Are you wondering if a gluten-free diet help with ADHD?

You probably heard stories or know friends of friends, whose child’s ADHD symptoms improved significantly after trying the gluten-free for ADHD.

In this post, I’m going to review some of the scientific evidence out there so you can decide if a gluten-free diet is worth your time and effort.

But first, let’s understand what gluten is first.

Gluten is a protein that’s found in wheat, barley, and rye. It’s the thing in cereal grains, especially wheat, that makes bread chewing and doughy. It is also these proteins and tears the intestines of people with celiac disease.

Knowing what gluten is, you’re probably thinking that it is in everything we eat every day – bread, bagel, pastry, cereal, granola, cookies, pasta, cakes. You’ll be surprised to find gluten even in salad dressings, BBQ sauce, and even medications.

1. In the book Eat to Focus, I talked about hidden food allergies as one of the many causes of ADHD.

Gliadorphin, which is a by-product of poorly digested gluten. Not only does gliadorphin sounds like morphine, but it acts like morphine too by attaching to the same morphine receptors in the brain.

Imagine, every time your child eats a piece of bread or noodles or crackers, it’s like getting drugs to their brain.

2. One Italian study reported significant improvement in ADHD symptoms in ADHD kids with Celiac disease on a gluten-free diet for 6 months. The researchers tested 67 people with ADHD for celiac disease. Study participants ranged in age from 7 to 42. A total of 15 percent tested positive for celiac disease. That’s far higher than the incidence of celiac in the general population, which is about 1 percent.

Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder that causes inflammation of the small intestine resulting from eating gluten in genetically susceptible individuals.

Intestine biopsy of patients with Celiac disease shows pronounced villus atrophy in a jejunum, which confirms a diagnosis of Celiac disease. The only treatment of celiac disease is a gluten-free diet, which allows for the total healing of the intestinal mucosal lesion.

There are over 300 known symptoms associated with celiac. While most people are familiar with the gastrointestinal symptoms of Celiac disease, but few are aware of the cognitive and behavioral symptoms that impact your emotions and brain function.

Some cognitive and behavioral symptoms may include:

• Being Forgetful and poor memory
• Having a hard time maintaining attention
• Anxiety and depression
• Struggling to get motivated
• Impulsivity and hyperactivity
• Lethargic and fatigue
• Irritability and aggression
• Moodiness
• Sleep problems

In the study, once these patients started on a gluten-free diet, the patients or their parents reported significant improvements in their ADHD behavior and cognitive functioning, and these improvements were backed up by ratings on a checklist physicians use to monitor the severity of ADHD symptoms.

3. Another study investigated the incidence of ADHD symptoms in people with newly diagnosed celiac disease. It looked at 132 participants, ranging from toddlers to adults, and reported that “ADHD symptomatology is markedly overrepresented among untreated celiac disease patients.”

Again, a gluten-free diet improved ADHD symptoms substantially in about six months after starting the diet.

These results suggest that celiac disease should be included in the ADHD symptom checklist.

4. However, not everyone who has a problem with gluten has celiac disease. Another recent research has identified markers for non-celiac gluten sensitivity, a poorly understood condition that seems to involve a reaction to gluten but not the intestinal damages that are seen in celiac disease.

Non-Celiac gluten sensitivity basically has all of the symptoms of Celiac but without the small intestine damage.

Gluten sensitivity may affect up to 8 percent of the population by some estimates. For people with gluten sensitivity, studies show it’s possible that gluten plays a role in ADHD symptoms, but it’s less clear how large a role it plays.

5. The other reason why gluten is bad because the wheat and grains we eat nowadays are highly modified genetically making these foods almost impossible for the human to recognize.

Our body raises an attack whenever a foreign food or substance enters the body and is recognized as enemies.

The bottom line is a gluten-free diet does help with ADHD symptoms. Many parents of kids with ADHD noted significant improvement in their child’s behaviors after starting a gluten-free diet. However, hidden food allergies are common in kids with ADHD, therefore, a gluten-free diet alone does not resolve all ADHD behavioral symptoms. A more stringent systemic elimination diet is needed to help identify all potential trouble food in your child. 

Ok, there you have it…

I hope you find this information helpful. Let me know what you think and comment below. 

Remember ADHD does not doom your child to a life of under-achievement. You know your child is bright, full of potential, and deserves the best. In fact, many of the world’s greatest discoveries and inventions were made by people with ADHD.

I helped my crazy wild child who couldn’t read or write when she was little overcome her learning difficulties, and become a merit scholarship student majoring in premed at Loyola Chicago University.

So don’t give up, everything is possible. 

If you’re just starting out on this natural ADHD treatment journey and still in the research phase, check out my new book Eat to Focus.

Inside this book, you’ll learn why your ADHD child is always hungry, why he or she seems addicted to milk and bread, the reason why most ADHD treatments do not work, and the exact four strategies I’ve used for my daughter to help her calm down to focus and finally learn normally.