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When I tell people you can change a person’s personality by what you feed him, I get looks that suggest I might be missing a few nuts and bolts.

In my 20s, a book I was given by a friend changed my life; How to Detox Yourself by Jane Scrivner. It firmly drove home that biblical adage: everything is permissible but not everything is expedient. Up until that point, I ate everything, and had no independent ideas about what was good or bad to eat. I still believed those food clichés that generalized sweets, ice-cream and cakes at one extreme and greens, fruits and vegetables at the other.

When I was in secondary school my typical pack-lunch was a ham and cheese sandwich. Once I ate it, my brain shut down and my joints became lead. I never once connected those symptoms with what I was putting in my mouth. I once drank a glass of Peak milk powder mixed with water that prompted the most dramatic projectile vomiting, but I never knew why until Ms. Scrivner connected the milk to the drama.

I have always been fascinated by alternative theories about food: the Nazarene in the bible is set apart to the extent that he has a finicky grocery list on the fridge even before he exits the womb. Thou shalt not eat this and thou shalt not eat that! Samson’s was as extensive as they get; no raisins, no grapes, no wine, no balsamic vinegar, no pork, no rabbit, no catfish, no ham, no snails, no crayfish… and John the Baptist was so restricted that all he ate were insects and wild honey.

A professor, Thomas Sowell, in his theories on late talking children, suggests a common link between the inability to tolerate certain foods and exceptional abilities in the child; in essence, a fascinating link between food sensitivities and an unusual wiring of the brain. Jane Scrivner’s book suggests that one really scrutinizes foods that are believed to be healthy and nutritious. Foods like bread, tomatoes, bananas, mushrooms, red meat, chicken, potatoes, stock cubes, oranges, dairy products and peanuts are removed temporarily from the diet. She encourages eating to bursting point some other foods, like brown rice, carrots, pineapples, ginger, garlic, beetroot, cabbage, yams, plantains and fish.

Her book proposes that, over time, the exclusion of certain foods from the diet improves the body’s ability to eliminate toxins. And the elimination of toxins in turn enhances the efficiency of the body in using those foods that it tolerates as fuel.

I have read many reviews of this book that absolutely slammed its integrity or usefulness. I can recommend that it does two things extremely well: it helps you realise that you ‘cannot’ eat everything and it helps in jumpstarting that process where you discover what your body can and cannot process as food.

My detox diet at that time revealed that I have problems digesting red meat, wheat, and milk, among other foods. When those foods were eliminated from my diet, I found that I had no need to worry about weight loss. The weight stayed off naturally. Apart from that, my focus improved and my hair grew faster than it ever had.
Fourteen years later, I have three children who have similar food sensitivities. Some of these are so dramatic that one of my children has a different personality when he eats carrots to when he doesn’t. One of my children eats sweet potatoes and ends up in hospital. One of them eats wheat and gets dandruff. One of them can’t eat any vegetables or fruits with bright colours. Everything he eats must rhyme with the colours on the Nigerian flag – green or white. My children are all exceptionally bright but cannot think when they eat those things to which they are sensitive.

Last week I was sent a link to a new report confirming the link between ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and food. In the U.S. alone, five million children are being medicated for something which is now confirmed to be a set of symptoms that can be significantly reduced with a restricted diet. The study is led by Lidy Pelsser and published in The Lancet Journal.

According to the study, 64 per cent of children diagnosed with ADHD are actually just experiencing a hypersensitivity to food, which means a tantruming, violent, constantly fidgeting child who can’t focus in a classroom can change dramatically just by having his diet scrutinized and cleaned up. The irony is that parents have intrinsically known these facts forever.