Fast Food and Feingold

Today, boys and girls, we're going to have a word about Fast Food and Feingold.

As parents of ADHD kids, on a budget no less, early on we investigated non-medication methods for treating the wonderful adverse symptoms of... hey, is that a butterfly?

MWHAHAHA... Now that I have lost your attention...
One of the treatments we investigated is diet. Specifically, the Feingold Diet. The principle behind the diet is that we have lots of additives in our food that companies have put in there to make it fresher, brighter, tastier, and, well, many other ERs.

Food companies are in the business of making money. It's what they do, and why they exist, and we shouldn't shame them for it. After all, they employ a LOT of us, including now my oldest son, yay, he got a JOB!

But in order to make money, they need to pull out the sugar, which is kinda expensive, and replace it with Corn Syrup, which is also now kind of expensive, since we run our CARS on it. (go figure...). And they add BHT (Does anybody even know or care what that stands for??) to the packaging so that your cereal will stay fresher longer, meaning more can be on the shelf for you, and it can have a sell-by date many months in the future, rather than, like, next week...

Because you like your food brighter, they add artificial colors, like Red Dye #5. Or Yellow Dye #2. Sort of like Crayola, except you eat this stuff. Really, you DO. Just read the label on the stuff you're eating now while reading this. Those ingredients are just a tad scary.

So, these companies had the bright idea to add all this stuff into the food you eat. Nobody, not even the FDA, had a really good idea what that might do to you over the long haul, but they tested it out on mice and prisoners and some folks from Bug Guts MS, and there were no real ill effects. Right.

So, the basis on the Feingold Diet is to eat fresh food, and avoid all that other stuff you don't really need in you, because believe it or not, it really does seem to affect your brain. That's right, the effects of those chemicals affect your brain.

Anyway, lest I ramble further, we tried the Feingold Diet (There was an entrance fee for their book and subscription to their newsletter and website and some other goodies, and believe it or not, the DIET WORKED. Bringing a verse to mind, Psalm 34:8.

 

Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good;
Blessed is the man who trusts in Him!

I came into work after two weeks on the diet, and my head was clear for the first time in, like, ever, and I could actually think faster, talk slower, react more calmly, and in general was no fun anymore for my coworkers, who enjoyed my daily rants. One of them actually stopped me outside her office and said, "Ok, who are you, and what have you done with Chris??"

One of my coworkers actually started dropping by my office before staff meetings and giving me a Snickers Bar and a Mountain Dew so I would be good and wound up before our weekly staff meetings.

 

That's right, my coworkers sabotaged the diet, because I was no fun anymore.

Also, though the diet does not seem expensive, it actually is. You see, companies can sell cheaper food, well, cheaper, because fresh, natural, organic food is harder to grow, doesn't stay fresh as long, and therefore, costs more.

So now, we've got all the kids on medication, but one thing the diet DID do for us is give us a hunger for fresh food. So, while we do occasionally stop at McDonalds or Wendys for fast food, when we head to the grocery store, we usually try to pick up organics like apples and salad stuff.

So this weekend Rebecca came home with a bag of apples, intending to put them in a bowl on the table. But by the time she got a bowl out, this was all that was left...

Now, THAT's what I call FAST FOOD.

Late Night Snack??

This morning, when I came down to fix coffee, There was an empty jar of Peter Pan peanut butter (creamy) on the counter, and this mess in front of it...

My first thought was, which of my four kids got up in the middle of the night, to make themselves a sandwich? And why a fork? a Spoon? A bowl??

So, I hollered up at my oldest dear son, asking him what was up with the PB sandwich late at night?

He really had no clue what it was about, and blamed the 4yo.

Hmmm. I couldn't see the 4yo doing this, and the finger smears through the middle of the bowl didn't look like toddler fingers...

Then I went into the bathroom.

It appears that the peanut-butter culprit also wanted some hand lotion. But why in the world? And with peanut butter all over their hands, too! What in the world?

So, then I looked next to the Lubriderm, and there was peanut butter smeared on the gargantuan Sams bottle of hand sanitizer. Looked like whoever the culprit was, they desperately wanted 'clean hands and a pure heart'.


Next to the hand sanitizer, it appeared the water faucet had been turned on by Peter Pan also, and there was also peanut butter under the tap, dripping down into the sink. Yuch. Peter was desperate to get those hands clean.


So, I started asking questions of the kids. Finally, R, the 11yo daughter, admitted it was her. Apparently, she'd gotten some of this stuff called 'Zing' gum. Here's the packet of it, pulled out of the trash.

She decided that if one stick of gum was yummy, then all 15 sticks of gum would be even more yummy. So, she crammed them all in her mouth, and sat up reading a 'Charlie Bone' novel until 2am, when she started to fall asleep in her gum and in her book too.

She knew it wasn't good to go to sleep with gum in your mouth (A baseball-sized wad is such a choking hazard, you know...) so she pulled it out of her mouth. But gum that's been chewed all day and all night tends to gain in stickiness, or at least, that's some of the 'Zing' in 'Zing'. It turned into a goo on the level of taffy, with an adhesive coefficient of tackiness equal to that of Gorilla Glue.

First it stuck to one hand, then the other, as she attempted to get it off the other hand. One finger after another was imprisoned in the wad of goo, until she had a cats cradle between her hands, like a pink spiderweb.

Eventually she managed to get downstairs, open a jar of peanutbutter, and sacrifice all its contents to remove the glue from her hands, her arms, and her face.

The peanut butter worked, but removing slimy peanutbutter from your body at 2am apparently requires liberal application of Lubriderm, Hand Sanitizer, and Cold Water.

Lucky for the rest of us, chemical reactions involving lanolin, alcohol, and peanut oil do not in fact cause fires or spontaneous explosions.

Or so their packages seem to imply. But I think I'm going to write the manufacturers of 'Zing' and 'Peter Pan', requesting that they please add to their verbage on the package, 'Keep out of reach of Children'.

On a side note, R's late-night foray into cleaning up this sticky situation should have turned into a teaching opportunity, because, just as King David found out, trying to cover up your sin, and deal with it yourself, leaves a much bigger mess than getting help and forgiveness.

R should think about this as she attempts to clean the downstairs bathroom before homeschool starts...