The Role of Diet: Children & Adults with Learning Disabilities
OmegaMatters: Episode 50
Hosts: Drs. Bill Harris & Kristina Harris Jackson
Guest: Dr. Rachel Gow
About this episode: In this episode, Drs. Harris and Jackson talk to Dr. Rachel Gow, a child neuropsychologist specializing in ADHD and associated neurodivergent conditions in the overall field of nutritional neuroscience. She holds a PhD in child neuropsychology from King’s College in London and is a registered nutritionist. She’s a lecturer at several universities in the UK, and trained here at the NIH stateside with Dr. Joe Hibbeln. She writes books and has created a nonprofit to help talk about this topic. For more information on OmegaMatters, visit https://omegaquant.com/omegamatters-broadcasts/.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Welcome to OmegaMatters, where we talk all things omegas. I’m Kristina Jackson. This is Bill Harris, my dad. And today, we are excited to bring in Dr. Rachel Gow. Dr. Gow is a child neuropsychologist specializing in ADHD and associated neurodivergent conditions in the overall field of nutritional neuroscience. She holds a PhD in child neuropsychology from King’s College in London and is a registered nutritionist. She’s a lecturer at several universities in the UK, and trained here at the NIH stateside with Dr. Joe Hibbeln. She writes books and has created a nonprofit to help talk about this topic. Thank you so much for joining us, Rachel.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yes, my absolute pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. I’m excited to talk with you both today.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yes. This is a hot topic that we are asked about all the time, kids, ADHD, omega-3s. So I’m always curious how you got into this field, what is your journey to get you to a place where you are so deeply involved in the research and the clinical side of this issue?
Dr. Rachel Gow: Sure. How long have we got? Do you want the short version?
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: I know. Sort of short, sort of detailed.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah. It’s been a long journey. I started out really just as a mum with my firs-born son who was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, and then, basically, that completely transformed both of our lives. I knew something about dyslexia, I’d never really heard much about ADHD back then. Now, it’s a household term, but it wasn’t then. So I felt I had to start researching. Parents of children with neurodivergent conditions often become better researchers than FBI agents. We want to know everything and we want to know it now, so that’s what happened really.
And then, I decided to enroll as a mature student. We can do that in the UK. So basically, off the back of life experience and age, I didn’t have the conventional entry criteria, but we go down formal interview, all the rest of it. Anyway, I started a Bachelor of Science in psychology, that led to a master’s in psychological research methods, which was really interesting, because a lot of it was statistics, but also learning to critique other published research, especially in terms of design and methodology and so on, and there was also really neat philosophy side that I loved.
Then I was offered a PhD at King’s College London at the Institute of Psychiatry in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry under, at the time, one of the UK’s leading authorities in ADHD and ADHD research, that was Professor Eric Taylor. He was head of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, so I was really privileged to be able to work with him. And I conducted a four-year project in child neuropsychology, but obviously being trained also in child and adolescent psychiatry. And then, I was invited to be a post-doctoral researcher in the section of nutrition and neuroscience where I spent four years. So it was a long journey. And I’ve actually just finished studying again, I just finished my PGCAP, which is a higher education training qualification, which will enable me to just be that little bit more qualified in terms of lecturing and teaching university students.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Wow. And you are a registered nutritionist.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yes.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: So you’ve got that degree too.
Dr. Rachel Gow: And an author, Smart Foods for ADHD.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: And an author.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Thank you, yes.
Dr. Bill Harris: Show that a little more clearly, right in front your face.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Show us that again.
Dr. Bill Harris: Show us your book.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Smart Foods for ADHD, is that what you said?
Dr. Bill Harris: Smart Foods.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Oh, here’s my book, sorry. Smart Foods for ADHD and Brain Health.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Excellent.
Dr. Bill Harris: Wonderful. Okay, great.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: We’ll put in our show notes.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Well, I wrote it after my PhD, because I felt like I needed to share that information.
Dr. Bill Harris: Great.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah. Because once you do your dissertation and it goes into the annals of science, but it doesn’t necessarily drip into the clinical practice or general popular culture, so that’s awesome that you wrote a book about it. So I did not know you had such a personal connection to this, so that’s really fascinating. And I’m curious, do you also work clinically with other kids? Is that part of where this study that you just published came from?
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, I did, for some time, have a private clinic where I would screen children for ADHD and other neurodivergent conditions. And then, depending on the outcome, work with a child and adolescent psychiatrist who would handle the diagnostic evaluation part, so a team effort, or refer within my network to a wonderful clinical psychologist or an educational psychologist or whatever came up.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Okay, excellent. And so, you just published a study in Frontiers in Nutrition, and it’s called “A Closer Look at the Role of Nutrition in Children and Adults with ADHD and Neurodivergence.” Can you tell us what the overall study rationale was and then the methods and we’ll get into it?
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah, of course. I think first and foremost, seeing families on a day-to-day basis for some time, I started to observe that upon having a blood draw, the individual, the child or the young person, often presented with a number of nutritional insufficiencies, as well as food intolerances. And then, having a thorough look at their food diaries, I noticed really interesting relationships, that these children were eating the very foods that they were intolerant to, and the main culprits were cow’s milk, whether they’d be guzzling dairy, or wheat gluten.
And I started looking into these because I felt the were connected. So for example, tests came up that they were intolerant to cow’s milk, yet they’re craving cow’s milk and drinking it by the pints. And I felt that, without obviously knowing, this child was potentially feeding the dysbiotic pathogenic gut microbiome, facilitating its growth to the point where it was potentially over-colonizing the gut microbiome and potentially increasing risk for more serious conditions like leaky gut syndrome or gut dysbiosis, same thing, inflammation of the gut, essentially.
And then, I decided that this really needed to be put together, because obviously observational data is really interesting, but you need several case studies, and in my case, there was about 80 families. So first of all, I was a guest lecturer at the University of Roehampton. A dear friend of mine, Dr. Simon Dyall, who’s a world-renowned researcher in omega-3 fatty acids, I wrote to him and I was telling him about some of my preliminary observations and would he be interested in putting this data set together as a clinical project for some of his master’s students. So I was invited to collaborate, and I ended up supervising four master’s students in clinical nutrition.
We put together all the families, obviously going back a step or two, each family would go and visit a clinic in W1, where they’d have a blood draw by a qualified phlebotomist, or they’d have a home visit by a phlebotomist, and then the data was obviously analyzed after that. So we put all the data together. Some of the families obviously didn’t consent, we’d lost touch with some of them, but it was quite a sizable amount of data as a healthy starting point, because obviously we aim to build on this database, and also collect data from non-diagnosed controls. So that was really the start of it all.
Dr. Bill Harris: This paper that’s coming out in Frontiers, why don’t you tell us about that before I ask you more questions about it?
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah, of course. Many parents or carers of neurodivergent children also have the challenge of that child being a fussy eater or a picky eater. This is quite common as well, it’s spoken about quite a bit. Shall we just pause, because my coffee machine is running? I don’t know, it just switch itself on magically.
Dr. Bill Harris: That’s okay.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Well, I’m also… Yeah, I was going to say, my light, we’re in a new building, and it turns off when I don’t move enough, so if it goes black a few times.
Dr. Rachel Gow: You’ll have to sit there walking.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: I’m just going to wave.
Dr. Rachel Gow: So children with ADHD and other neurodivergent conditions tend to be picky eaters, fussy eaters. They also have an increased risk of developing disordered eating or problematic eating. Some common disorders include avoidant and restrictive eating patterns, ARFID-like traits, they’re very common to children with both ADHD and also autism spectrum disorders. There’s food neophobia, which is a reluctance or outright refusal to try new foods. And it’s estimated that around 20% of children with ADHD develop some type of eating disorder, although there’s other research that suggests it’s actually quite a bit higher, up to 37%. We also know that OCD is associated with orthorexia nervosa. And there is this frequent pattern of high levels of food selectivity, avoidance of entire food groups, strong preferences for certain foods, lots of sensory aversions to taste, textures. It’s not uncommon for a young person with ADHD or ASD, for example, not to eat fruits and vegetables until their mid-20s to even early 30s.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Wow.
Dr. Bill Harris: Wow.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Gosh, yeah.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: I did not know that it went on until then. And fruits and vegetables are very large food groups to avoid that. What you said about them seeking out dairy, and that also, it’s as if the gut biome is not able to absorb when it’s that… It’s interesting, I’ve never heard that they actively are seeking out this food that is also inflaming their gut, but they’re not actually getting what they need from it, it sounds like. And it’s the same thing happening with grains, essentially. And then, milk has so many nutrients, and magnesium was one of the main ones you found a lot of relationships with in this paper. And do oftentimes they eliminate these foods and that helps with symptoms, or not, is that…
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah, it’s really hard to eliminate foods-
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Hard to tell.
Dr. Rachel Gow: … between children who are such fussing eaters.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: I know.
Dr. Rachel Gow: The research has shown that children with ASD frequently consume fewer vegetables, fruits and high-fiber foods, which obviously is needed for the gut, and instead rely heavily on the ultra-processed foods, refined carbohydrates. There’s a lot of research demonstrating that. So we knew this already, this is not new knowledge, it’s very common knowledge that children with neurodivergent-related conditions are at risk of nutritional insufficiencies. And I’m particularly interested in how that influences brain activity and function, and especially mood as well, because we know that certain nutrients are absolutely critical to regulate our serotonergic and dopaminergic systems of the brain, and we see a lot of dysregulated behaviors in these children as well.
And it is a real struggle, because there’s been lots of research in the field of nutritional psychiatry showing lack of antioxidants, I found that in some of our findings, which we’ll come to, but polyphenols, lower fiber, magnesium, folate, these are commonly in food sources that are rejected by neurodivergent children due to their complex textures, bitter taste, and all of that, as I said, contributes unknowingly to micronutrient insufficiencies, which obviously impacts their behavior as well.
Dr. Bill Harris: So can we bring it around to omega? That’s our interest here primarily. So in this paper, you looked at 47 kids, 57 people all together, and you measured blood levels of a variety of nutrients, including omega-3, and what’d you find?
Dr. Rachel Gow: Absolutely. It was really, really interesting. Approximately 63% of the full sample presented with suboptimal Omega-3 Index scores. And for those that don’t know, the Omega-3 Index is the sum of EPA and DHA, the two key highly unsaturated fatty acids that we need for optimal brain function. And yes, we actually did use the OmegaQuant as well, because it’s comprehensive and provides an excellent detailed overview of not just omega-3 fatty acids, but so much more than that as well, so it’s fascinating.
But the mean Omega-3 Index was four, which is very, very low, and we know through the work of other research groups in England, like the DOLAB study, and Dr. Alice Richardson and others found a mean Omega-3 Index in UK school children as 2.4, so very, very low. Increasingly, the Omega-3 Index is being used in nutritional psychiatry research, because it gives us an indicator, and it’s also very interesting to correlate that with psychiatric or psychological symptoms to look at some of these relationships. I have always used it, so when I was at the NIH, we measured the Omega-3 Index in the group of adults with ADHD that took part in our NORAA study, and that was the Neuroimaging Omega-3 and Reward in Adults with ADHD, it was the world’s first randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial to look at omega-3 versus a placebo in the brain activity of adults with ADHD using neuroimaging techniques. It was a 16-week RCT that unfortunately never got published, but should have done. And yeah, we found an Omega-3 Index of 4.2 in those adults with ADHD.
Dr. Bill Harris: I’m sure the general public would say, “Well, you did this study, why didn’t you publish it?”
Dr. Rachel Gow: I’ve been trying for 10 years, so maybe we can talk about this off-screen.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: More there.
Dr. Bill Harris: Not dead yet.
Dr. Rachel Gow: It kept getting blocked. Yeah, shame, but I tried. I’ve been talking about it and I discuss it in presentations and I talk about what I can, and some of it has been semi-published. But it’s a shame, and I’m going to try and go back to that if I can.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. Well, we’re very interested in trying to figure out how we can define a healthy target Omega-3 Index for kids and what data set we would use to… How would we define normal healthy kids, and if you can find those kids, can you get blood samples from them and then use their omega-3 level as a theoretical target for health? Can you think about that? What would you think?
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah. I mean…
Dr. Bill Harris: In your paper, I think you define healthy using our standard, under 4%, over 8%. Those were originally set up for adults because they didn’t have data in kids, and that’s a challenge we’re facing now is trying to… People want to know, well, are those the right numbers for adults or should I aim for something else in a kid?
Dr. Rachel Gow: That’s a great point.
Dr. Bill Harris: And I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on that.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah, that’s a really relevant and important point, and you’re right, it’s a scale for adults. But increasingly, it’s being applied in research with children. So yes, I do think that will need to be adjusted accordingly. But saying that, we still know that children eat very little oily fish and seafood. I take diaries, so I get to see it firsthand, as well as the blood. Also, there’s no real general consensus. There are recommendations by authorities like GOED and ISSFAL, as you know, for 250 milligrams as the average amount that a child should be consuming, and government recommendations of one to two portions of oily fish and seafood. But yeah, I do feel that we need firmer recommendations, given the brain is the fattiest organ in the human body, and that DHA plays a critical role in cell signaling across neuronal networks, making for faster, more efficient communication, and of course, the other roles that these brain essential fats play as well.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. And trying to-
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah. It does strike… Sorry, go ahead.
Dr. Bill Harris: In trying to link ADHD with low omega-3, it becomes a chicken and an egg thing, it seems like. If you know they don’t eat omega-3, which is why their blood levels are low, but we really don’t know if that’s in part of the causal pathway or is it just a result of having ADHD that you don’t eat fish and you have low levels? How can we make a causal connection there?
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah, that’s right, because it’s way more complex than that. And obviously, the biochemical pathway in terms of the conversion from alpha-linoleic acid into EPA and DHA is highly problematic and mediated by a multitude of factors, including things like whether the child is male or female, their background diet, their genetic activity as well, the delta-five and delta-six desaturase enzyme activity, which can potentially be impaired, or it’s being found to be potentially impaired. But that, again, needs more research and closer attention. And I wanted to do that type of research as a PhD student, I wanted to look at a stable isotope and map and trace the absorption, but it was costly, we’d run out of time and money.
And nutritional research is not easy, and I think what’s really difficult is a lot of psychiatrists and psychologists come into the field without the biochemistry training, without the nutritional training, jumping on the bandwagon like, “Oh, I’ll conduct an RCT.” And then, they don’t do things like measure the baseline level of that child’s omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acid levels before they supplement, they don’t make adjustments in the dose, they don’t particularly even look at the formula, they don’t understand oftentimes the difference between omega-3 and 6 fatty acids. I’ve looked at Cochrane reviews where they’ve just chucked everything in it, garbage in, garbage out, and they adopt researchers with no biochemistry training to be the lead author and write this up.
So yeah, nutrition research, as I mentioned, is not easy, far from it. And also, I think a key thing is nutrients don’t work in isolation, they work in synergy. So when you eat a piece of fish, you don’t just get the omegas, but you get the multibiome and you get the iron, magnesium, selenium, the zinc, and all of these work together to facilitate absorption into the red blood cells. So oftentimes, people are just taking their one gram of fish oil every day and they’re not changing their background diet. I was told at NIH by Bill Lands, William Lands, you have to literally elevate the omega-3s and simultaneously decrease, he used to say nicks the six, reduce the omega-6s. But yeah, it’s not easy.
Dr. Bill Harris: It’s not easy, right.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: There’s an older paper, and I’m not sure the author, they did blood levels, they had normal controls, ADHD and autism spectrum, and they did find low DHA and also low arachidonic, the omega-6, so it was just across the board low essential fatty acids. So what’s going on with that, with the omega-6 side and the omega-3 side, when decreases in both seem to indicate not enough of these fats for these kids or something’s going on with their metabolism. What do you think about that in context with what you saw here?
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah, it’s a great question. Obviously, both omega-3 and 6 are essential polyunsaturated fatty acids. There’s a lot of the vilification of omega-6, I think mainly due to a lack of education potentially. We obviously need omega-6, it’s brain-essential. Obviously, we have to be careful with the amount we consume through ultra-processed foods, for example, because it’s the processing of oils containing omega-6 and the refining hydrogenation that may be potentially linked to harm, whereas if you’re having something that’s unrefined, it’s virgin, it’s going to be a lot… I hate the word cleaner, but you know what I mean.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Rachel Gow: You don’t want to use that word anymore.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Right, right.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah. So obviously, omega-6s alert us to injury. If I cut myself, that wound’s going to become inflamed. It’s going to be like, “Hey, I need to treat this wound,” but if the wound is still red, warm, inflamed three months later, I’m in trouble, and I think that’s a very simplistic way to put it.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: That’s not good, yeah, yeah.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Yeah. There obviously is a link to information. Instagram’s gone crazy over this, you see it all the time, don’t you? And we do need to be careful with a lot of the misinformation, and nutritional education is absolutely critical. That’s why I love the fact that you guys have this podcast. Your dad is one of the top researchers out there in this field, and I’m sure you’re doing an amazing job of re-educating everyone.
Dr. Bill Harris: Oh, stop, stop, stop, stop.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah, no, it’s-
Dr. Rachel Gow: What do I think? Yeah. What do I think? I think we need to be taking closer looks. I think it’s a very complex picture, it’s not as well-understood as we think or we’d like to think, it’s not always clear cut. Basically, I think this field is expanding rapidly, which is wonderful, given when I first started out, nutritional psychiatry wasn’t as big as it is now. It’s growing and there’s more research and investment. I had to come to America to get funding to do the research that I wanted.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Oh, wow.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Nutritional research is not well-funded at all in the UK.
Dr. Bill Harris: Do you recommend for parents who’ve got kids with ADHD to give them omega-3 supplements?
Dr. Rachel Gow: Well, my motto is there’s always foods first, so it’s basically you have to address the diet. And I think it’s really frustrating, because oftentimes, nutrition is addressed from the neck down in terms of its preventative role in the premature development of metabolic health disease, type two diabetes, obesity, stroke, cardiovascular disease, so on. And the role of nutrition in the activity and function of the human brain is not well-understood. And especially by those who are in privileged positions of power to make changes, like our GPs, our family practitioners, if someone turns up at the GP surgery and was like, “I’ve got low energy, I’m fatigued, I have anxiety, I’m tearful,” they’re not going to say, “What do you eat?” That question seldom or never features in any preliminary screening, like mental health, I call it brain health, but yeah, it doesn’t.
We’re not at the stage where we’re recommending simple tests, like the Omega-3 Index test, things that we can do at home for ourselves, giving the patient authority or treating them as agents of change over their own lives. We need to give some of the power back to the patient, allow the patient to have a voice, and we need to say, “Well, you know what? There’s things you can do at home. Have you tried testing your Omega-3 Index?” And then, “Yeah, this is what the Omega-3 Index is,” and giving them that critical potentially life-saving information, as opposed to, “Okay, you’re tired, you’ve got low mood, you’re tearful, okay, let me get my prescription pad out. Now, I’m going to write you a prescription for some type of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and you’re going to come back in six months and we’ll adjust the dose accordingly.” Brain health is so much more than that, and that’s what I want to see in my lifetime, that change.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah, I agree.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah. And especially in kids, many parents don’t want to go jump to the medicine, they want to try everything else that they possibly can first.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Of course, of course.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: And it’s interesting, we have the same issues here in the States around nutrition, it’s almost it’s too big for the general practice docs to get into. But that would be an amazing place for registered dietitians or nutritionists to have a bigger role. And along with being able for us, we think, to test this nutrient, it’s one nutrient, like you said, of many, but it is one of the key critical ones, we think, that is fairly deficient. What I also have noticed in this paper was this population, it didn’t seem like to me this… It seems like a lot of kids. I bet the overall rate of omega-3 deficiency by this standard is probably 50%, 60% of kids in the US, it seems like.
We often see kids have lower levels of omega-3s compared to adults in general, so that’s part of where we’re trying to assess whether 8% is appropriate for kids. They certainly can get to 8%, typically take supplementation, but there are also lots of more functional foods now, different kinds of emulsions and ways. Do you at all think that there’s a use for that hiding the vegetables or hiding the omega-3s in something that they’re already a little bit more palatable, they’re more likely to have something that’s more processed, probably a sugar, but you’re also trying to dose them up and maybe start to take care of some of those symptoms to start to address trying to eat a more balanced diet? There’s a lot there.
Dr. Rachel Gow: I love the fact that you’re making America healthy again. I love-
Dr. Bill Harris: We were doing that before the last election.
Dr. Rachel Gow: I love that there’s some cleaning up going on, I’ll use that word again-
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah, a focus.
Dr. Rachel Gow: … in terms of some of the food dyes are already outwiped, banned, in England and Europe that have been and especially children are the most vulnerable. Children are arguably rewarded with ultra-processed foods for exam marks for behavior.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Candy.
Dr. Rachel Gow: Let me shove you some more… And it’s really hard, because we’re all indoctrinated, it’s part of our society. A lot of these non-nutritive compounds, food stuffs, if you like, are basically not the diet of our ancestors, they’re not how we used to eat. And I really would like us to go back to basics, and I know it’s hard, I know it’s tough, I’ve been a single mom myself and it’s really hard. But get back in the kitchen, try and select your ingredients yourself, try and, where you can, prepare and make your own meals. And I know it takes a bit longer time to get up earlier and stuff like that, I know it’s not easy. But I just think it’s so important, because we’ve become too reliant on some of these supermarket foods, and oftentimes parents are not checking labels or overlooking labels, and a lot of these dietary emulsifiers, there’s emerging research now showing they’re kind of acting like laundry detergents in our guts, they’re shipping away the healthy gut microbes, so we’ve got to be careful.
In my research, just going back into the children’s group only, we found, as I mentioned, children presenting with nutrient values below recommended ranges, and that was in vitamin D. And we know that in many, many research trials that vitamin D has a moderately favorable antidepressant effect, so it helps reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety, and we all need vitamin D. And in England, 65%, it’s estimated, of the UK population are vitamin D-deficient because we spend much of our time under dark gray rain clouds with very little direct skin exposure to sunlight, so that’s a problem. And then also iodine, so 53% of the group had insufficient iodine levels, which we know directly impacts brain function. Zinc, 71% of the group had lower than recommended values. Also, vitamin E, alpha-carotene, so the antioxidant alpha-carotene, they were all below the recommended range, as well as the Omega-3 Index, which I’ve already mentioned, none of the children had optimal, obviously it was for adults, but optimal values. And as I said, the mean score was, I think, around four.
So there’s stuff going on here, and obviously it was a small group and it is only preliminary and we’re not making any big claims or grand gestures about this research. But it is important, and I hope it will inspire other researchers in the field of nutritional psychiatry to take a closer look at the role of nutrition in ADHD and other neurodivergent conditions. And we also found these really interesting relationships between the children’s nutrient levels and their ADHD symptoms. So we’re forgetting about that, I need to mention that. So magnesium was moderately negatively correlated with the total ADHD index scores as well. We found also that magnesium, again, was related to children’s behavior, so the lower the magnesium, the higher the disruptive behavior scores. And omega was also negatively related to learning and language score, so the lower the omega-3, the higher the learning and language difficulties, and obviously these were all in children. So the relationships between food and the health of the human brain certainly deserves much greater investment, and research funds must be allocated to this study.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. That is a great message, I think, maybe to end on, because that’s the message we’d like to get out to. There’s certainly-
Dr. Rachel Gow: Okay, fine.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah, no. We could talk a lot, I think, about this, but that brings it back to really what needs to be done. We need more research to understand the role of nutrition in children’s mental development, everybody’s mental health, children’s, right now, mental development in kids.
Dr. Rachel Gow: And I think… Can I just say, I’ll just end on something? I just want to end just by saying, for me and for many, many others in this field, the future of brain health and wellbeing requires a whole person, holistic, intuitive and personalized model or approach. So you’ve got the nutritional biochemistry, which is your lifestyle, your behavior, which are your beliefs and your habits, the psychological, your thoughts, your emotion, your cognition, the physiological factors, the interconnected biological systems, these are all key contributing factors to brain health, wellness, and also for building brain health resilience in a protective way against the premature development of disease.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah, very good, very good.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Yeah, this is great. Keep up your work in this field, and we’re looking forward to seeing what else you come out with and to checking out your book. And thank you so much for coming to talk with us today.
Dr. Rachel Gow: My absolute pleasure. It was a joy, I really enjoyed it. Thank you for inviting me. It was lovely to see you.
Dr. Bill Harris: Good to see you. All the best.
Dr. Kristina Harris Jackson: Thanks, Rachel.