Back to Archived e-Newsletter List ||| Home Page

---

January / February 2002 Feingold Email Newsletter

---

Dear Feingold Association Members & Friends,

^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v

• New Home Page
• Your help needed - Request for stories
• Additions to Research Pages
• Pure Facts Articles On Line
• Forced Vaccinations?
• MCS Petition
• Book Reviews
  • Omega 3 Connection
  • Taking Charge of ADHD
  • ADHD with Comorbid Disorders

^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v

• NEW HOME PAGE

  Check out our updated home page.

  It is more user-friendly and will make it easier to locate the information you need.

  Back
  
  
  
  

• YOUR HELP NEEDED - REQUEST FOR STORIES

  Dr. L. Eugene Arnold, professor of psychiatry at Ohio State University, has been invited by an interested medical journal to contribute an article on complementary treatments for ADHD. He plans to focus on how alternative treatments fill gaps not covered by the standard treatments and how they might be used together with standard treatments for the patient's benefit

  He is looking for reports of the following situations:

  1. If you use both stimulant medication and an elimination diet such as the Feingold diet, and/or nutrient supplementation, are you able to use less medication than expected? If you were using only stimulant medication before beginning the diet, or supplementation, were you able to reduce (or eliminate) the amount of medication required?

  2. Were you or your child a "stimulant failure," in which medication for ADHD was tried but did not work or created unacceptable side effects? Did diet and/or supplements work for you after you had to discontinue medication?

  Please send your stories to me and I will forward them to the doctor for use in his article. Names and personal information will not be used, but please provide your name and a contact number or email address in case he needs to contact you for more information.

  Hopefully, this will also lead to more research in this area -- it has been almost totally ignored until now.

  Back
  
  
  
  

• ADDITIONS TO RESEARCH PAGES

  These additional studies can be found linked to the main research page.

  • BHT/BHA/TBHQ (new studies added to this page)
  • Food Dyes & Flavorings (new studies added to this page)
  • Skin Problems (new studies added to this page)
  • Cardiac effects of Psychotropic Medications
          This new page is from the American Heart Association
  • Fragrances & Perfumes
         This is a new page
  • Some Early Research on Food Additives & Chemical Pollutants -- 1959-1975
    This is a new link, and the following full text articles or long extracts have been added to it. Being older studies, these will be harder to find now in medical libraries, but they should not be missed.
    • Birch Pollen and Aspirin Psoriasis. A Study in Salicylate Hypersensitivity (Shelley, 1964)
    • Health Aspects of Food Additives (Johnson, 1966)
    • Unsolicited Food Additives - Letter to Editor New England Journal of Medicine (spodick, 1970)
    • Food Additives (article in Lancet 1972)
    • The Effect of Butylated Hydroxyanisole (BHA) and Butylated Hydroxytoluene (BHT) on Behavioral Development of Mice (stokes, 1974)
    • The Susceptibility of the Fetus and Child to Chemical Pollutants. Behavioral Implications of Prenatal and Early Postnatal Exposure to Chemical Pollutants (weiss, 1974)
  Back
  
  
  
  
• PURE FACTS ARTICLES ON LINE

  Selected articles from our newsletter, Pure Facts, are linked to the new Home Page (right side, in Newsletter section) or you can see them by going directly to the Pure Facts Newsletter Section

  If you have a particular favorite, let me know. I'll work on those articles first.

  Following are the newly added articles, from March 2001:

  Medical
  
  • Asthma is a growing problem...
  • Autism - Dr. Rimland's Survey

    General
    

  • Living in an upside-down world -- some editorial comments
  • How does it feel to be on medicine? -- One adult describes his experience

  Back
  
  
  
  

• FORCED VACCINATIONS?

  The other day I got a phone call from my Health Department. It was an authoritative recorded message telling me that I had children due to be vaccinated and I was to bring them in immediately and do so.

  You may -- like most of us -- assume that the national vaccination programs of your country are perfectly safe and routine. However, some researchers do not agree with the safety of mass vaccination or the safety of certain vaccines.

  As long as there is controversy, parents need to educate themselves. Government public health sources seem to have embraced the goal of expanding mass immunization, but there may be times and circumstances when you must be your child's advocate. Compelling evidence is beginning to appear that mercury preservatives, multiple vaccinations at one time and vaccinating during illness may contribute to several serious health problems including ADD and ADHD.

  More information can be found at the National Vaccine Information Center.

  See an interesting article by Dr. Joseph Mercola about Chicken Pox and its vaccine.

  Back
  
  
  
  

• MCS PETITION

  As an organization which helps chemically-sensitive people, we are concerned that Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) is an increasing problem in many states and countries, but the medical (and chemical) industry is doing its best to wish it away and to punish both those who suffer from it and those who try to help them.

  There is a petition calling for recognition of MCS by the White House through proclamation of an awareness and education month (May).

  Note: the petitions have been removed from PetitionOnline.com

  Back
  
  

• BOOK REVIEWS

  (These opinions are my own based on years of experience with diet management for controlling ADD and ADHD and accumulating scientific evidence.)

  

  • The Omega 3 Connection
    by Dr. Andrew Stoll, Director of Psychopharmacological Research at Harvard Medical School
    2001

    This is a surprisingly readable, well documented book about the research on and uses of Omega 3 essential fatty acids. These fats are deficient in the standard American diet, and a deficiency is implicated in a wide variety of symptoms from bipolar disorder and depression to heart disease and high blood pressure. This is a MUST READ book for everybody. You can buy it right here (click on the book) or at our on-line bookstore at www.feingold.org/bookstore.html in the "health" section.

    Back
    
    -------------------------------------------------------------
    The following two books were sent to us by
    Guilford Press for our review.
    -------------------------------------------------------------
    

  • Taking Charge of ADHD
    Russell Barkley
    Revised 2000

    This book is advertised as the "Complete, authoritative guide for parents."

    This book has useful information about helping the ADHD child through the schools, home organization, and finding good medical care, and Barkley's consideration of the possibility that ADHD symptoms are simply the high end of a continuum of normal behavior rather than a "disorder" is intriguing, although unproven.

    Nevertheless, his 'open mind' ends there. The very next page makes the flat statement that

    "No evidence has ever been provided that normal children develop ADHD by consuming such substances (additives or preservatives) or that children with ADHD are made considerably worse by eating them."

    He predictably quotes only studies done in the 1970's and early 1980's when the food & chemical industry's "Nutrition Foundation" funded and designed quite a few studies intending to neutralize the Feingold threat to their bottom line. See the Nutrition Foundation membership.

    Back
    
    
  • ADHD with Comorbid Disorders
    by Steven Pliszka, Caryn Carlson & James Swanson
    1999

    This is another book by the same publisher (Guilford Press) with the same questionable agenda. We didn't expect it, because we had been pleased to see Dr. James Swanson's name on the cover - he himself did a nice study back in 1980 that showed that 85% of the children who had previously responded to Ritalin showed behavioral deterioration upon exposure to mixed food dyes. Surprisingly, he never mentions his own study in this book.

    After publishing his study, Dr. Swanson was thoroughly castigated for using "too much" food dye in his study, and he was prevented by funding providers from ever doing more research in that area. I myself talked to him by phone a few years ago, and he explained to me that he had been told his study used a toxic dose of coloring. After I told him how much food dye I had measured in certain products in a project done at Agnes Scott College, it became clear to him that a child can easily consume up to well over 300 mg of food dyes at a normal birthday party, which is 3 times the amount that he had used. If that is "too much" in a study, why isn't it "too much" for lunch?

    In this book, meanwhile, the most shocking paragraph is the one that claims that the "most definitive test" of the Feingold diet was carried out by Gross, Tofanelli, Butzirus, and Snodgrass in 1987. The only reason I can conceive of for this claim is that the date is in the late 1980's and they must have been embarrassed to quote (like Barkley) only studies from the 1970's. I am familiar with the details of the Gross et al study, and it is about the worst, most scientifically compromised, study I have ever seen. How it was ever published is a mystery.

    A GOOD LOOK AT A BAD STUDY:

    • Only half the children in this small study even had ADHD
    • All of them but one were on medication (with coloring) the entire time
    • The one not on medication was sent home during the "additive-rich" week
    • Another child did worse on the "additive-rich" week, so it was assumed his medication was insufficient
    • The Feingold diet was only tried for ONE WEEK -- at best, it takes a week to begin to see any response
    • Medication, cleaning supplies, toiletries, were not changed to conform to the diet requirements
    • The Feingold diet was unpalatable (their own words)
    • Behavior was recorded by TV camera for 4 minutes DURING each meal.
    • The people evaluating the TV film were supposed to be "blind" to the study, but one of them was Gross himself .... obviously not blind to the study.

    Gross' conclusion: "Feingold diet has no beneficial effect on most children with learning disorders...." and moreover it was "distasteful to the typical American child"

    There may be other useful sections of this book, but my usual approach is to look at the part I know about. If they do not tell the truth there, I cannot depend on the information presented in the rest of the book, so I refuse to read it. I suggest you do too.

    Back |||Home Page
  
  
  Have a lovely and safe Valentine's Day ..... and be careful which candies you choose to give to your honey.