Eating My Own Words
When Wren was about 4½, her preschool teachers noticed that she seemed to be having problems coping emotionally.
While her friends had begun to shrug off knock~backs and disappointments, she continued to be overly upset and throw tantrums. She didn’t seem to be developing emotionally, somehow.
I wasn’t too concerned at first, as each child develops at their own rate, but when she continued having problems after her 5th birthday, I began to look for a reason.
Grandma had been watching one of those current affairs shows and suggested that it might be worth a try.
Now, before this, I’d often watched current affairs shows tout the terrible effects of food colourings and scoffed. Look at those parents blaming something else for their rotten parenting, I’d think.
But, as a last resort, I did some research into reducing the number of artificial food colourings in our foods. I started with Wren’s favourite foods and drinks and the colourings in those.
Because the problem had become worse since switching Wren’s favourite drink, I was able to narrow the problem to two colourings in particular. These were Tartrazine (102) and the appealingly~named Sunset Yellow FCF (110).
I was surprised at the number and types of foods that contained them. Some I’d thought were actually healthy.
I still didn’t expect to see much difference in Wren’s behaviour, and it certainly wouldn’t show for a couple of weeks.
The next day at around lunch time, I noticed that Wren had only had one small tantrum that day. It had been about 18 hours since she’d last had either of those food colourings.
Within 3 days, it was as though I was dealing with a different child. I had my sweetheart, my angel, my beautiful kind daughter, back again.
The reason I’m bringing this up now is that Mr Bump’s behaviour has deteriorated since about Easter and I’m again reviewing our foods.
I wanted to share the most valuable online resource that I have been able to find, and hopefully help someone else’s little angel to return to normal.
Edited to add:
As I’m still researching, I’ll be adding any helpful new links here over the next few days.
If you have one to share, email me and I’ll pop it in here and credit the find to you.