Health & Wellness Issues

Are we turning schoolchildren into street junkies?

The BBC reports today that according to The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) parents need lessons in how to cope with their children's unruly behaviour. New guidelines on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) say that drugs such as Ritalin should be avoided - and must not be given to the under-fives. Most of the estimated 365,000 children in Britain with ADHD receive no treatment at all. But of those who do, most - about 37,000 - are prescribed stimulants like Ritalin (methylphenidate).
Children with ADHD have extreme difficulty sitting still, learning or concentrating.

I agree with Mike Adams in that controlling kids with drugs is not the answer. We are turning school kids into street junkies and Ritalin has seen a ten fold increase in precriptions. Distraught parent pressure or lazy doctors giving in to the spiel from drug reps. Doctors are certainly culpable. Kids are a responsibility and dosing kids up is certainly not the answer. Apart from the reported side effects of stunted growth in 40% of pre-schoolers given the drug (goodness me) there are other compelling reasons why Ritalin is not the answer.

This is what Mike Adams has to say about the subject. "Every time I write about this subject, I can't help but be outraged at the fact that we are a nation dosing our children with powerful narcotics in order to alter their brain chemistry rather than teaching them how to avoid the foods that cause these behavioral disorders in the first place. We don't teach our children how to eat right, nor do we teach our parents how to teach good dietary habits to their own children. Instead, we turn our children into literal druggies by forcing them onto extremely dangerous narcotic and anti-psychotic drugs."

In this nation, there appears to be a drug for every problem out there, including undesirable behavior on the part of children. In reality, ADHD is not a behavioral disorder, nor is it some sort of mysterious chemical imbalance in the brain. It is simply the natural effect of pursuing a diet that is very high in refined carbohydrates and very low in optimum nutrition."

Food Additives Cause Hyperactivity in Children

(NaturalNews) Two different cocktails of common food colorings and preservatives increased hyperactive behavior in children, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Southampton and published in the journal The Lancet.

In the study, which was commissioned by the United Kingdom's Food Safety Agency (FSA), researchers fed children fruit drinks spiked with either a mix of sunset yellow coloring (E110), tartrazine (E102), carmoisine (E122), ponceau 4R (E124) and sodium benzoate (E211) or a mix of sunset yellow, quinoline yellow (E104), allura red (E129) and sodium benzoate. Two different groups of children were tested, one composed of children aged three and the other composed of children aged eight or nine. In all, more than 300 children were tested.

The children were monitored closely after drinking the cocktails. Among older children, hyperactivity significantly increased in both groups. Among younger children, the researchers said, hyperactivity increased more significantly among those who had the cocktail containing the more common combination of flavors and preservatives.

Maybe Attention Deficit Isn't the Real Problem

Maybe Attention Deficit Isn't the Real Problem By Nicholas Regush ABCNEWS.com

Between 1990 and 1996, prescriptions for methylpenidate, know as Ritalin, increased more than 60 percent, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency. Back in my newspaper days, I often would catch reporters describing their editors as having the attention span of a gnat.

When I began work in TV, several producers quietly pointed out correspondents and senior producers who were known to have the attention span of a sand fly. But to my knowledge, none of those allegedly afflicted were required to take a drug to reverse their attention deficit.

This came to mind when I was in the thick of dissecting the scientific literature on Ritalin, a drug reputed to calm hyperactivity and help people pay attention to things. Its use is extremely popular these days for schoolchildren who, for example, have trouble sitting still, or difficulty keeping track of what they are being taught.

Overprescribed or Underprescribed?

In reviewing the data, I came across a study from Virginia showing that up to 10 percent of children in second through fifth grades are on medication to fight such problems, after being diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Being the compassionate type, I naturally wondered whether tests would show that at least 10 percentor even more of reporters and producers in newsrooms where I have worked also should have been on Ritalin or other brain drugs.

And should the scientific diagnostic drive extend into the professions, perhaps tests would show that many more psychiatrists, pediatricians and teachers have the attention span of a gnat or sand fly and need to be advised of the fact.

Maybe many doctors have ADHD without the benefit of Ritalin and therefore lack the attention span or patience to consider other factors that may contribute to the behavior and demeanor of their young patients ? such as how and where the children live, what they eat, whether they are loved, and the consequences of being taught in schools with curricula too underdeveloped to meet modern childhood needs.

ADHD, has a simple cause: poor nutrition and food additives

New research is appearing now that's showing the link between the consumption of food additives by children -- especially food colorings -- and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Well-informed parents have long realized that the consumption of food additives causes hyperactivity in their children, but most conventional doctors have dismissed the idea as pure bunk. Of course, far too many doctors dismiss the idea that food choice has any relationship to health in the first place, so the view from conventional medicine doesn't carry much weight. The real story here, however, is not that food additives and artificial colorings cause ADHD, but that there are several other dietary substances that heavily influence a child's mental state and day-to-day behavior.

Let's face it -- the human brain is a flesh and blood organ, and it is strongly influenced by blood chemistry, which is, in turn, dictated almost entirely by diet. What you eat, in other words, determines what your blood composition looks like, and what your blood composition looks like determines the way your brain functions. Of course there are other factors such as physical exercise and environmental influences, but the largest factor of all is dietary.

So when you eat processed foods containing additives and artificial colors, you are introducing toxic chemicals into your bloodstream. Those chemicals find their way into the brain and alter brain function, and in the case of children who have been diagnosed with ADHD, it alters their behavior to make them restless or to have a shortened attention span. It can also cause children and adults alike to display other problems derived from their mental state.