Subtitle: How Nutrition Deficit Disorder Affects Your Child’s Learning, Behaviour, and Health, and What You Can Do About It – Without Drugs
Stars: *****
Summary: In The NDD Book, Dr. Sears presents the latest scientific research on the effects of nutrition on the brain, outlines the symptoms of NDD, and lays out a drug-free prescription for prevention and treatment. Filled with inspiring success stories of children from Dr. Sears’s own practice who showed major improvements in learning, mood, and behaviour with diet changes alone, the NDD Book also provides nine days of sample meal plans and kid-friendly NDD-prevention recipes for meals, snacks and desserts.
First of all I’d like to clarify that NDD isn’t a condition you can get an actual diagnosis for (except by Dr. Sears) and you won’t find information on it in medical journals.
“Children are getting sicker, sadder, and fatter. Why? The problem is food, glorious food! During my thirty-six years as a pediatrician, I have never seen such an epidemic of nutrition related illnesses. In this book you will learn a new name that I have given to this epidemic: NDD, which stands for Nutrition Deficit Disorder.” – from the introduction by Dr. Bill
This is not to say that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Everything he said makes perfect sense. He explains how poor nutrition can lead to the D’s.
“The D Epidemic
Parents, we have an epidemic of Ds: attention deficit disorder (ADD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Bipolar disorder (BPD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), depression and the biggest D of the decade, diabetes.” – pg 7
First I’d like to point out that he doesn’t say that poor nutrition is necessarily the cause for every person who has these diseases but it can cause it in some and make it worse in others. I do think he could clarify that a bit more though.
Second, I’m not sure why he put BPD as the short form for Bipolar Disorder as BPD is the short form for Borderline Personality Disorder and bipolar is usually short-formed to BP. This could be a little confusing.
I really enjoyed the book and will be putting some of what it says into practice. Food is put into Green, Yellow and Red light foods to help children and parents remember what’s healthy. Also he uses the term Grow-Foods instead of Healthy Foods because the word healthy puts off children and adults who might otherwise eat said food. Dr. Sears also shares tips for helping your family transition to a better diet, ways to sneak in some vegetables while he develops a liking for them and games to do with your children to help them learn the difference between grow-foods and red-light foods and how they affect his body.
There is also a much needed chapter on breakfasts. Everyone has heard that you need a good breakfast to function but Dr. Sears actually explains how those foods work in your body to help your brain function.
I highly recommend this book to all parents and it could even benefit adults who don’t have children, especially young adults because they are often not much better when it comes to eating nutritiously.
* I received a copy of this book for review from Hachette Book Group. Reviews are in no way affected by how I came across the book.
Links of Interest: Article on NDD by Dr. Sears, Ask Dr. Sears,
Other Reviews: NONE YET
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