Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas

vegetable that i would maybe love if it was with something else as a side but that combination is kind of like icky for me i just look at it and i'm already thinking oh my god this is not going to satisfy me and from a nutritional point of view it's got all the macros so it's got the protein and it's got the fiber and the polyphenols and everything else so i'm thinking gut brain connection muscle you know power for my inner so i don't get hungry so i get kind of a you know a good

protein intake, so my blood sugar is regulated.

So all of that is kind of like ticking in.

All of those considerations are neurotypical considerations.

So what we haven't actually considered is that nutrition as a whole is very neuro-normative.

The norms of nutrition have been kind of a white colonial neuro-normative for as long as they have been around.

They haven't actually considered the ins and outs of

ethnic origin of people that may actually, you know, I had a student last year who did a very interesting project and she was talking about how in Bangladesh, if you have, she was from Bangladeshi origin, and in Bangladesh, if you have cooked rice the previous day, you don't eat it the following day because it's considered to be dirty.

Whereas we talk about rice cooked the previous day as a source of resistant starch.

And we were talking about how resistant starch is good for your microbiome and your gut microbes love it.

And, you know, it's like source of undigestible fiber in a way that is good for your gut.

And it comes from some carbs that have been cooked and then cooled down like rice or potatoes or pasta.

But we haven't actually stopped to think that in some cultures that is kind of like taboo.

You don't do that.

You know, how dare you give me like rice from the day before in Bangladesh thinking that it's going to be good for me.

Well, it's the same thing.

You know, if we extrapolate that to another audience that is neurodivergent people, what do we value that for us would be outrageous, but maybe for a neurotypical person that would be all over it and, you know, lap it up.

It will be on the basis that, okay, so it will be and it won't be in a sense, you know, there is no ADHD clear signature that would allow me to just look at somebody's poo sample and say, oh, he's got ADHD versus somebody who doesn't because the literature is so mixed.

It's very heterogeneous.

It's not clear enough to say, oh, somebody with ADHD has got a lot of this