Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a condition that is poorly scientifically understood.
ADHD can be characterized by difficulty with focus, inattentiveness, problems with impulse control, and/or inability to fully execute tasks. The worldwide average for ADHD in ages 3-17 is 6%; however, the average in the United States is 9.8%. That’s over 6 million children! These statistics do not even include the adults afflicted. According to the CDC, ¾ of those diagnosed are medicated with pharmaceuticals, with psychostimulants coming to the forefront as the First Line of Treatment. 1
To put it bluntly, I am a Holistic Pharmacist because of my experiences with the pitfalls of the conventional medical treatment of ADHD. The experiences I had as a pharmacist with children medicated with ADHD-focused drugs forced me to re-evaluate my profession. The stimulant medications used to treat children (and adults) with an ADHD diagnosis have horrendous consequences. As a result, I left my entire profession behind to find a better way.
The stimulants used to treat ADHD have addictive potential and many side effects. Possible side effects, which are any undesirable effects are:
Weight loss
Loss of appetite
Difficulty sleeping
Anxiety
Tics
Growth delay
Changes in blood pressure and heart rate
Agitation
Lowering of seizure threshold
Headaches
Mood changes
Abdominal pain2
Since 2010, I have helped hundreds of adults and children alike to either avoid pharmaceuticals for ADHD altogether or, in some cases, to wean off their medication. After working with so many cases, I have learned some clinical pearls that I will share with you.
Top 3 Vital, Natural Ways to Manage ADHD
Each case of ADHD is different and thus the appropriate interventions can vary; however, there are certain measures that are evergreen and apply to each case. I have chosen the three most broadly applicable and important steps to share.
#1: Protein and good fat for breakfast.
Over the last 12 years, I have witnessed the power of a good breakfast in staving off ADHD symptoms. This step is the simplest and the most important. After tracking countless food and behavior/symptom logs, the connection is undeniable. Protein and good fats are the winning formulas to support focus and attention.3
Eating cereal or skipping breakfast sets one up for a blood sugar and attention roller-coaster and should not be the routine if you are struggling with focus. If you have a picky child and high carbohydrate items cannot be skipped in the morning, then add more protein to it. Even for little ones, about 20 grams of protein should be consumed for a good focus day.
Here are some ideas for breakfast:
Eggs with avocado
2+ meat sticks, 2 cheese sticks, and an apple
4+ slices of bacon, a piece of fruit
Unsweetened Greek yogurt with berries- you can get a stevia-sweetened version or add a small amount of maple syrup or honey
Hardboiled eggs with cheese
Nitrate-free lunch meat rolled up with cheese and hummus (or any kind of fat desired). If a wrap is needed, use a grain-free wrap or Egg-Life wrap.
4 tablespoons of peanut or almond butter and an apple
A breakfast sandwich on an Ezekiel (or other sprouted grain) English muffin with eggs and some type of meat and cheese
#2: Avoid refined sugars and dyes.
The world of clinical research has sought to codify and quantify the effects of food dyes and additives on behavior and focus. Unfortunately, the data is lacking because researchers rely on subjective observation by parents and teachers. However, many studies conclude that the link is too substantial to deny. From my own observation, I can confidently say that avoiding added sugars, dyes and chemicals are make-break for this condition. Removing processed foods and getting onto a whole-food diet is a recipe for success.4
#3: Omega 3 supplementation.
Omega 3 fatty acids are present in very high concentrations in the brain and the nerves and are vital to your nervous system, especially eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). These fatty acids play a protective role within the brain. Consuming adequate amounts of these fats is vital to brain health and cognition. Eating a diet rich in these foods as well as supplementation can be a game changer for ADHD.5
Here are some good food sources of Omega 3s
Fish and seafood- especially salmon
Nuts and seeds- especially walnuts, flax seeds, and chia seeds
Grass-fed beef and butter- these items contain far less than the items above but can still be a great source and back a bit of protein and other healing factors.
When you supplement Omega 3, it is very important that you get a high-quality supplement. Fish oils can come along with heavy metal contamination and can also become rancid if not packaged and stored properly. My all-time favorite Omega 3 supplement for ADHD is Omega Focus by Nordic Naturals. I have successfully assisted many children to wean off prescription psychostimulants with the use of this supplement and dietary intervention. In addition to the Omega 3s, there are also other ingredients in this supplement that are very beneficial. One of those ingredients is an herb called Bacopa monnieri. Bacopa is currently being studied for many cognitive conditions and has shown a lot of promise for cognition, memory, focus, mood, and behavior. 6
ADHD is a condition that can have many social, academic, and professional ramifications. Medicating with stimulants can help focus but does not heal the issue. The potential for serious side effects and other long-term issues from psychostimulants is a terrible trade-off. The good news is there is hope. By improving one’s nutritional status and targeted supplementation, ADHD symptoms can be overcome safely.
As a former pharmacist, I have a special interest in helping children and adults with attention and hyperactivity issues. If you are in school and have issues with focus and you either want to get off of medication or avoid it, now is the time to come in!
Kids or college students off for the summer: you now have a couple of months to work on healing your body before you are back in the attention demanding environment of school. This gives us time to find out which of your organs are stressed and start feeding those deficiencies so you can perform better in the fall.
There are a whole host of nutrient deficiencies that cause ADHD like symptoms. Some of the most common deficiencies are minerals, vitamin D, B vitamins, and essential fatty acids. There is also often a food allergy or a blood sugar issue present.
The time is NOW. Schedule an appointment today so you can start the next school year medication free. Call 734-302-7575 to inquire.
Yours in Health,
Dr. Amanda Childress, PharmD
Nutrition Response Testing Practitioner
In this article, I’ll cover a number of subjects, but all of the information will be centered around one product: Restore.
Restore gut health supplement was created by a medical doctor Zach Bush. Here’s an overview of what you’ll read about: the antioxidant theory, redox reactions, soil biology, chemotherapy, organic chemistry, glyphosate (found in Roundup, the herbicide), leaky-gut syndrome and the symptoms and diseases that arise from that, Mitochondria, the health of the cells, glutathione (the main cleaner in the cells), and how all of these things are related to one another. At the very end, you’ll understand the big picture.
Dr. Mercola, who has the number one health website on the internet, said that Dr. Bush’s work is “Nobel Prize-worthy.” I completely agree. Restore is described on the website as “a soil-derived supplement that promotes an optimal gut environment.” Think of it as fertilizer for your body to feed your microbiome, which are the good bugs that live in your body.
The Problem Dr. Bush Wanted to Solve
Dr. Zach Bush said this at a seminar: “[an] acid environment in the body leads to microbiome coping by fermenting sugar.” This coping mechanism is taking place in the body when what’s really supposed to be happening is oxidative phosphorylation, our body’s preferred method of energy production. Fermenting sugar is what cells a billion years ago used to do on planet Earth to create energy when the environment was very toxic and hard to live in. The cells fermented sugar and multiplied very quickly in order to cope and survive. With an unhealthy and acidic microbiome, the inside of your body will look a whole lot like planet Earth did a billion years ago. This is what cancer is.
Because of the unhealthy environment, all the friendly bugs die off. This leads to sterile tissue, which leads to a loss of communication between cells, which leads to cancer. Cancerous cells then cause more acidosis, which is back to the start. It’s a downward spiral, and it makes the body more hospitable for a more aggressive cancer. You want to reverse the spiral.
A. An acidic environment in the body —>
B. Microbiome copes by fermenting sugar —>
C. Microbiome dies off —>
D. Sterile tissue —> E. Cells cancerous —>
A. An acidic environment in the body —>
Molecular Compounds in Soil
The molecule pictured here is fulvic acid, a molecule found in soil.
You can see that on the left side of the molecule, the atoms form tight bonds and are very stable. The atoms on the right are hanging off like Christmas tree ornaments at the end of branches, which means the atoms are more likely to fall off or allow more to be added on. The right side can be as varied as snowflakes in that there isn’t organization to the randomness of the addition and subtraction of elements. Those unstable atoms are hanging off, and if something like an H falls off, then the whole molecule has now been oxidized. It leaves an empty space. Think of oxidizing like a car rusting. Then, if another hydrogen comes on and it gets attached to that, now the whole molecule has been reduced, the charge is less. If we combine the first few letters of the two words reduced and oxidized, and we have redox, hence the name Redox Theory. More on this further down.
Dr. Zach Bush studied chemotherapy drugs, in fact, he created chemotherapy drugs before 2009 when there was enough funding from the government for that field. Then the economic crash happened, 2008-2009, and he lost his job. He then moved into a small town, and he started a practice as a medical doctor, with a focus on nutrition.
Bush had a friend, a medical doctor in the office with him, and they studied everything together. This friend had a 90-page report on soil biology. Bush was flipping through this report, and he saw the above-pictured molecule. The report said that 40% of soil is this molecule or a molecule much like this, and his thought was… “Why does soil have chemotherapeutic drugs in it?” This kind of a molecule, with many hydrogen’s and oxygen’s hanging off the end for use in redox reactions, Bush knew from his studies to be exactly what chemotherapy was.
Now, if you don’t have a healthy microbiome, you don’t have cells like this in your body. As a result, your cells won’t be in good communication with each other. Which is, of course, what you want. You need to restore your gut health.
Here’s an analogy: there’s a territory on planet earth, a plot of beautiful land, and there are two groups of people on the land of completely different cultures that speak different languages, and neither is mentally healthy. They can’t communicate with each other, so they start fighting with each other, and they keep fighting, and in the process damage the landscape. Then, to make things even worse, some other country comes in and bombs the place. Everybody is wiped out and in really bad shape.
Now imagine this scenario happening in the gut or on the skin where you have different organisms. Maybe you have too much bacteria relative to fungus or vice versa. They’re not communicating very well. They’re not healthy. They’re not vocalizing with each other. The fungus and the bacteria fight but it doesn’t get anywhere productive. Then you take an antibiotic, or you take an antifungal, and you bomb the landscape. And what’s the result? All the bad fighters have been destroyed, but so has the beautiful landscape. The point here is that you want to uplift the health of the territory, whether on planet earth or in your gut. You want the organisms that are living there to be healthy and communicate well with each other.
To improve communication, you need to increase redox reactions, and in order to increase redox reactions, you need the extra Carbon, Oxygen, and Hydrogen atoms to allow for those redox reactions, and in order to have those extra molecules, you need the above-pictured molecule in your body. And here’s the key to the whole thing:
The product Restore is composed of molecules similar to this one.
You drink it and your body is filled with the ability to reduce or to oxidize, and it all comes naturally into balance. You don’t have too much oxidation and you don’t have too much reduction—you have a lot of both, and it becomes a way for the bugs in your gut biome to communicate.
Glutathione’s Role
What’s Glutathione? It’s responsible for 85% of the cleaning in the cells. It pairs oxidants and reductants and neutralizes them. Glutathione is the compound that performs the individual redox reactions. It’s like a big Pac-Man molecule.
An oxidant attaches to the mouth of this Pac-Man, and then it waits until a reductant attaches to the other side of the mouth, then the Pac-Man mouth closes, and it neutralizes the oxidant and the reductant, and then it opens up for the next oxidant and reductant.
The Antioxidant Theory
More than likely, you’ve heard a lot about antioxidants. However, the antioxidant theory, meaning, the method of taking antioxidant supplements to prevent and reverse disease, is currently invalid. It was all good and fine in 1953 when it first came out, published by Dr. Denham Harman, an anti-aging specialist medical doctor who lived to be an impressive 98 years old.
However, new information has come to light that disproves the theory. Anti-oxidation happens in plants and it happens in a laboratory, but it does not happen in the human body.
Regarding the process of developing his published theory, Denham Harman was quoted in a magazine interview saying, “I thought and thought and thought for four months. Then the idea came to me.” He imagined and thought about his theory for four months, but, frankly, didn’t do enough research. What Harman’s theory of anti-oxidation is, very basically, is there’s an oxidant in the body, like a chemical-causing irritation, and then along comes an antioxidant that neutralizes it. It doesn’t work that way. Antioxidants, as a group of supplements, are against oxygen. That’s what the term actually means. ‘Anti’ means against, ‘oxidant’ is oxygen. However, your body needs oxygen; your body needs oxidants!
What happens if you don’t have enough oxidants?
This graph shows what is seen to happen to cells under a microscope when given Restore. On the ‘x’ axis is time, and on the ‘y’ axis is ROS, which stands for Reactive Oxygen Species—that’s what an oxidant is. The number of ROS in healthy cells goes down over time. This is good. In sick cells, like cancer cells, the number of ROS goes up because the cancer cell is trying to die—it’s trying to commit suicide like it’s supposed to. All properly functioning cells eventually commit suicide. If cells are living and dying the way they’re supposed to, then you’ll never get cancer. Cancer cells multiply so fast (remember I mentioned that above: they’re living in a toxic environment and trying to survive by multiplying quickly!) they’re never able to build up the number of oxidants to prompt them to commit suicide. When you take Restore to improve your gut health, the sick cells die, and the healthy cells undergo less oxidation. It’s perfect.
About the Mitochondria
You can see how severe cancer is by how depleted the mitochondria are in the cells and how unhealthy the mitochondria look. A healthy Mitochondria will have a certain oblong shape with a corrugated-like pattern on the inside. If the mitochondria are twisted and convoluted, they’re sick. As a result, the body doesn’t make the energy it needs to repair itself. Furthermore, the number of mitochondria in your body is proportional to how old you will live to be and to cancer severity.
The normal loss of mitochondria is 1% per year. The number of mitochondria in the cells can increase by 30% in three weeks taking Restore.
More About Soil
The success of Restore all comes down to the soil, or “permaculture,” or soil that can sustain itself perpetually. The way Restore is made is by digging down a couple feet into the desert out in the American Southwest where they hit old fossil soil: it’s dead dinosaurs and dead palm trees and the like has been compressed for 50 million years. An eight-foot deep layer of really healthy soil, soil that has an unbelievable amount of nutrients, possibly like no other place on the planet. The makers of Restore harvest that, and through certain lab processes, turn it into the liquid supplement. (For more information, visit the website: restore4life.com)
Basically, when you’re taking Restore, you’re consuming soil. There are no bacteria in there, though—it’s completely sterile. No viruses, no fungus. It’s literally a fertilizer for your gut, just like when you mix fertilizer into your garden. Garden fertilizer is sterile, yet it enhances the environment for the plants to grow with greater success: it creates a healthier ecology for water, minerals, bugs, good bacteria, and the plants to work together and to thrive in. They all live happily together; that’s what you’re trying to do in your whole body.
Let’s talk about Glyphosate
Glyphosate is a chemical that’s used in Roundup and other herbicides. In the United States, there are 300 million pounds of Roundup used every year. That’s one pound per person in this country. 75% of rainwater has Roundup in it.
One of the main symptoms of too much glyphosate in the body is the loss of tight junctions. Tight junction proteins are meant to be very close together and very smart. They allow nutrients from digested food into the body to be used and they allow waste from the cells from the body to enter into the small intestine. When these tight junctions are not as tight as they should be, that’s when you get leaky membranes. This could mean leaky gut syndrome, leaky blood-brain barrier, leaky cell membranes around all the cells, etc..
Then, if you have a child who’s four years old with leaky junctions and they get a vaccine, the toxins, the mercury, the aluminum, the formaldehyde, can go straight to the brain and seep through the spaces between the proteins. There’s a straight path from the blood to the brain. This is the reason why not all kids have a reaction from vaccines, and why some have a very severe reaction, known, of course, as autism. Their brain is filled with toxins.
When you’re eating a bun at your favorite restaurant, you’re eating Roundup, and within minutes of eating that, you get 70% loss of membrane resistance occurs within minutes. You get leaky gut, leaky blood-brain barrier, leaky cells.
Now, leaky tight junctions can be repaired in four hours with Restore—you can see it under a microscope.
This is because Glyphosate is an oxidant, and it needs to be reduced. Restore does a great job of doing just that. You can reduce the reactive oxygen species in the body within three minutes using Restore. There’s good research on this.
You might guess, then, that Restore can help with autism. You would be correct!
Restore prevents glyphosate damage, leaky junctions, even at 1,000 above typical nutrition dosage of glyphosate. Meaning you can eat 1,000 times more glyphosate, and you still have prevention of damage when you’re consuming Restore. Of course, taking Restore doesn’t mean go drink glyphosate—it still means eat organic food as much as possible and take care of your body.
To wrap up…
I’m a big fan of Restore. When I started taking it, I felt better on the second day. I have a patient who started taking it and she had what’s called a “global headache” within a couple of days of taking it, meaning that it was felt over the entire surface of the head. Her brain was actually expanding from receiving more nutrition into her brain. There are other symptoms that can occur from taking Restore which all signal that your body is getting better.
You can buy Restore from my office. You can buy it from Dr. Zach Bush on his website directly: restore4life.com.
There is a spectrum of disorders that are related to each other. On the severe end there is Autism and getting less severe there is Aspergers, ADHD, and ADD.
It is commonly known that children suffer from these conditions. The rate of prevalence is increasing exponentially.
Toxins are the cause of autism, Aspergers, ADHD, and ADD. The most common toxin is mercury which is in our teeth as fillings.
A collection of autopsy studies found the amount of mercury in your brain is directly proportional to the amount of mercury in your teeth.
The amount of mercury in a baby’s brain is directly proportional to the number of mercury fillings in mom’s mouth.
When a baby is born with lots of mercury in the brain and is given more mercury via a vaccine shot, it can trigger instant autism. There are babies who have been born autistic and have never had a vaccine shot.
How do you fix this? Detoxify mercury out of the nervous system. It sounds easier than it is.
There are several steps to this, this is where to start.
First, heal the intestines. When this works well, toxins start to leave the body. The GAPS diet does a great job of this. GAPS stands for Gut And Psychology Syndrome. Once the intestines are healed, then toxins start to leave the brain.
Next, assist pulling the toxins out of the body. There are two supplements that help pull mercury out of the brain without damaging the nerve cells. One is very expensive, one is much cheaper.
In medicine, there is no real solution since they only use toxins as their treatments.
The worst cases of autism have been reversed in the natural healthcare field. There is hope! Contact us for more information.
Yours in Health,
