“You forget to eat. You forget to buy food. You forget to buy healthy food. You even forget what counts as healthy food.” Dr Blandine French is talking about the complicated relationship that people with ADHD can have with something most of us take for granted – eating.
French would know. She’s a senior research fellow at the University of Nottingham, specialising in the lived experience of ADHD.
She works with doctors and affected families, and also has a personal connection to her work. She was diagnosed with ADHD herself, as an adult in 2010.
She says practically all of the interconnected symptoms and traits associated with ADHD can affect the way people buy food, cook it and eat it.
Issues with executive functions like forward planning and attention can impact meal-prepping or the ability to follow recipes. Hyper-focus might mean missing meals altogether.
Impulsiveness leads to quick-fix snacks and meal-deal convenience over balanced plates. And due to emotional dysregulation, people with ADHD might stress eat more than others.
“All these elements add up to having a very poor relationship with food in general,” French says. “You end up buying what you want and what’s distracting you, rather than what you need, and then you can become angry with yourself.”
It can also lead to something many adults with an ADHD diagnosis (or persistent symptoms) recognise: a vicious spiral.
ADHD traits make it harder to eat well – then, poor diet can amplify the very traits that made eating difficult in the first place, and so it continues.
Researchers are, however, hopeful that a better understanding of the way ADHD and food affect each other will lead to solutions, strategies and relief for the ADHD community.
Maybe we can make eating less stressful, more healthful, and even lower the intensity of some ADHD symptoms in the process.
Can poor diet cause an ADHD diagnosis?
Some believe that better nutrition could help to manage symptoms of ADHD – but this can be a contentious point.
In 2024, the health and fitness influencer Joe Wicks was criticised for appearing to suggest that poor diet might lead to a misdiagnosis of ADHD.
He later apologised and clarified that he believes nutrition can affect children’s behaviour, but the debate is increasingly divisive and political.
With diagnoses increasing and waiting lists for ADHD assessments growing, some have claimed that the condition is overdiagnosed.
An independent review is underway to ask whether that is true, but in 2025 a report by the National Health Service (NHS) in England instead claimed that ADHD was more likely underdiagnosed.
Current figures suggest that around 5 per cent of children and 3–4 per cent of adults meet clinical thresholds to diagnose ADHD, although many more show traits and behaviours.
The picture is also complicated by the fact that it’s a heterogeneous condition, meaning it’s not a single, uniform set of symptoms but something much more diverse.
“It’s very individual,” French says. “Ten people with ADHD might have ten different profiles and different kinds of nutritional needs.”
One thing researchers are clear on is that nutrition doesn’t cause ADHD. “There isn’t any evidence for that,” says Prof Ellie Dommett, a neuroscientist who studies ADHD at King’s College London.
However, she says, there is “overlapping circuitry in the brain that’s impacted in ADHD that also controls eating. When that circuitry is disrupted in ADHD, you can see a knock-on effect on binge eating. And likewise, binge eating can exacerbate some of the existing ADHD symptoms.”
How ADHD affects eating behaviour
The difficulties are plain to see in health research. There is a strong link, for example, between ADHD and obesity. The two conditions share a genetic link, meaning if you’re predisposed to one, you may also be predisposed to the other.
Researchers have estimated that as many as 70 per cent of people with ADHD could be obese.
At the same time, ADHD might make you a fussy eater. This is in part due to sensory factors – such as strong aversions to certain smells, colours and textures – but there’s also a phenomenon of food neophobia, a strong reluctance to try new things.
It means ADHD can put people at a greater risk of certain nutritional deficiencies.
There are other links with eating patterns, too. Studies have shown that people with ADHD are more likely to engage in impulsive food behaviours, like snacking.
Multiple other studies have shown more extreme patterns: that people with ADHD are more likely to develop eating disorders such as binge eating and anorexia nervosa, as well as alcohol misuse.
“One issue is impulse control, the inability to inhibit behaviours,” says Prof James Greenblatt, founder of educational platform Psychiatry Redefined. “You have one cookie, then two, then ten.”
As a child psychiatrist, Greenblatt has specialised in ADHD for 30 years, but his hospital work includes running residential treatment clinics for eating disorders.
He believes that because girls with ADHD are not as hyperactive as boys, they’re less likely to be diagnosed, and other problems appear later instead.
“I saw many repeated cases of undiagnosed ADHD in girls with disordered eating,” he says. “Often it leads to binge eating disorder. But we’re also seeing the same patterns in boys and men now. The path towards disordered eating is amplified by the neurochemistry and symptoms of ADHD."
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Habits that could help those with ADHD
Clearly, for people with ADHD, the stakes are high and the disadvantages many.
There is also, however, growing knowledge about ADHD and a dedicated effort among researchers, clinicians and the wider ADHD community to find effective strategies to manage symptoms and help people to lead healthy lives – nutrition included.
“The best interventions we have for ADHD are medication, and the first-line medication for adults is stimulants,” says Dommett.
Psychological strategies can also be effective, she says. “Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is recognised in the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines. Mindfulness isn’t yet in the guidelines, but anything that reduces stress is good for physical and mental health.
“There’s evidence that mindfulness may improve some ADHD symptoms like impulsivity or hyperactivity, or at least the depression and anxiety that sometimes come with it.”
Mindful eating is the practice of being fully present when eating, focusing both on the food and your own body’s cues of when to begin and finish.
Mindful steps might include making the first few bites of a meal as slow as possible, or committing to screen-free dinners.
You might also set timers on your phone between or just before mealtimes as a cue to check on your hunger levels. This might remind some people of the need to eat, and coach others that a mid-afternoon snack is based on impulsive habits rather than actual hunger.
“Setting timers on your smartphone is really important,” says Dr Rachel Gow, an ADHD researcher and founder of Nutritious Minds, a charity that helps neurodiverse people in multiple ways, including nutrition support.
Gow says digital reminders can also help with food planning and shopping, and the creation of healthier habits generally.
If reminders help people to eat at regular intervals, for example, it can prevent yo-yoing blood sugar levels that often lead to people seeking out unhealthy snacks between meals.
“Keeping a food and mood diary can be helpful, too,” Gow says. “It isn’t about judgement – it’s about becoming mindful of how what you eat makes you feel.”
Locking in healthy behaviours
Planning can also be a key way to avoid missed meals and other triggers that could cause food bingeing. For French, it can be useful to take some of the thinking out food choices.
“Some families I work with only do food orders,” she says. “It’s delivered to their door, so they don’t have to think about it. Some people rely on their partner for cooking, some on ready meals, some on veg box deliveries.”
It’s about outsourcing food prep to make healthy choices more likely, or even automatic.
Having a saved delivery order from a supermarket, packed with nutritional food that you know you like, can be a simple way to circumvent decision fatigue or the impulse to buy sugary snacks.
It can also be a good idea to keep healthy options accessible and visible. Fill your fruit bowl and put less healthy foods out of sight in a cupboard, again lowering the cognitive load often associated with healthy eating.
Changing the menu for better brain health
As well as cognitive and behavioural strategies, some people with ADHD may benefit from changing what’s on their plates.
Reducing sugar where possible seems like an obvious strategy, and there have been studies showing a correlation between high sugar intake and increased hyperactivity and inattention, especially in children.
The evidence is not clear-cut, however. An association seems to be there, yes – but whether sugar increases symptoms or whether symptoms lead people to seek out sugar is still up for debate.
In terms of overall health, knowing which nutrients ADHD people are often deficient in provides targets for improving their diet.
It’s important to add the caveat that everyone is different, but in 2023 a review of existing evidence found that protein, omega-3 fatty acids, magnesium, iron zinc and some vitamins are all common deficiencies.
Again, that’s not to say these deficiencies cause ADHD. And nor does increasing these nutrients ‘cure’ the condition.
But there have been intriguing studies that show an improvement in certain ADHD symptoms in some people with some nutrient interventions.
For example, supplementation of omega-3 fatty acids, magnesium and zinc have been shown to improve sleep in children with ADHD.
“I cannot emphasise enough the importance of omega-3s. They are absolutely critical to brain health,” says Dr Alex Richardson, who has studied the nutrient’s link with ADHD for more than 20 years.
“The human brain is 60 per cent fat. The lower your omega-3, the worse your reading, attention, behaviour and sleep. And we found improvements across the board in ADHD-type symptoms in a randomised controlled trial [when omega-3 is increased].”
She also points to a famous study conducted at Aylsbury Prison in Buckinghamshire in 2002. In it, researchers saw a significant drop in offences and antisocial behaviour among inmates after giving them supplements that included high doses of fatty acids, vitamins and minerals.
Problems with omega-3 for ADHD
Of course, most research into nutrition and the human body paints a complicated picture, and the relationship between individual nutrients and ADHD-type symptoms is no different.
Not all studies on omega-3, for example, have shown statistically significant changes in traits or behaviour.
You also need quite a lot – the equivalent of 1–2g a day, or three or four portions of fish per week – Richardson says.
Then there’s the need for B vitamins (also found to be low in ADHD individuals) alongside omega-3.
“Vitamins B6, B12 and folate – deficiencies or low levels of these will predict cognitive decline,” Richardson says. “But B vitamins don’t do anything if you haven't got enough long-chain omega-3. And you can’t get omega-3 DHA into the brain without the B vitamins.”
The other problem with all of this is how complicated it can get. Understanding which nutrients you’re deficient in, how to get them from your diet and then remembering to buy or cook the right foods regularly can be overwhelming – especially for somebody with ADHD.
In the short-term, and at least for some people, Richardson believes supplements can be useful.
“What I would recommend is a multivitamin and mineral – you really want a broad spectrum – and a fatty acid supplement,” she says.
The other crucial ingredient
Not all researchers are convinced by nutritional interventions. The NICE guidelines in the UK currently include no nutritional therapies for ADHD.
“There are lots of small studies showing things like polyunsaturated fatty acids could be beneficial, but there’s nothing substantive,” Dommett says.
“Nothing that would meet the research evidence needed for NICE to take on board dietary treatments for ADHD.”
Dommett believes that education, support and compassion are also vital in helping people with ADHD to live healthy lives.
A 2019 study found that US adults with ADHD earn less, meaning they can reach retirement with a net worth 40–74 per cent lower than their neurotypical counterparts.
“If you don’t have much money, you’re going to buy the cheaper food, and that often has more sugar. We have to remember that ADHD infiltrates every aspect of your life, including your finances and your nutrition,” says Dommett.
Self-compassion is the other important ingredient, Blandine French says. Very few people, whether you have ADHD traits or not, eat healthily all the time. But people with ADHD can self-blame more than they should.
“You watch everybody else and think, ‘Why can’t I do that?’” French says. “You’ll have really good times and really bad times with food. It will come and go – and that’s okay. Being mindful of it and trying is the biggest strategy.”
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