While I agree with you on the basic premise that those scans are likely reflection of how ADHD brain works in general and not strictly how ADHD brains processes glucose.
It's been shown that ketogenic diets - where whole body and brain switch to fat/ketones instead of glucose for power helps with Epilepsy (and was it also Parkinsons).
In my biochemistry class at MIT during undergrad, the professor showed during the section on the krebs cycle that the pop-culture concept of "ketogenic diet" is almost never actually doing what people believe.
To force your body into a purely ketone metabolism, you'd need to restrict not just carbohydrates but also protein. If a person is eating a high-fat, high-protein diet, their body will make glucose/glycogen from that.
Not to say there isn't value in a low-sugar diet. There's a whole cascade of other things happening metabolically in response to blood sugar. Just that the notion of "burning ketones instead of glucose" is a medical myth, like "depression is because you have too little serotonin in your brain".
>To force your body into a purely ketone metabolism, you'd need to restrict not just carbohydrates but also protein. If a person is eating a high-fat, high-protein diet, their body will make glucose/glycogen from that.
That is expected and fine. It wont make glucose/glycogen in the same way/manner it would do from carbs though, and it's not really a problem for getting into ketosis and staying there (as shown by ketone measurements).
That professor was making a pedantic argument it seems.
THere's some evidence, yes, but there's also research that suggests that ketogenic diets can lead to increased risk of heart failure, blood pressure issues, increased risk of kidney stones, so it's really a bit of an evaluation on a case by case basis on what the benefits vs drawbacks are in each individual case, rather than a blanket recommendation that everyone with ADHD/epilepsy/Parkinson's/whatever follows a ketogenic diet.
AFAIK they usually form ahead of ketogenic diet - when people are eating little fat and dont need much enzyme/bile - it's not flushed from gallbladder often enough.
And then increased fat consumption on ketogenic (or Paleo, Mediterranean, Carnivore ...etc) diet requires flushing gallbladder - and only then you realize you have gallbladder stones.
Anyway - true ketogenic diet is hard to pull off and maintain. Even just few glasses of milk (~2.5g of carbs per 100ml) could take you out of ketosis.
Same for basically any typical fruit (e.g. apple, pear, orange, banana...etc) where one fruit is enough carbs to take you out of ketosis.
So it's more realistic to sustain low carb with <=50g of carbs per day, and get most of benefits (including weight loss without increasing exercise) without too much risk of all the mentioned negatives.
Of course YMMV, and you should consult at least your GP (or other specialists) before changing your diet a lot.
In personal experience - such low carb diet works nice in combo with skipping breakfast (not quite intermittent fasting, but time between first and last meal is shorter than time from last meal until next days meal).
If anyone is like me and can't really skip breakfast, nor at least delay first meal until noon.
I've found drinking "bulletproof coffee" takes case of hunger and energy until actual lunch time.
Despite media hype it can be just water, coffee - instant or grounded Turkish/Greek/Balkan style, espresso isn't enough liquid for full mug - with butter and coconut aka MTC oil.
And of course if such coffee doesn't work for you as meal replacement. Then eggs, bacon/sausages, avocado (no bread, no beans, no orange/apple/etc juice) is a perfect (practically 0 carbs) meal that works for breakfast, brunch or dinner.
Premise there is that while "normal" (average neuro typical) brain works just fine with either glucose or ketones - it's different for non-typical brains.
And through bypassing damaged or suboptimal glucose pathways, you also bypass problems that come with it.
Of course it might also be that ADHD brains simply do come from evolution of what used to be Hunters (as opposed to Gatherers). It wouldn't be too unreasonable to think Hunters ate more fat and protein than Gatherers.
Personal ADHD anecdote - being on low carb or keto was really helping with energy and focus.
We were not exactly counting all the nutrients in details. Since we normally eat a lot of protein and fat (think almost mediterranean diet), we basically focused on eating as little carbs as possible - no bread/pasta/potatoes/etc (even whole banana would be too much carbs in a day).
On the other hand - back as undiagnosed kid, I've used "white coffee" (milk, sugar and 10%~20% of normal coffee/caffeine) and even bits of chocolate throughout study/tests/exams.
When I started doing this "Internet stuff" we were called "webmasters", and job would actually include what today we call:
- DevOps
- Server/Linux sysadmin
- DB admin
- Full stack (backend and frontend) engineer
Why pointing out Calculus as opposed to just Math?
Might be just my Eastern Europe background where it was all just "Math" and both equations (that's Algebra I guess) and simpler functions/analysis (Calculus?) are taught in elementary school around age 14 or 15.
Maybe I'm missing/forgetting something - I think I used Calculus more during electrical engineering than for computer/software engineering.
In my central european university we've learned "Real Analysis" that was way more concerned about theorems and proofs rather than "calculating" something - if anything, actually calculating derivatives or integrals was a warmup problem to the meat of the subject.
Calculus, because all of engineering depends critically on the modeling of real world phenomena using ordinary or partial differential equations.
I don’t mean to disregard other branches of math — of course they’re useful — but calculus stands out in specific _applicability_ to engineering.
Literally every single branch of engineering. All o then. Petrochemical engineering to Biotech. They all use calculus as a fundamental block of study.
Discovering new drugs using Pk/Pd modeling is driven by modeling then drug<->pathogen repo as cycles using Lotka models.
Im not saying engineers dont need to learn stats or arithmetic. IMO those are more fundamental to _all_ fields, janitors or physicians or any field really. But calculus is fundamental to engineering alone.
Perhaps, a begrudging exception I can make is its applications in Finance.
But every other field where people build rockets, cars, airplanes, drugs, or ai robots, you’d need proficiency in calculus just as much as you’d need proficiency in writing or proficiency in arithmetic.
True, we learnt calculus before college in my home country - but it was just basic stuff. But I learnt a lot more of it including partial derivatives in first year of engineering college.
>I think I used Calculus more during electrical engineering than for computer/software engineering.
I think that was OPs point - most engineering disciplines teach it.
Yeah computer science went through this weird offshoot for 30-40 years where calculus was simply taught because of tradition.
It was not really necessary through all of the app developers eras. In fact, it’s so much so the case that many software engineers graduating from 2000-2015 or so work as software engineers without a degree in BS. Rather, they could drop the physics & calculus grind and opt for a BA in computer science. They then went on to become proficient software engineers in the industry.
It’s only after the recent advances of AI around 2012/2015 did a proficiency in calculus become crucial to software engineering again.
I mean, there’s a whole rabbit hole of knowledge on the reason why ML frameworks deal with calculating vector-Jacobian or Jacobian-vector products. Appreciating that and their relation to gradient is necessary to design & debug frameworks like PyTorch or MLX.
Sure, I will concede that a sans-calculus training (BA in Computer Science) can still be sufficiently useful to working as an ML engineer in data analytics, api/services/framework design, infrastructure, systems engineering, and perhaps even inference engineering. But I bet all those people will need to be proficient in calculus the more they have to deal with debugging models.
Before covid and being in office - "core hours" meant you needed to physically be in office during those hours on almost all days - basically all work days except occasional doctor/dentist/signing-contract-to-buy-house/sick type of situations. And had flexibility to come in earlier or stay later.
In your case it seems to be the same definition of core hours.
Or this "trust to balance their work and life" means it would really be OK for someone to say something like "I'm regularly pick up kids from school/daycare during those last 2 core hours"?
While installing it initially might be technical, these days they also sell things with it preinstalled.
After tuning on HA for the first time, it just recognized our heating system (Plugwise, it's also zigbee but custom/closed), Christmas Tree lights, Smart Reader of our Electricity & Gas (as in district "propane"), Foscam and Reolink cameras and doorbell ...etc.
All those things just asked for username/password set for that service/device and everything just worked.
And actually controlling of things like TV (well Chromecast part of it that's built into) just work without authentication.
And while Zigbee Coordinators required some flashing of firmware updates. From there on it was very similar to any other smart device system.
Sounds like those parents would benefit from having a Chromebook?
If they want to play games then SteamDeck or such
Otherwise for phones, I just give my mum same/similar device to one I'm using (e.g. Motorola Moto G[number]). There's ~1800km in between us, so by using same or very similar device - I can hand hold her step by step.
And actually phone is usually not a problem - it's the TV. In order to have good Internet we've switched her from cable (coax so TV tuner was same as last few decades) to fiber. With fiber, now TV is basically IPTV/SmartTV - and she just wants to turn it on and use +/- and digits for channels and volume.
The best example I had of the same (started with Amstrad CPC, then Amiga, PC ... software engineer for almost two decades).
I couldn't find "Find on page" on iOS/Safari, so I did a Google search on how to so it - result snippet on Google was cut and actual results page was full page of forum replies, and I was having trouble finding it by just scrolling.
Now years later (and only Android) I forgot, it was something rather non intuitive where they've hidden that option.
It's been same before EU or other similar multiple country things.
Back then some politicians were getting "promoted" into ambassadors of some faraway country, or decided to become university professors, if not flat out sent to "Goli Otok", "Siberia" ...etc.
Since that mentality/way-of-doing politics has been around for a while - it will not be easy to get the political establishment to change.
Anyway - Croatia also has digital nomad visa. Mentioning just in case OP needs to be close enough to Iceland timezone, and wants better weather ...etc.
It's been shown that ketogenic diets - where whole body and brain switch to fat/ketones instead of glucose for power helps with Epilepsy (and was it also Parkinsons).