Any Opinions/Success With Feingold Diet?

Welp (as Sue would say), I’m sure quackwatch is agin it. OTOH, I have seen kids improve on it. But whether it is the strict following the diet or just the fact that their diets improve, with less junk and sugar might be more of a factor.

I wouldn’t be as concerned with the natural salicilates (ie in tomato products) as with the artificial colors, flavors, and words you can’t pronounce that go in foods.

A better diet with lower fats, simple sugars and starches, etc can’t be BAD for them (even if it doesn’t help ADHD).

—des

I happen to have an auto-immune disorder that includes celiac disease (no gluten), lactose intolerance, and a varietly of other chemical sensitivities. The allergies can mimic a lot of other things and can really make you function badly. So if the diet helps, why not? And after all, all of us could stand more fruits and veggies and less junk at any age.
The only fear I have is superstitious reasoning — someone puts their kid on a really restrictive diet and then decides that it must be helping even though there is no objective change. Please approach any health intervention with reasonable caution, lots of information, and common sense.

Thanks for the input. I agree with both of you. It is a pragmatic and reasonable approach, to believe that good nutrition can improve one’s physical and mental performance. The part about allergies to preservatives and colors/flavors, is the part I find far-fetched and somewhat paranoid. Allergies to the common stuff like wheat and milk are much more likely.

Since our kids eat pretty healthy for the most part, I don’t really think a change in diet is the answer here. Although the boy is an absolute carb fiend. I can safely predict which foods he is going to want seconds on. Though he did surprise us both by asking for seconds on meat twice last week.

In Feingold’s defense:
I don’t think Feingold ever really considered the dye reactions (which he saw in his practice, this was actually based on a real clinical case/s) to be true allergies. I think it has been misread like this and misreported. I think the word might be “sensitivities”. Why there would be sensitivities to additives is pretty well known. In fact there is one fairly deadly known sensitivity to sulfides (salad bars, wine, cheeses). So I don’t really think that it would be too far fetched to suggest that maybe some kids do react to the dyes in a sensitivity (ie more of a drug reaction/ interaction response). His first patient was a woman with a reaction to yellow dye ??
All based on clinical experience, etc. So this wasn’t a wild paranoid idea at all. I understand he was a pretty respected doctor at Kaiser Permanente.

Of course, *whether* there really IS such a sensitivity is still in question. I would guess if so the no. is actually fairly small. But gosh we live in a multi-colored flavored food world. Studies have been rather negative, but I’d also say that anything not drug is just not goign to get any serious study in this country.

I feel that the full Feingold diet is pretty extreme, limiting not just colors and flavorings but also a pretty good variety of veggies and fruit (oranges, tomatoes, etc) even though he does say these can usually be added back later. OTOH I don’t think it would hurt any kid to get the minimum of most processed foods out there. Mostly they are pretty full of empty calories, sugar, salt and trans fats. Compare the average Japanese breakfast (egg, fish, soy, veggies) to the average American one and there might be one more reason why Japanese kids do better in school. :-)

—des

I recently heard a Nutritionist define a really simple approach?
Only buy foods which dont require a list of ingredients.

OK, sensitivities versus allergies, a matter of degree I suppose. But the diet is supposed to cure such a wide variety of illnesses that I think the proponents have come to believe it is a magic bullet. The real question is, what percentage of people have severe sensitivities to these types of chemicals? My guess is, it is very small. Making the prospect of curing an apparent learning disability (or any other problem the diet is supposed to cure) have a low probability of success.

If you’re doing this for your kids, RATHER than seeking other types of help for them, then you are liable to be delaying getting some real help. I suppose if you put them on this diet and sought other avenues fo assistance simultaneously, then it would not do harm. Other than your kid would likely rebel at at the prospect of eating nothing but healthy unprocessed foods when all the marketing is urging him to eat Twinkies and his friends are gobbling soda and candy bars all around him.

There’s a lot to the placebo effect, in addition to the fact noted earlier that if you go from a crappy processed junk food diet, to anything resembling a helathy approach, then you are liable to see some positive effects.

Eating only unprocessed foods is a noble endeavor. Eating low carb does point you in this direction, because so many of the processed stuff is full of starch and sugar and is therefore off limits. I admit to having used low carb processed versions of some of my old favorites (ice cream, sweeteners). When used as an occasional treat, I don’t see a great harm in this.

BTW, some people (including myself) are sensitive to sulfiTes. Sulfides are poisonous. Sulfites had a tendency to cause my asthma to flare up.

>OK, sensitivities versus allergies, a matter of degree I suppose. But the diet is supposed to cure such a wide variety of illnesses that I think the proponents have come to believe it is a magic bullet.

If so, this is way beyond what Ben Feingold himself suggested. He believed that it was applicable to ADD, ADHD and some types of skin problems. That’s it. Applying it say to autism, epilepsy, even learning disablities, etc etc are way way beyond what he himself ever suggested.

>The real question is, what percentage

I would think it would be small and way below what B. Feingold suggested. It may be that some of his successes were 1. placebo and 2. some effects of diet improvement.

>If you’re doing this for your kids, RATHER than seeking other types of help for them, then you are liable to be delaying getting some real help. I suppose if you put them on this diet and sought other avenues fo assistance simultaneously, then it would not do harm. Other than your kid would likely rebel at at the prospect of eating nothing but healthy unprocessed foods when all the marketing is urging him to eat Twinkies and his friends are gobbling soda and candy bars all around him.

Well since help for ADHD is usually drugs I don’t think it would be a bad alternative. I doubt it would work with older kids unless they themselves (as I have heard of in a few cases) actually had the self-discipline and belief that they felt better on it and were motivated. I don’t think you can police this sort of thing.

Beyond ADHD I would worry about someone doing this if they weren’t say trying to remediate the learning disability. It makes no sense this would be useful for something that is more of a disability or processing disorder.

>Eating only unprocessed foods is a noble endeavor. Eating low carb does point you in this direction, because so many of the processed stuff is full of starch and sugar and is therefore off limits. I admit to having used low carb processed versions of some of my old favorites (ice cream, sweeteners). When used as an occasional treat, I don’t see a great harm in this.

Yes, it is. I think kids get in the habits of eating this junk very early in life and get kind of “addicted” to all the sugar and fat. Good carb good fats does get you away from a lot of the nastier elements of the typical American diet. Most people successful at this approach do allwo themselves treats and “sneaks”. I think it should be the case for kids as well. Mind you I am not a parent so actually doing this and thinking it is a good thing are two different things.

Re: sulfites:
yes they are poisons. Many of the additives may be low dose “poisons”. It makes sense (actually some spices are I think). I do NOT mean this in an alarmist sort of way. It is totally dose dependent. You’d prob. have to consume massive quantities.

—des

On the dosage issue, different people have different degrees of sensitivity. Due to severe mistreatment, being told to eat exactly the things that make my auto-immune worse, my sensitivities — which used to be very mild, could basically be ignored, up into my thirties — became horrendous.

The endocrinologist tried me on Synthroid and I had a serious lactose reaction; then he tried me on Eltroxin which he assured me had only “trace” lactose and I still reacted. At that point I started experimenting and he checked with the top allergist; the allergist agreed that yes, some people *do* react to “trace” amounts, and I found that dissolving the pills in pure water and adding Lactaid to kill the lactose solves the problem. The reaction to even trace amounts of wheat gluten is violent illness. I also need only to spend an hour in a room where someone has smoked heavily any time in the past several months and I develop swollen parotid glands (like mumps, or a deranged chipmunk). Luckily I don’t have the fatal sulfite reaction, but a handful of treated raisins will turn me bright red and rather dizzy. Certain kinds of soap will create massive hives.
These are observable physical reactions and pass the double-blind test — the reactions occur even when I *don’t know* the chemical is present, and they only occur when it is present.

Having experience with these things myself I find it quite believable that small amounts of chemicals can have a quite strong reaction on susceptible individuals.
Also, the reactions can affect the whole metabolism, can be extremely debilitating — the wheat reaction can require hospitalization — and can mimic other problems.

BUT you have to do the double-blind testing to make sure it is physical and not superstitious, you have to get an unbiased observer to rate the reactions, and you have to make sure you aren’t getting into a diet that is lacking in essential nutrients. I can’t stress this too much, please approach diets with caution, nutrition research, and common sense.

My kids are 20 and 17 now and I embarked on the Feingold Program when my older one was three. I first did an elimination diet and then added items to test. The first thing I tried was food coloring and bingo there was definite change in behavior. I soon also noted that whenever he had something with corn syrup behavior became a problem. Corn syrup is made from corn treated with sulfur dioxide.

Food additives and food dyes are byproducts of petroleum. Just think how the body has to cope when petroleum is ingested. When the body cannot detox the petroleum it crosses the blood brain barrier and wrecks havoc. Some people’s ability to detox the petroleum is better then others. It is believed that there is a lack of the necessary enzyme needed to detox the phenols.

Thanks for the info Helen. I figured there must be some people out there, taking or at least trying this approach. Let me ask, was it difficult to get the kids to eat that way? And have you all stayed away from the artificial stuff since discovering it was causing a problem?

Victoria, I think your comments on diet are good. Specifically I can say that anybody who was on the Feingold diet would be getting a much better than average diet for your average American at least the US.
The only conceivable missing vitamin might be C. (I’d say most people wouldn’t need to give up the tomato and orange anyway. There are still other sources like potatoes, lemons, grapefruit, etc.) I don’t think the Feingold diet is a fad diet, as it is really a non-additive diet. IF you took out all the junk people eat it could only be a better one. Now whether it works for ADHD is another thing. I’m sure there are a small no. of cases.
I’m sure doing away with petroleum in the diet is not a bad thing. :-)

I can’t answer for Helen, but some kids who see the changes in themselves will stay away from the offending food. If they think that you are trying to control them they will rebel and will be very hard to get them to cooperate. Like anything else I guess. But I have seen kids motivated to stay on the diet. Esp. if allowed homemade goodies.
I don’t know but when I was a kid I thought Wonder bread was the world’s best bread as mom didn’t give it to us. :-)

—des

Gosh, I was also led to believe that Wonder Bread was a disgusting excuse for bread and that anybody believing their marketing was sadly misguided (and of course, Mom was right as the later “does not really help build strong bodies 12 ways” findings exposed). I loved the way it mashed down into something almost like a communion wafer, though.
My mother also explored Feingold — it’s been around a long time. ‘Way before there were “natural food” places in stores (but when you could still get reasonably natural foods without having to go to a special section) we were on a no-artificials diet, but she did an informal elimination diet and figured out what wigged us out and what didn’t.
Whether or not something affects the population in general doesn’t really matter if it affects your children, and then there’s the interactive idea — it might be a combination of factors that trigger it. And, frankly, I don’t trust the FDA as far as I can throw them any more; there’s an awful lot of unclean dollars in the “Research” industry.
If your brain is wired so that there’s a processing problem, changing your diet is not likely to fix the wiring. HOWEVER, I have seen diet affect things the other way; almost as if tossing in the ol’ red dye or too much processed sugar disrupts those circuit pathways, *especially* if a person has had to creatively use alternative routes for learning. Organizing what’s happening around us (especially for academic purposes) is a highly demanding, complex process. Something that puts static in the reception can really change things. (Sleep deprivation & anxiety are also huge static generators.)

The younger the child the easier to get them to follow the diet; more parental control. A teenager weights a lot more then a preschooler and I think can tolerate infractions to the diet because of less impact. I try to keep the food in the house that complies with the diet.

Hi Sue,
Just to pick up on your statement: If your brain is wired so that there’s a processing problem, changing your diet is not likely to fix the wiring.

In fact, this so called Wiring, is what our brains White Matter provides. Where it provides the network cabling between our Grey Matter regions and cells.
But, the crucial issue, is that this Wiring, is continually rebuilt throughout our lifetime. Where it needs an ongoing supply of the right nutrients to carry out this building. As well as to maintain its daily operation.
Therefore, diet is crucial for the ongoing building and operation of our Wiring.
I might add, that the long chain fatty acids Omega3 are the major nutrient of our wiring/ white matter.
Geoff.

Good points — but generally, faulty wiring isn’t *repaired* that way; but future development would be enhanced.

Sue, that’s an important point, that the brain doesn’t repair faulty wiring.
Which it is more inclined to remove.
The best hope is to try and stimulate it to build some new wiring where it’s required.
Geoff.