Quinoa and the ADHD Diet

I've noticed a lot of discussions on these pages about the influence of diet on ADHD", particularly with regard to local:/topic/parenting-adhd-children/health-diet-exercise.html:"kids, and I thought that since I spent most of my adult life cooking for a living, I'd throw in some suggestions as they occurred to me.

One of the big problems appears to be that having a child with ADHD makes so many demands on a mother's time and energy that doing a lot of cooking isn't part of the game plan. If you incorporate a desire to eliminate many prepared foods, which may contain chemicals that adversely affect an ADHD sufferer, the time demands grow, perhaps exponentially. That box of mac 'n' cheese, the stuff that you can make in five minutes and that has that nice yellow-orange, never-seen-in-nature glow, looks mighty tempting. After all, you reason, as the kids methodically dismantle their room, they've gotta eat something, and the whole world eats mac 'n'cheese.

Here's a suggestion that probably won't work, but I'm going to put it out there anyway: make quinoa.

Quinoa is a "super cereal" originally grown in the Andes. It's advertised as a perfect food, largely due to the composition of its amino acid structure. And guess what. It is. Unimpeachable sources like the Departments of Horticulture at Purdue and New Mexico State can explain this in as much detail as you'd care to know.

Back to our hypothetical situation. Quinoa is eeeeeasy to cook. Takes about 15 minutes, start to finish. It keeps, in my refrigerator, for a week, and you can reheat it in seconds in a microwave. If you're worried about additives, there's a lot of certified organic quinoa available.

The problem is getting the kids to like it, convincing them that it's not "yucky." If it's not contrary to your particular dietary concerns, you can mix in some cheese (I like pecorino, but that's probably a bit much for most American kids, so try parmesan), add some tomato sauce or salsa, or hit it with some sesame oil or hoisin. Any leftovers that have met with your kids' approval can also be chopped up and mixed with the quinoa before you reheat it.

I suppose you could even put a big slab of Velveeta on it, but that might be defeating the purpose.