Do Sugar and Additives Cause Hyperactivity?

ADHD (with or without hyperactivity) is a condition that is diagnosed in and impacts both children and adults. It is a treatable condition for people of all ages, but there has been and continues to be controversy about the causes of and treatments for the disorder.

The notion that certain additives and processed sugars caused ADHD was quite popular for many years but has been empirically proved to be a rather dubious or at least inconsistent correlation.

As has been the case with many disorders of childhood, parents and professionals have searched and researched, wondered, speculated and hypothesized about ADHD's etiology (where it came from, the "causes"). Currently, disorders in that genre that are described as falling within the Autistic Spectrum have come under such scrutiny. But autism is not the last such quest, and it is far from being the first.

In the early 1970s, noted pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Feingold investigated what he believed to be a direct causal link between certain food additives and dyes and ADHD. His research found what it expected to (as research so often does), and his "Feingold Diet" was adopted by tens of thousands of families in which a child with ADHD lives. His findings went largely unchallenged for many years. In fact, the company I currently work for, Kaiser Permanente, was where much of his work was done. The findings and recommendations were followed by both the departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics.

Now, 40 years later, there is a plethora of evidence which dispels many of the seminal findings of Dr. Feingold's research and the commensurate dietary recommendations.

Similarly, there has been a large and perhaps still growing population of parents who have children with ADHD who believe that the consumption of processed sugar has a direct and causal relationship with the disorder.

Most contemporary research suggests that while there are some ADHD-like behaviors sometimes associated with sugar consumption, there is no substantive evidence of a direct causal link.

What does cause ADHD? Genetics, environment and temperament. It is, essentially, a biologically based disorder that is influenced by certain pouter, environmental factors and personality variables.

Perhaps because parents feel so helpless to deal with situations of this type where they are neither responsible for the disorder nor able to effect a cure, in desperation, they grab at straws.

This is not to say that dietary changes might not positively impact the behavior of some children. That is different, though, from ascribing the cause of a disorder like ADHD to a particular chemical substance found in the common human diet. Adding certain medications to the diet of people with ADHD has often been found to be helpful. Sometimes, parents have deep concerns about these medicines being used with their children and quest to treat the disorder more "naturally."

The effort to do so is reminiscent of the view of mental health professionals (articulated and popularized in his book "Love is Not Enough" at the time by psychologist and chief of the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago Bruno Bettelheim) in the 1960s and 1970s which held that what were unkindly and unfairly called "refrigerator mothers" caused autism to develop in their own children. Having lived through that era, it is embarrassing to recall it in light of the advances in neuro-science that have occurred since.

Science moves forward but not ever quite quickly enough to counter erroneous ideas.

While current research lends little credence to any directly causal relationship between processed sugars, food additives and hyperactivity, there is still a strong stream of popular belief to the contrary.