Food related behaviour? Got any suggestions

[mumofthreebeauties]

My DS has been playing up at school.

It is not all the time, and the SENCO asked if it could be food related.

He has cereal in the morning and takes a piece of fruit for snack and a carton/drink. I don;t buy squashes with a lot of additives but they're hard to avoid.

Usually it's caprisun or fruit juice cartons he has.

Any ideas or experiences greatly received.

is it a sugary cereal? also I seem to remember that capri sun is just posh squash isn't it?

..oh right - I thought you said you don't buy squashes at all.

could be the sugar or additives in that.

I would say switch the squash for Rock's organic squash. All natural ingredients and u can get it in most supermarkets. It is about £1.79 though.

Look at the sugar content in things and colours. I wouldn't let my kids have capri sun as it's full of additives, go for plain fruit juice or water instead.

Also the additives which can cause hyperactivity in children are available in all kinds of foods, it's not just colourings but also preservatives and flavourings. If you google, you can get a list of additives which are thought to affect some childrens' behaviour. We did this for ds1 and found that all the usual things you would suspect like Smarties, M&Ms etc were on the list but also things like jelly, sausages etc We cut all those things in ds1's diet and it made a huge difference to his behviour. TBH, he didn't have many of those things anyway but for us the huge one was squash. Even the toothkind ones are stuffed full of artificial sweeteners etc so we switched to Rocks. Caprisun is a big no-no as is anything which calls itself a fruit "drink" - this seems to equate to 10% fruit and a load of junk thrown in.

The changes made a huge difference to his behaviour and at the same time we started him on fish oils.

In addition to sugars and colouring additives, artificial sweetners could also be behind some behavioural issues.

hi mumof3beauties,
if his behaviour is caused by additives, it wont be just the morning food, but any food that he eats at any time of the day (results are not immediate, but may come a day or so after eating the food)

my brother was adhd, and his behaviour was food related. when my mother first heard about it, she put the whole family on an additive free diet, and his behaviour changed dramatically within about 3 days.(from impossible to normal)

you have to read every single label of every single food that your ds eats, including stuff like margerine that you may use in cooking. The simplest thing is to start from scratch and identify some additive free foods.
eg weetabix, milk, fruit, pure juice, home cooked meat and veg, pasta, rice etc, home made cakes or posh healthy ones from something like the Sainsbury's free from range but check the label! Or buy health food bars, but again, check the labels.
Also cut out foods with excessive sugar or sweeteners, and caffeine containing foods like chocolate, coca cola.

then try the resulting diet for about 3 weeks and see if you notice any difference.

there are quite a few self help books around, they describe fairly accurately the symptoms, and may give you more tips on exclusion diets.

Just backing up Nightynight and the others. Took my DS1 off artificial colours, flavours, preservatives and sweeteners 18 months ago and haven't looked back. Much calmer, no asthma, no wet pants during the day....Loads more benefits too in terms of behaviour and concentration. I always recommend \link{http://www.fedupwithfoodadditives.info/this very informative website} if you are interested in finding out more about food intolerances. Good luck! It can be daunting at first, but the results are so worthwhile.

Let's try the link again: hope this works

I'm just about to prepare the shopping list and am going through what he normally takes to school - which is fruit and a carton of drink.

Are the pure apple and orange cartons from ASDA ok.

What snacks at home do you use. I don;t normally let them have too many sweets anyway and go for chocolate rather than multicoloured jelly sweets.

He did have robinsons orange squash at pizza hut a couple of nights ago and was very naughty in the car on the way back.

Might try fish oils as well.

Pure juice is fine - well, at least in terms of no additives, colours etc! For snacks we use at various times - raisins, dried apricots, fruit flakes, fruit or cereal bars (you still need to read those carefully because even some of the ones without artificial additives are so stuffed with sugar that they're a whole problem to themselves), any easy fruit or veg - apples, bananas, grapes, carrot sticks - cheese (real stuff, not cheese strings etc), breadsticks. I'm sure there's more but I can't think. If you need to give something sweet, hob nobs, jaffa cakes or rich tea-type biscuits work for us.

As someone else said though, you have to look at the whole menu and not just snack foods and food at school. Lots of ready meals and frozen foods have "bad" colourings or preservatives and the effect on behavious seems to be cumulative although certainly in our case the improvement in behaviour when you identify the culprits seems to be immediate.

And in fact for my son pure juice is bad as well - too many salicylates. But definitely starting off getting rid of the 'nasties' will help.

Today i started with fis oils and after I'd given it to him i noticed it had preservatives in it.

It was haliborange syrup - any ideas for less 'chemical' varieties.