ADHD Nutrition: Healthy Food for a Healthy Brain and Body

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ADHD Nutrition: Healthy Food for a Healthy Brain and Body
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All of us—adults and children alike—can benefit from a healthy diet. For people with attention difficulties, a healthy diet can be especially helpful in supporting brain development and calming one’s behavior. As a natural remedy, ADHD nutrition is definitely worthy of research to discover the best diet for children and adults with ADD/ADHD.

While ADHD nutrition is not a cure for attention difficulties, a proper ADD/ADHD diet can greatly improve a person’s body chemistry, blood sugar levels, and healing abilities. Before you embark on improving ADHD nutrition, especially in children, it’s important to note that you don’t want to follow such a strict diet that it causes more stress than good. On the contrary, you want to teach your child about how to choose nutritious foods. When a parent becomes too obsessive about enforcing ADHD nutrition, the child could become resentful and defiant. Most parents find ADHD nutrition is much more successful when they focus on one goal at a time, such as decreasing refined sugar in the diet or increasing high-quality protein.

Once you’ve decided to move toward a diet focused on ADHD nutrition, here are some items you will want to include in your family’s regular diet:

Essential fatty acids: Not only are EFA’s like Omega-3 fatty acids great for the cardiovascular system, they are also necessary for brain function. Examples of foods rich in Omega-3 fatty acids include fatty fish (salmon), nuts (walnuts and almonds), and flaxseeds.

Whole grains, leafy green vegetables, beans, and peas: These foods are full of B-vitamins, magnesium, antioxidants, and more ADHD nutrition sources necessary for a healthy body, brain, and nervous system.

High protein foods: Instead of relying solely on sugar for energy, make sure your child has a steady supply of high-quality protein. Turkey, eggs, nuts, cheese, and yogurt are all good proteins sources for ADHD nutrition.

Milk, green vegetables, and other sources of calcium: Calcium is needed by your body to regulate many different functions, including nerve impulses.

As you attempt to improve ADHD nutrition with high-quality food choices, it may also be helpful to avoid certain foods. Most candy, potato chips, and other “junk” food are full of empty calories, sugar, and salt which will do little to nourish the body and brain. Limit the consumption of empty calories and try to replace them with healthy snack food choices like fruits, nuts, vegetables, yogurt, cheese, etc. Healthy snacks are also beneficial to ADHD nutrition because they stabilize blood sugar levels while also providing key nutrients.

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