3. Food allergies: The Great Hidden Cause of Attentional Difficulties?

Millions upon millions of Americans, children and adults, struggle with attentional difficulties. For many people, sitting still and paying attention through a 50 minute class or meeting, or sitting down for most of an eight hour day and focusing on work is all but impossible. This doesn’t owe to laziness or a lack of self discipline. It results from very real chemical imbalances in brain and body. The very fact that clinical cases of ADD and ADHD can be treated successfully with drugs is ample evidence of this. If the problem weren’t at least partially chemical, how could a drug treat it? But what causes the chemical imbalances that lead to problems with attention?

Many people would point to genetics, and there’s little doubt that genes are involved, since genes are involved in just about everything. But the incidence of ADD and ADHD seems to go up every year. Part of this may be due to the fact that in previous years little was known about these conditions, so cases went undiagnosed. But the real incidence of ADD and ADHD in both children and adults seems to be on the rise. So what’s causing this?

Our thought is that the major cause of attention problems, both clinical (ADD and ADHD) and non-clinical (just people who have trouble sitting down and focusing, but not so much so that they need medication) is stress. Not only psychological stress, but physical stress as well. We are bombarded by so many stressors in the course of modern life that it takes all our bodies can do just to stay afloat. These stressors all deplete our resources and erode our vitality. Sitting down and concentrating takes an enormous amount of energy (have you ever felt physically exhausted after a big exam or a hard day of purely mental work?). A body that has to deal with an overload of stressors simply doesn’t have the resources to commit to intense mental focus.

Scientists tend to look at chemistry, brain wiring, and other details like this to explain attentional difficulties, but everything in the body ultimately comes down to energy. Everyone's body has a limited supply of energy, and when you use up energy fighting stressors, there’s less left for other tasks. Food allergies represent a huge source of physical stress on most people’s lives that goes largely unrecognized. The energy our bodies use up dealing with food allergies gets drawn away from other processes, invariably compromising the performance of both brain and body.

Fair enough, you might say, but it’s quite a leap from the idea that food allergies use up energy to the idea that food allergies are a big part of ADD and ADHD. But consider this. Loads of people with attention disorders report remarkable improvement when they eliminate common allergenic foods from their diet, especially wheat and commercial dairy products. It could be that these foods have chemicals in them that directly interfere with attention. But this isn’t likely. Not very many chemicals from the body end up in the brain; the blood-brain barrier (a sort of filter made of blood vessels that screens all of the blood flowing into the brain) prevents this. The idea that dealing with food allergies diverts energy away from other areas, including the brain, is more plausible. Take a look at our Eliminating Food Allergies Tutorial for more on the effects of food allergies and what you can do about them.