Supplements for ADHD and Mood? Ask These 4 Questions Before You Buy

What Is the Supplement Pitch Promising?

The video is an interview with Julia Ross, author of The Mood Cure. Her subject is amino acids, the building blocks of protein, sold as pills. She names five of them. She says they work on focus, mood, sleep and stress. She says they work right away. She also sells the ones she recommends.

Her proof is mostly stories. One amino acid, she says, turned around a drug program for adults. A boy chewed a calming tablet on stage. Then he read a dull old book to the room. She also says another amino acid wipes out a cancer linked to AIDS. Claims that big need proof that big. The interview gives none.

She says most attention trouble comes from diet, not genes. If that line made you feel guilty, set the guilt down. She names no study for it. The research we hold says no such thing. Your child isn’t broken. Their brain is learning differently. That calls for patient teaching, not a guilty trip to the store. Still carrying the blame? Our infographic on nature, nurture and parent guilt is worth a look.

What 4 Questions Should You Ask Before You Buy?

We use four questions on any claim that a food or pill helps learning. They work on this pitch, and on the next one.

1. What was measured? Was it a child’s focus or mood, or something else?
2. In how many children? And were they children at all?
3. Compared with what? A dummy pill, another approach, or nothing?
4. Was the change big enough to notice? Would you see it on a real school day?

Now run the stories through them. The drug program story was about adults, not a child’s focus. The boy on stage was one child, with nobody to compare him to. Neither story gets past the first three questions.

Some supplements have been put to a real test. One Cochrane review (Tan, Ho and Teh, 2016) studied fatty-acid pills. It looked at children with learning difficulties. It found no trial data on reading, writing, spelling or math scores. Its authors said the evidence was too thin to draw any conclusion. We explain what that review means for reading. Beyond it, our research files hold a few small studies of iron. None of them settles what a food or pill does to focus or schoolwork.

Two moments in the video belong with a doctor. Ross suggests giving a child a small dose of lithium at home. Her goal is to “rule out” a mood condition. She says it does no harm. That is her claim, not an established fact. She also suggests timing amino acids around a child’s ADHD medicine. Then, she says, ask the doctor to stop the medicine. Medication is a decision between your family and your child’s prescriber. Any supplement belongs in that conversation before it goes in your cart.

So What Does Food Do for a Hard Day?

Food matters. Questions about it belong to your pediatrician or a registered dietitian. Saying so is not a brush-off. It is the honest answer. It is the one we would want for our own families.

Here is what we see in family after family. A child who has not eaten since lunch is harder to settle to homework. The same child, after a snack, settles faster. Ross makes the same point, and it is the part we agree with. She tells parents to serve three real meals and never skip breakfast. She also describes the after-school crash. The child barely ate at school. At pickup, they are grumpy and hunting for sugar. We wrote more about hunger and after-school homework.

Try this for a week. It costs little and is easy to undo. You get to watch what happens yourself.

• Breakfast on every school day, even a small one.
• A real snack at pickup, before any homework.
• Hard work before or after the late-afternoon slump, not in the middle of it.
• A short note each night: snack or no snack, and how the evening went.

If your child eats only a few foods, tell the doctor. Nothing you see at home shows whether iron is low. Only a blood test does, so ask whether one makes sense. Still working out what sits behind the hard days? Our page on attention difficulty and ADHD covers who makes a diagnosis. It also covers what else to check. Formal school supports, like an IEP or 504 plan, need a professional evaluation. So does a suspected vision, hearing or medical cause.