Children as Special Patients 185the increase, and the reason is not hard to find: this unpleasant affliction
is a direct offshoot of our deteriorating diets riddled with junk, sugar and
chemicals.
There are many degrees of it, of course. Not all cases are severe
and debilitating; sometimes the child seems no more than unusually
naughty, restless, irritable and unable to sleep a full quota of hours. Parents
often fight the diagnosis as if it were something to be ashamed of. Perhaps
psychiatrists, who unfortunately usually end up treating the condition, are to
blame for not recognizing that it is an environmental disease not a character
deformity.
Perhaps it is true also that some of them, hating to admit any of
their precious diseases have a merely physical basis, will deny any connection
with diet. They would rather treat a child with tranquillizers and soporific
drugs such as Ritalin than take the trouble to work out why he or she is over-
emotional, racing around frantically, hardly sleeping, pale and sickly, with
dark rings under the eyes and willful to the point where sometimes it seems
he or she is not even under his or her own control, never mind that of the
fraught, exhausted parents.
Nevertheless, the dietary basis of hyperactivity has been well
established by the work of many competent doctors. I myself have seen
enough cases recover fully on a simple elimination program to no longer
feel the need to question this point. I believe only those practitioners who
don’t take the trouble to look will miss the connection.
One of the interesting and well-known pioneer diets in this field was that
of the pediatrician Dr Ben Feingold. He thought he noticed an association
between hyperactivity and aspirin-sensitivity in children. If he were right,
and aspirin or aspirin-like substances (called salicylates; see page 145) made
children hyperactive, then avoidance of these and similar chemicals as food
additives should benefit the condition. So he tried putting these children
on diets that avoided foods (mostly fruits) which contain natural salicylate
substances (these include peaches, plums, raspberries, grapes, oranges,
apricots, cucumber and tomato), and was gratified to observe that this
produced a measurable improvement. He then went further and suggested
the removal of foods containing colorings, preservatives and chemicals.
This, too, seemed to be of some help.
The fact that his reasoning was incorrect – at least in my opinion
- does not detract from the enormous scientific importance of his
contribution to child health. But he made two significant mistakes. To
begin with, diets avoiding coloring and so on must of necessity be different
in other ways as well: it is a mere assumption to attribute the change to