A few years ago difficult child 3 was part of a study into diet and autism - they were looking at whether modifying his diet could bring about improvements in various issues such as anxiety, nausea, behaviour problems, mood problems etc. According to the work they'd done, I think they said about 40% improved in various ways when on the diet. For us, it was too difficult to test properly because there were too many variables, including environment. But we didn't find anything really amazingly startling.
But that was for us - there were others who found a lot of improvement. it really was a matter of testing and seeing, for each individual child.
A few cautions here - first, this wasn't specifically for "ODD" although reading between the lines there would have been kids who could qualify as ODD, who would have found improvement. And not just in anger management, but in any of a large number of symptoms.
The study wasn't looking at bipolar or any other disorder, but I can't see why there couldn't be any possible connection with bipolar, if there is for autism. We DO know that for a lot of difficult children, it takes a lot less change, a lot less 'feeling unwell', to really throw them off.
This was a LEGIT scientific study. By this I mean that to be part of the study you should not be charged a fee. Of course we had to buy difficult child 3's food according to their guidelines, but there was nothing we couldn't get commercially. They also gave us some capsules containing "challenge ingredients" to try as part of the study - we actually didn't get that far, unfortunately. But these challenge capsules were to be used the same way - keep him on the diet until he's been stable for several weeks then give him a capsule to take. They had them numbered and gave us a sequence in which they were to be tested. The capsules were double-blinded, which means that we didn't know what was in each one, and neither did the researchers. The only ones who would know were some technicians in a lab somewhere who had the information locked in a computer and unavailable to the researchers or doctors involved until after each person's study had been completed. Each individual box of capsules was individually put together, so difficult child 3's box of capsules were numbered randomly, not necessarily corresponding in any way to any other patient's.
Now for some BIG cautions - if you're going to try this, you have to really do it properly. I'm (allegedly) intelligent and educated specifically in physiology, chemistry etc. I expected I would be able to pick this up really quickly, not make a lot of the mistakes most people make, and be able to manage it easily. But frankly, I was just as much in need of professional guidance as anyone else. When you begin something like this it's like going back to school and starting over from the beginning, learning entirely new stuff all in a very short time.
In other words, you might think you could do this easily, how hard can it be? But in fact, it's very involved and complex.
What we had to do, in a nutshell - first we had to eliminate any possible causative agents from difficult child 3's diet. He had to be free of these things for several weeks before we could try reintroducing various food groups to see if there was any change. We had to reintroduce groups one at a time, so we could immediately identify which was the problem. Any reaction - back on the diet for more weeks, until his system was cleared again, then trying ANOTHER group.
To do this right, we had to record everything he ate or drank. This includes medicines and even stuff like mouthwash and toothpaste. We were given booklets with the food groups explained. Brand names, ingredient numbers, safe alternatives were given.
To truly eliminate all likely problem foods requires a very extreme diet. You could think you only need to eliminate gluten, for example, only to find out much later that the child reacts to both gluten and amines - in which case, eliminating one but not the other results in no observed change.
To find out more, see if you can Google information on the hospital or the researchers.
The hospital is Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH) in Sydney - it's a teaching hospital attached to Sydney University. The researchers - Dr Rob Loblay, Dr Velencia Soutter (both pediatric immunologists), Ms Anne Swain (dietician specialising in food sensitivity diets) and others. They are the main ones to look for.
This research was Australia-based which means a lot of their food information was specific to manufactured foods on the Australian market. You could have the same brand of biscuit, for example, in the US market but it could well have different ingredients. As a result, you would need to find a dietician who could help you with information specific to your locality; or failing that, be able to find out absolutely everything yourself (a huge task).
It's not just a matter of eliminating all processed foods, or all gluten-containing foods. "Eat a healthy, natural diet and you'll be on the right track" - sorry, nowhere near enough.
The various food groups they tested for (and I'm working from memory here, plus they'll have refined their work even more since we were involved, so this list is not guaranteed to be complete):
1) Salicylates. These can occur naturally in a lot of healthy natural food, as well as in additives. A lot of herbs and spices have high salicylate levels. Basically, anything with flavour.
2) Amines. Also associated with flavour, but this is a different group. Foods high in amines include chocolate, honey, bananas. There is a lot more.
3) Gluten. It's the sticky stuff that holds a lot of foods together, such as bread. If you bake with a low gluten flour, it won't rise well because bread needs the gluten to hold onto the carbon dioxide bubbles.
4) Wheat. Someone can be allergic or sensitive to gluten but still be able to eat spelt flour, for example (spelt is a primitive strain of wheat which was used in the Middle Ages, before selective breeding produced high gluten grain). Or someone can be so sensitive to wheat that even eating a single caramel (which somehow contains a trace of wheat protein) can trigger nasty symptoms.
5) Milk protein. This can be complicated. You could have a problem with just cow's milk, or any animal-produced milk. Or lactose. And for some people switching to soy milk can also be a disaster.
6) Soy. Thought I'd better include it here. It's a surprisingly common allergen.
7) Artificial additives. Colours, flavours and preservatives. You can be sensitive to just one, or a lot. Or all of them. But chemically they vary widely. Some things are labelled as "artificial additives" when they are from a natural source. For example, caramel is used as an artificial colour sometimes, even though it's made form sugar being heated.
There are more but it's all I can think of right now.
The diet needed to ensure you have eliminated ALL possible causes of sensitivity reaction or allergic reaction is extreme. If your child is non-compliant then it's almost impossible to do this. difficult child 3 was highly compliant but even though he would read labels carefully and check the lists regularly, he still sometimes made mistakes, and then we would have to begin our two week countdown all over again.
It's not a healthy diet, either. To begin with difficult child 3 was restricted to peeled potato which he could eat mashed (salt but no butter), in pieces, steamed, or dry-roasted (no oil). He could have steamed white rice (salt, no butter). One variety of pear was permitted, peeled. He could have chicken (no skin) provided it was roasted with no seasoning other than salt. This meant checking manufacture, because some chicken is prepared with flavour shots during processing. Therefore some brands had to be avoided. He could have lamb (again, no seasoning other than salt). For sweet things - he could have anything made with sucrose but no added flavour. So he could have home-made caramels and toffee, providing they contained nothing but sugar. Home-made honeycomb made by adding sodium bicarbonate to a hot sugar syrup - he could have that, too.
To drink - water.
Naturally he needed to take supplements, but they had to be checked out for ingredients on the banned list.
Toothpaste - it's generally mint-flavoured, and mint is very high in salicylates. We had to really hunt around. In some cases, you have to switch to cleaning teeth using sodium bicarbonate on the soap.
Water - we had to use filtered drinking water if at all possible, because of the added chlorine in our town supply.
As you can see, to do this right is really complicated. And restricting diet to such an extreme actually increases the risk of developing sensitivities to those few foods remaining (because you're in contact with it so much!)
You could try eliminating just one group and if you're lucky you could find a drastic improvement. But failing to find any improvement by doing it this way is no guarantee that it's not possible.
We did find we got better compliance from difficult child 3 when we explained just why we were doing this. He wanted to feel better and to be able to cope better, so he really made an effort.
I hope you can find some help and information on this. The doctors and the dietician I mentioned above did write a book titled "Friendly Food" which included recipes; it was for a wide range of food sensitivity problems and was well put together. However, I don't know how easy it would be to get, plus it was primarily written for Australian conditions. It was very cheap - much cheaper than many similar cookbooks, because I think they subsidised it. I'm also not sure if it's still available, although it should be because they're still doing this sort of work and people do need a book like this.
Good luck with your search - I hope you can find something that can help.
Marg