January 6, 2008
Food coloring additives and ADHD
More to keep you busy reading during my absence….
These studies have not yet been done on adults, but it seems the chemicals added to food can cause ADHD-like symptoms in children, so the additives probably have an adverse effect on the rest of us, too:
Study on food additives and relationship with ADHD symptoms
There is a general adverse effect of artificial food colouring and benzoate preservatives on the behaviour of 3 year old children which is detectable by parents but not by a simple clinic assessment.
‘Angry Moms’ fighting for improvements to grade-school cafeteria food
New Source of Exercises
Hi!
Well, I’m not really “back”, but I had a few spare minutes and thought I’d share something new with you. I know that physical health is definitely related to ADD and mental well-being in general, so I decided to join the millions of other people with a New Year’s resolution of “Get In Shape”.
I’m not really overweight, though I could stand to lose 5 lbs in my mid-section (especially after reading the previous post by Joan about waist-to-hip ratio… when I gain weight, it’s always around my tummy, and I have a really flat butt!), but I do want to gain some muscle tone and get back to the shape I was in a few years ago.
Problem is, back then I had a great college dining hall (yes, my school had delicious and healthy food), with fresh salads and seasoned veggies available at every meal that required no preparation from me, and I was in the college’s Tae Kwon Do club. With the easy healthy food that I didn’t have to shop for, wash, chop, etc. and with more time on my hands, I managed to have a pretty good diet. Lately, I’ve been eating pretty poorly, especially since there’s a convenient fast-food joint downstairs from my office that is open late when I’m working after-hours.
My main problem, though, is that I really had become sedentary over the last couple months. I used to attend rigorous hour-long Tae Kwon Do workouts 3 times a week. Now, I barely work out at all, and it’s showing. I have all of the normal excuses – I’m super-busy, I don’t want to pay for an expensive gym membership I probably won’t use, it’s too cold outside to take walks or ride a bike regularly, I’m tired after work and don’t want to go anywhere but home…. but now I found a solution that has been working for me for the past couple weeks: on-demand “free” cable workouts!
I put “free” in quotes, because I’m (over)paying for Comcast cable, and the on-demand service is part of the service package I have. I only recently discovered these workout videos because I thought the only on-demand things that were available were rental movies, or pay-per-view boxing fights. Boy, was I wrong! I finally looked through the menu, and there are “cable favorites” (re-run TV shows), older movies, and a ton of 10-30 minute exercise videos On-Demand at no extra cost! I can pause, rewind, etc. and play them any time I want! I don’t have to have buyers remorse after paying for a video in the store because if I don’t like the personality of the fitness guru, or the exercises they want me to do, I can just try another one! Yay! I’m so excited.
So, you ADDers out there that either 1) misplace rarely-used exercise DVDs, or 2) have energy late at night when the gyms are closed, or 3) have the excuses I had above, or 4) get bored doing the same exercises every day – check out your cable on-demand shows! You might come across the good selection of short workout videos that I did.
Waist-to-Hip Ratio, Omega-3s, and ADD
Joan, over at “Chaotic Order, Living with ADD” wrote a post, which is relevant to this blog, and is excerpted below. To read the entire post, click on this link: “She Get It From Her Momma”
The University of Pittsburgh and University of California @ Santa Barbara published a study suggesting that fat stored in the hips and butt are a privileged source of nuerodevelopmental resources. The study asserts that upper body fat particularly abdominal fat has negative effects and lower body fat (hips, butt) have positive effects on long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFA) that are essential for brain development. They used waist to hip ratio(WHR) as a marker for how much fat is located around a woman’s waist compared to how much is around a her hips, thighs and butt. They used the WHR to predict cognitive ability in women and their children. They used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey which included data on body fat, body mass index (BMI), waist & hip circumference, results of cognitive tests of adults & children, demographics such as education levels, income, age, race and etc.
They analyzed the data controlling for factors that correlate with higher intelligence and found that women with lower WHR and their kids have significantly higher cognitive test scores and teenage mothers with lower WHR and their kids are protected from cognitive decrements associated with teen births.
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Omega-3 fatty acids are the main LCPUSFA involved in brain development. Omega-3’s contain DHA and ALA and are essential fatty acids because they can not be made from the body. They have to come from food or supplements. ALA can be converted to DHA by the body. ALA mainly comes from flax seed, walnuts, olive oils etc, while DHA is primarily found in fatty fish. LCPUSFA’s make up 20% of the dry weight of the human brain. DHA is critical for fetal and infant brain development which is one of the reasons they add it to infant formula while it is found naturally in breast milk. A recent meta-analysis report estimates that a child’s IQ increases by 0.13 point for every 100mg increase in daily maternal prenatal intake of DHA. A study in England showed a positive relationship between a mother’s prenatal consumption of seafood (high in DHA) and her child’s verbal IQ.
Gluteofemoral(hips/butt) fat has higher amounts of LCPUFA’s than abdominal and visceral fat. In comparison, abdominal fat decreases the amount of a desaturase enzyme that is involved in the synthesis of important LCPUFA’s from dietary precursers. Other studies showed that 60-80% of LCPUFA’s in human breast milk come from maternal fat stores, rather than from the mother’s current dietary intake, presumably because of the rapid rate of infant brain development relative to limited dietary supplies of LCPUFA’s.
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The most important points of this study is that Omega-3 fatty acids are crucial for the brain development of fetuses, infants and in adults as well and also that having excessive abdominal fat reduces the availability of those fatty acids and raise health risks in general. Low levels of Omega-3 fatty acids have been implicated in contributing to ADD, depression, anxiety disorders, aggression, hypertension and etc. So make sure that you are taking in enough omega-3’s especially if you are pregnant. Mommies, some children’s vitamins now contain DHA.
Kick My ADD 