The Feingold Foodlist

Today, I’m preparing to go grocery shopping. Buying food, not cooking it, is at the heart of making the Feingold Program work. The Feingold Foodlist is the cornerstone of the program, the grocery shopping Bible of those who follow it. I keep my Foodlist in my glove compartment so I don’t have to worry about forgetting it at home.
What is the Foodlist, anyway? Most of the food available in grocery stores is processed with artificial colors and flavors, as well as preservatives to keep it from spoiling on the shelf. Simply reading labels while I shop won’t help me much because food companies are not required to list trace amount of products used to prepare the food. The packaging may claim that the product is “all-natural” with no artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives, but if the product is not on the Foodlist, it is not acceptable.
The wonderful folks at the Feingold Association of the United States patiently research all the products in our food supply, and if a company won’t release all of the ingredients used in a product, that product won’t go on the Foodlist. The booklet is divided into categories such as beverages, baking products, deli meat, convenience foods, snacks, and soups. I am restricted to buying only the products that are on the list, but with patience and determination, I’ve become familiar with the list and created shopping habits that support the program.
What does this mean for my shopping excursion, practically speaking? I make a shopping list that identifies specific flavors of specific brands of specific products. I write down which flavors of which brands of soy yogurt I can buy. The same goes for potato chips, cookies, cooking oil, pasta, bread, and deli meat. I don’t have to be concerned about items such as flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and fresh meat. For fresh vegetables and produce, I need only be mindful of which high salicylate items I’m avoiding. My list includes berries, peaches, plums, and peppers, to name a few.
This seems like a lot of effort, figuring out what to buy. Yet all of us make shopping choices all the time. We have certain brands of certain product that we prefer, mostly as a result of advertising. The difference is for me is that the behavior of my child and her academic and social success are at stake.
I don’t rely on product preference as much as I rely on food companies to produce foods without harmful additives. With our growing awareness of the perils of eating American food, I can only hope that food companies will read the writing on the wall and make my job easier. For now, however, I’m relying on the Feingold Foodlist.

Experiments with Medication

Yesterday morning, my daughter pulled off half her clothes and ran around the backyard drenching herself with the hose. By evening, she had peed on the bathroom floor without telling anyone about it, thrown a screaming fit over her punishment for the morning’s antics—not going swimming, and jumped fully clothed into the baby pool when we went to pick her sister up from the pool. You could say that all of the above behavior resulted from a lack of supervision on my part, but is that the behavior of a typical six-year-old?
Yes, my daughter has severe ADHD, which means that she has a devil of a time sitting still, paying attention, and thinking before acting. For the past couple of years, we have controlled her behavior with nutrition, eliminating artificial colors and flavors, preservatives, and salicylates from her diet. This strict nutritional regimen, known as the Feingold Program, has worked wonders. Ana is not nearly as hyperactive and impulsive as she had been before we started the program, but she still has such difficulty paying attention that it affected her schoolwork. So we decided to try medication.
The first medication we tried had none of the offending ingredients we work so hard to avoid, but it caused alarming side effects. Now we’re trying another med that is only manufactured with artificial colors in pill form and artificial flavors in liquid form. We’re trying it anyway.
Why? Why would we give our child something we know is not good for her? Perhaps the medication will be strong enough to counteract the effects of the dye, or perhaps not. We’ll never know unless we try, and with her academic and social success at stake, we feel obligated to try. Such is the adventure of raising a child with ADHD.