furthermore, in many cases the child is inattentive in school because he is extremely talented and is bored. President Bush’s 14-year-old nephew, Pierce, is an example of this. In 2000, he appeared on Larry King Live with his father, Neil, who explained how Pierce was told he was ADD and needed a stimulant, which the boy refused to take. Instead, he was given 3 1/2 days of assessment and was found to be a “gifted and talented kid.”
Education has also regressed with the introduction of psychological concepts into the curriculum. For example, in some areas phonics are ignored and children have been forced to memorize nearly every word without understanding the logical sequence of letters or their sounds.89 Over the years it has had different names: “Look-Say” in the 1940s and 50s, “sight-word” method in the mid- to late-1960s, to “psycholinguistics” and “Whole Language” in the 1980s.90
Consequently, students simply don’t understand what they are being told to study.
Therefore, educational basics, tutoring and discipline should also be tools to address “challenging behaviour.”
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Child Drugging