Allergies and Me

Today, a New York Times article about a mother on a crusade against certain potentially allergy-causing foods caught my eye.

The subject of the article, Robyn O'Brien, sounds a lot like my own mother. In fact, many things that Robyn says in the article could have come from my mother's mouth.

A little background:

When we were young, my sister and I showed symptoms of hyperactivity. After visiting several doctors that recommended medication, my mother looked for an alternative and put us on the Feingold Diet, a rather radical diet that's based on the assumption that hyperactivity, irritability, tantrums, and pretty much any bad behavior in children is caused by allergies. Allergies, in turn, are supposedly caused by artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives, as well as many fruits and vegetables.

Once she learned of this diet, my mother committed to it with an almost fanatical devotion. We went to Feingold Association barbecues with cotton candy, Hebrew National hot dogs and food made from scratch. My mom cooked nearly all our meals from scratch, and since she doesn't particularly like to cook, taught me and my sister to cook from scratch starting from a young age - I was a skilled baker by the time I was 12 or so. She didn't allow us to use any scented products, including soaps, shampoos and scented markers. She even made Play-Doh from scratch, since the coloring from mass-produced Play-Doh can apparently be absorbed through the skin. Products like body spray, hair dye, make-up, lotions, temporary tattoos, and scented candles were the enemy. She sent a long list of Permitted and Banned foods everywhere with us so teachers, camp counselors, friends' parents, etc. couldn't plead ignorance.

Over the years, though, she relaxed the diet as my sister and I became successful athletes, academic overachievers, and generally well-adjusted people.

Now that I'm on my own, I pretty much eat whatever I want, though I tend to avoid artificial stuff out of habit, and focus on "whole foods" like fruits and vegetables that I cook at home. As far as I can tell, I'm only allergic to almonds, possibly strawberries (which gave me hives when I was a preschooler, but I've avoided them since), and some heavily preserved/MSG-laden food (like Boston Market food, which is gross anyway). Many heavily scented products give me a headache, though I use lightly scented products (usually from Trader Joe's as well as Paul Mitchell hair products) regularly, as well as make-up from the likes of MAC, Stila and Smashbox.

I'm not a particularly focused person, and I have the attention span of a fruit fly, but for the most part I don't consider myself hyperactive or ADHD. I consider myself a creative type who switches from one task to another 50 times an hour, with no ill effects. I've never taken Ritalin or Adderall, nor had any need to.

I'm a little skeptical of the Feingold Diet. As the Wikipedia article notes, the main downside of the diet is social. I would go to birthday parties and not be able to eat cake or ice cream; when schoolmates brought treats into school, I could rarely sample them. I could certainly not trade lunches or share food with friends, though I started cheating on the diet quite a bit starting in fifth grade or so (not allowing a sweet-toothed child any candy or soda is really, really tough, though there are a lot of great all-natural sweets and sodas out there).

Face it: people bond by sharing food and eating meals together. For many people, refusing an offering of food is to refuse friendship. I always felt a bit weird and outcast because I refused food, and many of my friends' parents became hostile or confused when I could not eat anything they offered me while I came over to play. I still remember whe one of my best friends' mothers bought Breyer's peach ice cream for me. Breyer's, of course, is an all-natural brand. But I couldn't eat the ice cream because peaches are one of the banned foods according to the Feingold Diet. (Naturally, peaches are now one of my very favorite foods now.)

In addition, I don't like how my mother used the tenets of the Feingold Diet as a reason to blame every bad behavior on something I had eaten. Whenever I misbehaved, my mother would shake me and scream, "What did you eat??!!" Sometimes, a child is being a little shit for absolutely no reason. I got punished for cheating on my diet lots of times when, in fact, I had done no such thing. I chafe at the idea that there is always rhyme or reason to a child's behavior. (Of course, later, I did cheat on my diet, and has a period where I did badly in school - but I attribute that to being a rebellious, experimental teenager, not hyperactivity or food allergies.)

However, I definitely think that avoiding processed food, foods with artificial ingredients (Yellow #5 and so forth), genetically modified food (good luck avoiding those), hormone-laced milk, etc. is generally a good idea. It's the simple principle that the closer to the earth a food is, the better it tastes and the healthier it is. Thus I drink organic, hormone-free milk and eat primarily organic foods. And yes, I eat lots of ice cream and cookies and candies, including a bit of processed junk - perhaps to make up for the relative lack of sweets I enjoyed as a child. I still can't stand soda and generally back away from obviously dyed foods, like bright red pork at Chinese restaurants. I still love to bake and cook from scratch. I don't plan to ever make a cake from a mix.

After eating a "forbidden food" according to the Feingold Diet - anything from a tomato to a Reese's peanut butter cup - I don't think that I'm less able to focus or function normally. After eating something sugary I experience the usual energy spike, but nothing out of the ordinary. I feel like this is 50% simply growing up and getting over my hyperactivity, and 50% evidence that sticking to the Feingold Diet wasn't totally necessary in the first place.

Obviously, if a mother is faced with a hyperactive child, she should explore all the options. Ritalin is certainly over-prescribed in this country, and there are myriad reasons why a child can be an unmanageable bastard - anything from brain chemistry to bad parenting. These things need to be taken on a case-by-case basis. In some cases a blend of medication, diet and therapy/behavior modification strategies might be best.

Anyway, it was interesting to see that skepticism of the American food supply - from the perspective of allergic kids - is still alive and well. I do think the food supply is a minefield of genetically engineered, preserved, colored, processed junk, but I'm very skeptical of the assertion that allergies are on the rise among children. However, there's really no downside to feeding children whole, unprocessed, organic foods, except for a nominal increase in price and increased need to cook at home. However, I don't necessarily think that superbly restrictive diets such as the Feingold Diet are a cure-all suitable for all children, as some people would assert.