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Comment by m3sh | Hacker News Reader

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I’m so tired of people dismissing ADHD as something other than ADHD.

My diet has evolved throughout my lifetime, but you know what hasn’t? My ADHD experience. I’ve always struggled to stay focused, get started, finish tasks, manage time and set priorities since I was a young child.

Claiming it’s a food allergy — with no evidence! — just reinforces the idea that ADHD is a moral failing rather than a developmental disorder that renders many of us miserable and, sometimes, nearly powerless.

These idiots are so eager to write off what they don't understand

ADHD is neurostructural ... you can see it in an MRI

Ah so the vaccines did it then! Should have put onions in your shoes and walked it off /s

In all seriousness an explanation I've seen banded around that seemed far more plausible is that it's an obsolete evolutionary mutation. Once we moved to farming and tribes/society, we no longer needed people who could stay up all night and be able to notice something miniscule like leaves ruffling in the distance

I read that paper too.

Even so, it's a mutation that leaves the person incongruent with the world in a way that limits happiness and self actualisation.

Evolution or not.

i think you should increase you medicine intake so that you can understand what you read. I didn't say ADHD is a hoax but if you have food allergies and having internal lesions etc due to it, you can show symptoms similar to ADHD (being unable to focus etc) and one shouldn't dismiss this before going to a psychiatrist.

Do you have a source for this? From everything I've researched, it's actually a chemical imbalance that affects the management of dopamine in the brain, making it hard to focus.

You’re off by a little bit: it’s not a chemical imbalance but an actual neurological difference. ADHD develops when the brain is very young and results in permanent differences in cognition and executive function.

We do use dopamine (via stimulants) to treat it, though. We essentially flood the brain with excess dopamine and hope that it’s enough to overcome the deficits caused by developmental differences.

I think norepinephrine also plays a role

Oligoantigenic/elimination diets have been shown to improve symptoms, may not work for everyone and still may not be as effective as stimulants

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.0073...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9257090

The chemical imbalance is one side-effect of the actual structural issues in the brain that cause ADHD.

This is why ADHD medication does not fix many secondary problems. (Examples include memory retrieval, time blindness, emotional regulation, etc)

I believe the more current thinking is that it’s a functional connectivity issue rather than a chemical imbalance, but nobody knows for certain.

Sometimes I get worried about oversimplification on Hacker News. As a bacteria researcher, I know how complex health research can be. Unfortunately, some smart people oversimplify things they don't understand, especially in biomedical research.

I agree certain foods can attenuate symptoms (I’ve gone on a year plus long elimination diet eating only a handful of foods, which helped symptoms), there’s certainly a “lower level” component to it as well.

After the diet I don’t magically become more skilled at visual reasoning (think that’s what it’s called), or able to recite a story from start to finish without jumping everywhere.

I agree though that the worst of the symptoms can probably be mitigated at the least.

I've heard and experienced that fasting or extreme ketogenic diets can help somewhat. Inflammatory foods probably don't help either.

But it would be wrong to say that the opposite, high carbohydrates or sugar, high inflammatory or whatever is causing "ADHD". At best similar symptoms but that's what diagnostics are for...

I read that allergies are co-morbid in ADHD, because of the elevated stress hormones.

ADHD-like symptoms are caused by a food allergy?

What might be some common foods that would cause this?

"Some of the common foods that can cause ADHD reactions include milk, chocolate, soy, wheat, eggs, beans, corn, tomatoes, grapes, and oranges. If you suspect a food sensitivity may be contributing to your child's ADHD symptoms, talk to your ADHD dietitian or doctor about trying an elimination diet".

That's been disproven.

Not really. Though, of course, anything has been proven or disproven in one paper or another, like "everything causes cancer" since it's easy to find the appropriate research papers...

You won't find many papers with any association between food allergies and -diagnosed- ADHS. Plenty of papers where that has been ruled out. Also sugar has been ruled out plenty of times.

The psychopathology just doesn't lend itself to food allergies as a cause. The symptoms would just vanish with sporadical diet changes all the time during childhood and that's just not what happens. You wouldn't see neurological changes, you wouldn't expect stimulants to work as a treatment, but you would expect anti-allergy or immunosuppressant medication to work.

The evidence on this is too strong to claim food allergy is a major cause of anything like ADHD. Intermittent concentration problems in some people? Maybe. But that's nothing compared to actual ADHD.

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