Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Exercise, food and other supports
Since 1994, supplements have not had to satisfy a regulator before going on sale. Nobody checked the bottle in your hand the way they check a prescription.
The gap is wider than most people expect. Drug factories get unannounced inspections and can be shut down on the spot; supplement makers do not face that, and recalls are handled by the consumer protection side rather than the medicines side. So two separate questions sit behind every supplement. Does the compound do anything, and is that compound actually in the bottle at the amount printed?
Qur’an and Sunnah
Eat the lawful and good things that God provides for you. Be mindful of God, in whom you believe (Quran 5:88). Mindful is doing real work in that sentence: knowing what you are taking is part of taking it well.
وَكُلُواْ مِمَّا رَزَقَكُمُ ٱللَّهُ حَلَٰلࣰ ا طَيِّبࣰ اۚ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَ ٱلَّذِيٓ أَنتُم بِهِۦ مُؤۡمِنُونَ
but eat the lawful and good things that God provides for you. Be mindful of God, in whom you believe
Qur’an 5:88read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
An international taskforce of psychiatric bodies reviewed nutrient and plant based treatments across mental health conditions and graded the evidence for each. For ADHD, most supplements landed in the weak or provisional band. So even the first question, whether the compound helps at all, is mostly unsettled before you get anywhere near what is in the capsule.
Sarris J, Ravindran A, Yatham LN, Marx W, Rucklidge JJ, McIntyre RS, Akhondzadeh S, Benedetti F, Caneo C, Cramer H, Cribb L, de Manincor M, Dean O, Deslandes AC, Freeman MP, Gangadhar B, Harvey BH, Kasper S, Lake J, Lopresti A, Lu L, Metri NJ, Mischoulon D, Ng CH, Nishi D, Rahimi R, Seedat S, Sinclair J, Su KP, Zhang ZJ, Berk M. (2022). Clinician guidelines for the treatment of psychiatric disorders with nutraceuticals and phytoceuticals: The World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry (WFSBP) and Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments (CANMAT) Taskforce.. The world journal of biological psychiatry : the official journal of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A product nobody has to verify can be different from the product that was studied.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
When you read that a treatment worked, look for who judged the improvement and whether they knew what the child had been given. In much of this literature, they knew.
Several professional bodies came together to say that vision therapy is not a treatment for ADHD. A joint statement like that is unusual, and it is worth quoting to a family word for word.
When omega levels are low, everything about ADHD tends to get louder: attention, mood swings, holding things in mind. Low omega does not cause ADHD, but it can be sitting on top of it.