Artificial Colour

Judah is 5. He's also crazy and zany and cute and fun and wonderful.
He also makes total strangers ask me what's 'wrong' with him. Our friends and family think that he must be brain damaged or he is poorly disciplined. My Occupational therapist described it like herding cats. Yep, that's about it. When we are away from home I feel a little bit like a cat herder. Which I think we can all say is impossible.
In the past year I have seen two different doctor's, an occupational therapist, a child psychologist and a naturalpath. All to try and figure out how to help my little guy operate in a world that travels slower then his brain does. And to help us figure out how to help him function.
Imagine then that you are reading a blog one day and the author begins to describe her son and what is going on with him, and it begins to sound very similar to your own dear son. And she beings to talk about a eating program that they are doing with their son. It's called the Feingold program and I had never heard about it before.
At first I thought it wasn't important, it couldn't possible help my son, surely his problem wasn't food related.
Then began a series of what I can only describe as God moments. It started the Sunday before Easter and Judah consuming 5, (yes only 5), Cadbury mini-eggs at church. What followed was eye opening. He literally couldn't sit still. He had to keep wiggling, fidgeting with paper and toys, and seemed not to even be able to focus when I talked to him. I thought I might be just imagining it.
The next day though I was talking to Megan's mom when we were waiting for our kids at school. I don't even remember how the conversation started. I do know that she told me that her son was allergic to artificial color. I then proceeded to tell her what had happened with Judah the day before and she told me about something called 'Tartrazine'. It's also called Yellow #5. We lead a youth group so we are not ignorant as to the effect that Red food coloring has on youth. I didn't know that Yellow is even worse.
I started doing research and more research. And we made the decision to try it for a month and see what would happen. To take out all the artificial colour out of our diets a month and just see if it would have any positive change in our son.
And that was our first step towards Feingold.