Diet has been strongly linked to mood, focus, and sleep. Consequently, the hormones Dopamine, Serotonin, Epinephrine, and Norepinephrine all have receptors in t

Diet has been strongly linked to mood, focus, and sleep. Consequently, the hormones Dopamine, Serotonin, Epinephrine, and Norepinephrine all have receptors in the brain as well as the gut and this should not be too surprising because consuming calories, vitamins, and water is fundamental to survival. In fact your gut has 100 million neurons in it, more than a dogs brain. While it’s not “thinking” in the way we know as consciousness, it does make decisions and pull levers to motivate you to do stuff. It should come as no surprise that dumping refined sugar into this system, something we did not evolve to process in its current form, will cause issues. ADHD is a sort of misnomer, it doesn’t describe a deficit of attention but rather intention. It messes with the wiring of your prefrontal cortex to limit the effectiveness of executive functioning which handicaps your ability to make decisions based on importance (because everything seems just as important) and the brain makes it very unpleasant to start tasks that non stimulating (to the point of withholding dopamine and dumping cortisol into the bloodstream). There is plenty of ADHD in Africa but you need to find it in the places where non-ADHD brains are rewarded. I suspect that as African nations become more metropolitan and the workforce demands shift to meeting the needs of a city, we will see even more ADHD diagnosis in this part of the world.