Last year, my then six-year-old son was having a lot of trouble focusing at school. We were having minor behavior issues and his sleep was terrible. Not always mind you, it wasn’t daily but enough that I sought help from my trusted tribe of moms and our pediatrician.
These conversations lead me to my task to remove food dyes from our pantry.
This process is an ongoing one because food-dyes are in SOOO many things that tend to be staples in many of our pantries. In the last year, I have had to get much better about reading labels not only for food for myself but especially in the foods I buy for my kids.
I am not perfect and if I am doing a lot of online shopping for curbside or Shipt I’ll admit I am not as diligent about making sure I am looking at food labels.
When this was all suggested to me, I really wasn’t sure that it would make a difference. I’ll be honest I haven’t paid much attention to the ingredients in the foods that we buy. Even when I do look at the label it is mostly to see the calories, proteins, and carbs. I also didn’t realize just how much of the food we ate had food-dye in it!
Like pickles! Most of the store-bought pickles we buy have the dye Yellow 5 in them, or on the HEB brand ones that are in my fridge, it is referred to as Amarillo 5, I wonder if the change in name is to try and hide the fact that there is food dye in them.
Food is really important, and over the last year, I can definitely say I can now see the correlation between what my kids eat and their behavior or moods.
For example, I realized just this last week that my son’s behavior was noticeably different, he was lashing out and very moody (even on the weekends when he didn’t have to wake up early). I tried to think about things that had changed and the only thing I could think of was his lunch for school. While it was free of any RED 40 dye, which is one of the more widely used dyes and one of the more controversial food additives. (You can read more about Red 40 specifically here.) His lunch was full of things that I knew would fill him, but not necessarily FUEL him. Since he no longer gets an afternoon snack time I was determined to make sure his lunch was enough to get him to the end of the day. But was it really what his brain and body needed.
This week in addition to Dye-free foods I made sure that 95% of his lunch was fresh foods that would do his body good. And it made a world of difference, his attitude and behavior has been much more “normal” and he was not as irritable even by the end of the day when he was tired and ready for bed.
I’m not going to lie, trying to rid food-dye from your diet is a daunting task and it takes trial and error. Some days in the store you will feel like you have conquered the dye, and others you will feel like you can not buy ANYTHING! I did a lot of reading on how I could still find foods and easy snacks my kids would eat but avoid the food-dyes.
Here are a few resources that I have used:
100 days of real food was one I found myself going to a lot, you can find an article about ways to find and avoid food dye here.
Kitchen Stewardship: Baby steps to real food and natural living, has an article about giving up food-dye for lent and the effects here!
You can find a list of natural food dyes here!
If you find yourself in my shoes, maybe your child is struggling and people have suggested a change in diet. Maybe you are a skeptic like I was, I can tell you that it really does make a world of difference! I won’t tell you it is easy, because unfortunately, it is not. I will tell you that it is worth it! It helps my son who already struggles with the focus to have an easier time at school, it helps with irritability and mood swings in both of my children and it helps with my daughter’s eczema breakouts.
What questions do you have about the effects of dye in the things we eat? How do you feel about the foods you are finding have dye in them that you were unaware of? Will you take on the task of clearing your pantry of food-dye?
