Red 40

Yesterday was a great day for Tara with Camden. He was well behaved, didn't have any potty accidents and took discipline well. Why so good one day and so bad another? She was reading on one of her message boards about other moms with troublesome three year olds and some intersting observations they've made. Apparently a common food additive called Red Dye #40 can have negative affects on a childs behavior. Not all kids...but some. We've decided to give it a little test with Camden.

Recently he's fallen in love with Crystal Light Fruit Punch and has been drinking it for almost every meal. It has no sugar or any other 'bad things' I thought we wanted to keep him away from. It does however contain Red40. Yesterday, he had no Crystal Light Fruit Punch and was an angel. We're going to keep him off of anything with Red40 as best we can for the next few days and see what happens. We'll have to be diligent to keep track of what he eats and stay away from Red40....it's in a lot of food.

Here are a few of the stories we read yesterday that helped us decide to give this a try:
http://floridadalton.com/files/RedDyeAwareness.htm
http://lifeaslou.blogsome.com/2008/01/21/red-40-and-cracking-the-bad-behavior-code

We'll report back in a few days and document our findings for Camden. Our plan is to keep him off Red40 for a few days then give him some Fruit Punch (which we guess has a lot of it) and see what happens. Pray for us!! We really want this to be our solution for keeping our sweet well-behaved boy around more consistently!