Research Suggests Limiting Food Additives in Diet May Help Kids With ADHD

By Salynn Boyles
WebMD Medical News

May 22, 2008 -- The notion that artificial colors and preservatives in foods may play a role in hyperactivity has been largely dismissed within conventional medicine, but there are signs that this is beginning to change.

In a newly published editorial appearing in BMJ, pediatrics professor Andrew Kemp, MD, of the University of Sydney, called for removal of food additives from the diet to be part of standard initial treatment for kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Kemp cited a recent controlled trial showing an increase in hyperactivity among children without ADHD who were fed a diet high in food colorings and the preservative sodium benzoate.

Last February, editors of the American Academy of Pediatrics publication AAP Grand Rounds cited the same study as evidence that it is time to revisit the issue.

"The overall findings of the study are clear and require that even we skeptics, who have long doubted parental claims of the effects of various foods on the behavior of their children, admit we might have been wrong," the editors wrote.

Kemp tells WebMD that practitioners have largely ignored the clinical evidence suggesting that dietary modification improves ADHD symptoms in some children.

"Clearly it doesn't work for everybody, but very few treatments do," he says. "(Dietary modification) is certainly something that parents who want to avoid drugs could try for a month or six weeks."

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