Julia Rucklidge - Mental Health & Nutrition Research: Te Puna Toiora

27/09/2026

What if supporting emotional regulation in neurodivergent youth could be as simple as improving nutritional status?
Our newly published study suggests that broad-spectrum micronutrients may play an important role.
We analysed outcomes from 97 adolescents with elevated ADHD and/or autistic traits who participated in the BEAM randomised placebo-controlled trial. While micronutrients did not significantly improve core ADHD symptoms over placebo, they did improve something many families tell us is even more challenging:
• Irritability
• Emotional dysregulation
• Dysphoria
• Stress
• Suicidal ideation
• Overall functioning and quality of life
Perhaps most encouraging, young people with both ADHD and autistic traits were over three times more likely to respond when taking micronutrients compared with placebo.
The findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that nutrition matters for brain function and emotional wellbeing. For neurodivergent youth struggling with intense emotions, safe nutritional interventions may offer an important additional tool alongside existing supports.



For full article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S3051156926000328

25/09/2026

A conversation about whether there is over diagnosis or under diagnosis in ADHD....or could it be both? My biggest worry with the rush to diagnosis is that the diagnosis can bring an assumption that this is a medical condition that needs medication. Does that stop the investigation into why one might be struggling with attention in the first place?

University of Canterbury psychologist and researcher Julia Rucklidge has been looking at nutritional interventions for mental illnesses, and has found a crucial link between gut health and symptoms of ADHD.

25/09/2026

22/09/2026

I keep having great conversations with super interesting people! This time with Simon Gault and Kate Fenwick from the Forkin' Good podcast. What a fun discussion we had!
Can what we eat really affect how we think, feel and behave?

Podcast Episode · Forkin' Good with Simon Gault & Kate Fenwick · 21 September · 55min

21/09/2026

Always love to have a yarn with Prof Grant Schofield ...you never know where the conversation might end up!

The Science That Could Change Mental Healthcare, If Regulations Would Let It!

We love to see Prof Grant Schofield challenged and Prof Julia Rucklidge - Mental Health & Nutrition Research: Te Puna Toiora doesn't hold back 👏

Great read or listen to the podcast episode 👉 https://hubs.ly/Q04w_2s70

20/09/2026

Well, this isn't the kind of AD that I expected to wake up to this morning. Full page spread in the New Zealand herald. So many things on this list are things that I and so many other people in the preventative lifestyle space have been talking about for years. It also covers things that I've been talking about with politicians for the last 3 years such as funding nutritional interventions, removing pharmac and medsafe barriers to making micronutrient interventions mainstream, supporting Farmers to grow nutrient-rich food etc.

Can we trust New Zealand First? One thing I've learned over the last 3 years is that if something isn't stated ahead of the election in a policy, there's no way it's going to get addressed during that term. So the hope that I have here is that at least it's now in policy. Will that translate? Hard to know..... So many times politicians make promises that simply don't ever get delivered.

It is refreshing that finally a political party is talking about prevention rather than continuing to discuss further ways they can send more ambulances to the bottom of the cliff. Those are steps in the right direction. Even more hopeful would be that other political parties follow suit and also come up with policies that will be in the preventative health space.

Make New Zealand Healthy - MNZH

16/09/2026

10/09/2026

More evidence that the food environment is not meeting the nutritional needs of our children's developing brains.

Over 80% of foods marketed to toddlers in the United States are ultraprocessed, while nearly half also fail to meet global nutritional guidelines, a new study found.