Fed Up with Food Intolerance - A Personal Story

Copyright 2014 Sue Dengate

ISBN 978-0-9923207-0-6

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

Some of the material in this book appeared originally in Different Kids (Random House Australia 1994 ISBN 9780091830519) and Fed Up with ADHD (Random House Australia 2004 ISBN 9781740512305), both of which are now out of print but often available in libraries.

Some names have been changed to protect privacy.

Copyright illustrations by Joanne Van Os.

The information contained in this book is based on the research and the personal experiences of the author and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult with your doctor regarding illness. Before beginning dietary investigation, consult a dietitian with an interest in food intolerance. The publisher and author are not responsible for any adverse effects or consequences resulting from the use of suggestions or preparations discussed in this book. Rights to the commercial use of the term ‘failsafe’ in the food context are retained by the author.

Contents

Introduction

1 Rachel 0–2

2 Beyond the terrible twos

3 School and learning delays

4 Matthew’s year

5 Howard the adult

6 The big answer

7 More about food intolerance

Notes and references

Acknowledgements

Other titles by Sue Dengate

Introduction

This story has already appeared in my books Different Kids and Fed Up with ADHD. It is about my search for the magic answer to our daughter’s problems. Thousands of families have found it was also their magic answer, like this one from our website:

‘I spent the night reading your book crying and laughing and knew that this was my daughter and we had to follow through with the dietary program. It made such a difference to our lives. It still brings a tear to my eye when I remember that night reading your book and a whole new world opened up to us’. – Kathy, from story [615]

Over the last forty years, an increasing number of parents have discovered that their children don’t bring them the joy they expect. Instead, their children are demanding or defiant, forgetful or anxious, irritable or restless. Perhaps they aren’t doing well at school or suffer from itchy rashes, headaches, stomach aches or difficulty sleeping. They’re all different, but they share one characteristic – they make life difficult for their parents and teachers.

At first, experts told us it was our fault. If we couldn’t control our children, it was because we weren’t firm enough. We just needed to learn better behaviour management. Then they told us that our children had been born with a chemical imbalance in their brain that must be treated with medication. They were encouraged by drug companies that spend millions of dollars a day promoting their products to doctors.

‘What about food?’ some parents asked. There are hundreds of additives in our food and thousands of chemicals in our air, soil and water that weren’t there forty years ago. Funded by the giant food industry, a few experts in the 1970s carried out some studies and concluded that children’s behaviour wasn’t affected by foods. We now know that the results of industry-funded science are likely to favour the funder.

There is overwhelming evidence about the effects of foods on children’s behaviour and anyone who says otherwise is probably either out of date or financially motivated. In the UK in 2003, when an entire primary school class ate additive free food for two weeks, nearly 60 per cent of the children improved. Since 2010, certain artificially coloured foods in Europe have been required to carry the warning: "may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children". All over the world, manufacturers are working to either remove nasty additives from their products or hide them under names intended to mislead consumers.

Despite innocent-seeming labels, the use of additives continues to increase. Since this book first appeared, two more additives have quietly become widespread throughout our food supply, with devastating results for some consumers. As well, there are some natural ‘healthy’ foods that can be as bad for some children as additives. Parents who want to protect their children from the harmful effects of food chemicals must do it themselves. To find out how, please read on . . .

Food intolerance in children

The quiet ones

• Inattention, forgetfulness, unexplained tiredness, difficulty concentrating • anxiety, depression, panic attacks.

May be diagnosed with inattentive ADHD.

The restless ones

• Irritability • restlessness • inattention • difficulty settling to sleep, restless legs, night waking, night terrors.

May be diagnosed with hyperactive ADHD.

The defiant ones

• Losing temper • arguing with adults • refusing requests and defying rules • deliberately annoying others • blaming others • touchy and easily annoyed • angry and resentful • spiteful and vindictive.

May be diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD).

The physical ones

• Hives • eczema • headaches • migraines • stomach aches • colic or reflux • toddler diarrhoea • bloating • encopresis (sneaky poos) • diarrhoea and/or constipation (can be either or both) • bedwetting • daytime incontinence • recurrent mouth ulcers • asthma • chronic stuffy or runny nose • frequent colds, flu, ear infections, glue ear, tonsillitis

Adults can be affected too.

The Story

1 Rachel 0–2

My first baby, Rachel, was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in the 1980s. When she was four days old I overheard a nurse saying, ‘Come and have a look at Mrs Dengate’s baby, she’s a real peach,’ and I glowed with pride. Two nurses bent over the crib.

‘She looks like a two-year-old, the way she sleeps,’ mused one. It was true. Rachel had none of the clenched-fist tension of other newborns. She lay sprawled in what I thought at the time was a relaxed posture, but know now was an indication of low muscle tone.

I also noticed that the top fold of one of Rachel’s ears appeared to be stuck down. It was barely noticeable unless you looked closely. I had worried about possible birth defects since a camping trip in early pregnancy when I ate a freshly caught fish before finding a dumped herbicide container in the water upstream. Some versions of this herbicide were used as defoliants in the Vietnam War, so a tiny ear malformation seemed nothing compared to what I had feared.

These were to be the first of many clues which would be misinterpreted and rationalised. We had no idea then that it would take eleven gruelling years for us to find out what was affecting our beautiful daughter.

The six-week siege

‘It’s a six-week siege,’ our friends had told us, about looking after a new baby. ‘After that you start getting into a routine.’ Six weeks turned into eight, then ten, and I started to feel mystified about the easy babies described in the baby book. In fact, we ended up feeling that our siege lasted for years, but in those first four months, things were desperate. There were always heaps of unfolded washing, unmade beds and piles of washing up. I was always exhausted. My husband Howard worked a full day as a research scientist then came home to a mess and started cooking and cleaning up.

Rachel spent a lot of time crying. We carried her around and waited for her to become the settled baby promised by our childcare book. Our doctor prescribed a drug, now considered not safe, to help with colic.

A friend advised me to watch what I ate. I just loved the sweet New Zealand cherries, apricots and plums. ‘I’m not going to stop eating fruit at the beginning of the summer fruit season,’ I protested, but trial and error showed that fruit obviously did affect Rachel. Since we paid for each lapse with a couple of hours of inconsolable screaming, I was motivated to stick to my limited diet and by the time Rachel was four months old I found I had a more settled baby if I avoided some vegetables and all fruit except bananas.

Howard had hay fever, so we knew we were considered to be an allergy-risk family. I considered myself free of allergies and was surprised when I developed hay fever that year for the first time. I knew very little about allergies and had never heard of food intolerance.

‘Keep breastfeeding,’ the breastfeeding counsellor told me. ‘She’s likely to develop more problems if switched to formula.’

Behaviour problems are linked to food intolerance, not food allergy

Allergy is a quick reaction to food proteins

• relatively rare, affects mostly children (except for tick-induced meat allergy)

• symptoms: hives, swelling, breathing difficulty, stomach pains, diarrhoea

• typical foods: cow's milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, sesame seeds, soy, wheat, fish

• usually obvious, except for eczema

• diagnosis: laboratory tests

Intolerance is a delayed reaction to food chemicals

• common, affects all ages

• reactions are related to size of dose

• symptoms: as for allergy plus behaviour, headaches, irritable bowel symptoms and more

• typical foods: additives and natural chemicals in a wide range of foods

• usually not obvious, remains unrecognised

• diagnosis: no scientifically proven laboratory tests – use elimination diet

‘All babies sleep, don’t they?’

Food related sleep disturbance can vary from difficulty falling asleep or frequent night waking to night terrors or sleepwalking. Of course, we didn’t know what we were dealing with, and I had thought that sleep came naturally to babies, but even when she was obviously exhausted Rachel would not drop off to sleep. I have always been the sort of person who falls asleep when my head hits the pillow, and I need a good night’s sleep to function.

Exhausted by the infectious hepatitis I developed when Rachel was seven weeks old, I followed the rule of sleep when your baby sleeps. I would feed Rachel to sleep then fall into a deep sleep myself, only to be woken by her cries half an hour later. At night she woke often and was becoming less rather than more settled.

Before our marriage I had spent three years backpacking around the world. The highlight of my travels was the seven months I spent in the mountains of Nepal, trekking more than 2,000 kilometres (1200 miles), mostly alone. During these treks I often stayed with families in one-roomed huts, unthinkingly observing the mothers breastfeeding, carrying and sleeping with their babies. I was an only child of older parents, so the mothers in Nepal provided me with my first role models. ‘I can’t remember the mothers in Nepal having these problems,’ I thought. ‘The babies were always carried around. They slept with their mothers, and the whole family went to bed soon after dark, so they weren’t left alone.’

Survival

Howard had always had difficulty getting to sleep and getting back to sleep when woken. ‘Rachel must have inherited this difficulty sleeping,’ we thought, so we worked out a system which would enable us to survive. I would feed Rachel to sleep on a double mattress in her room, start the night off with Howard, then move to Rachel’s bed at the next waking. If she didn’t fall asleep at the breast I would spend hours rocking her stroller across a ridge in the kitchen floor, singing grimly.

Rachel’s wakefulness was worsened by teething. ‘We didn’t know our daughter had her first tooth until we heard it clinking on the spoon,’ a young doctor friend commented. By contrast, Rachel started teething early and we were plagued by sleepless nights and daytime grumpiness for each tooth. My friend was more sympathetic after her third child experienced teething problems but how could she be expected to know what I was dealing with? My child was difficult in every major area of child rearing. I always felt there was something wrong with my skills as a mother. I found myself constantly trying to explain why Rachel was so fussy or difficult, and often felt inadequate and embarrassed that she wasn’t easier, like other children.

Controlled crying

By the time Rachel was nine months, she was waking at least five times every night. Our doctor suggested teething gel and paracetamol (see Notes). We also tried controlled crying. It was very traumatic for all of us, and it didn’t work. Rachel had far more stamina for screaming than we had for listening and I doubt if she would ever have fallen asleep exhausted.

In desperation I went to my doctor again. He prescribed some medicine. ‘It’s a mild sedative’, he explained. We looked forward to having a good night’s sleep at last. The medicine had the reverse effect. Rachel spent the next four hours leaping around, laughing and generally having a great time. This was from eleven at night until three in the morning. Other mothers of food intolerant children have experienced the same paradoxical effects of medicines intended to help children to sleep. I felt we had turned to medicine as a last resort and it had failed us utterly. I interpreted this to mean that our doctor had nothing more to offer us and felt alone and desperate.

In her first winter, Rachel had a number of colds which led to ear infections. This, too, is a classic symptom of food intolerance, although I didn’t know that. On one occasion, when Rachel was ten months old, I gave her some paracetamol and took her into a warm bath with me. Afterwards, I lay her on my bed briefly while I dressed. When I turned around she was lying motionless on the bed, eyes closed.

Panicking, we called the duty doctor. He quickly examined her. ‘This child is asleep,’ he said, perplexed. Howard and I looked at each other. So far she had never fallen asleep without such a huge effort that the possibility hadn’t crossed our minds. The doctor obviously thought we were very peculiar. He didn’t know Rachel. We laugh about it now, saying, ‘The only time she fell asleep on her own we called the doctor.’ But living with a child who couldn’t go to sleep was no joke.

Howard’s children

One day I was talking about our sleeping problems in a mothers’ group and a mother said, ‘That’s interesting. I only know of one other family who have found controlled crying didn’t work.’ She mentioned the name of the family. I was astonished. She was talking about biological children of Howard’s living in another city.

Before our marriage, Howard had been approached by friends who shared his university background and love of the outdoors. Desperate to have children, the husband’s infertility meant that their only option was donor insemination. Like many other couples they objected to an anonymous donor. Howard had agreed to father two children for them and to keep this secret. ‘I told them I didn’t like the idea of secrecy,’ he explained to me, ‘but they insisted they didn’t want the children to know.’ After our marriage we retained our friendship with the family for a while, but were advised by a marriage counsellor to break the connection for the children’s sake. ‘Children can pick up on hidden emotions,’ she said. ‘They will sense there is something going on and won’t be able to work out what it is. They’ll be confused.’ So Howard’s donated children were growing up unknown to us.

I told Howard what I had heard at the playgroup: ‘One of those children must have a sleeping problem just like Rachel’s. ’We were to remember this many years later.

The entertainer

When Rachel was awake she needed constant attention. We decided that this was because she was bright, as she always seemed alert and welcomed new playthings, but I found I could get very little done during the day unless I carried her everywhere, so she spent most of the time in a frontpack and from six months in a backpack. Although the backpack was physically easier for me, by this time I had to be doing something reasonably interesting or energetic to keep her from complaining.

The best way to keep Rachel happy was to give her undivided attention. She would be charming and delightful. Left to her own devices she would find adventure, which soon involved gigantic messes like emptying drawer contents, or unsafe practices like crawling down our stairs. If confined, she would be restless and grizzly.

By the time Rachel was six months old I had realised that if I stayed at home with my baby, she would drive me mad. The only way I could cope with her was to keep her busy. ‘She needs lots of stimulation,’ I told Howard, and spent my time providing it. We had a campervan, and I would spend my days going from one diversion to the next. When Rachel fell asleep I would park in a quiet place and sleep too. It is hard to find places to entertain a young baby in a cold climate, but I went to everything on offer – mothers’ groups, playgroups and visits with friends.

‘How do other mothers have time for a cup of tea and a chat?’ I thought. I often felt lonely because I was always too busy looking after my daughter.

Into everything

Once Rachel attained mobility at about nine months I had to watch her every minute in an unconfined space or she would disappear. At the doctor’s surgery other children investigated the toybox while Rachel headed for the stairs, down the hall, into the doctors’ rooms. I spent the whole time entertaining or retrieving her. At playgroup I wondered if I was overprotecting her, but if I wasn’t there constantly she would be out the door or trying something too big and dangerous for her, ending up in frustration, tears or a squabble. Setting her up at something safe like playdough would last about two minutes, unless I played with her.

‘Isn’t she cute,’ everyone said.

‘I love the way she gets into everything,’ one mother told me, after I had spent a meeting continually jumping up to prevent Rachel from reaching the gas heater beside the guest speaker. The other children spent the meeting sitting at their mothers’ feet, playing quietly.

When the weather was fine I spent hours walking along the riverbanks not far from our home, feeding the ducks and going to the Botanic Gardens. It was a good way to keep Rachel happy and entertained, to keep constantly on the move, but I took a long time to recover from the hepatitis I had caught at Rachel’s birth and would usually be exhausted the next day.

The libraries in Christchurch had safe areas with beanbags and toys for babies and I spent many hours with Rachel every day reading books because it gave me a chance to sit down. Even by six weeks I had found that if I read aloud Rachel seemed soothed, presumably by the sound of my voice, so right from the beginning I started ‘reading’ to her, as it was something I could do lying down. By the time she was nine months, I was reading her at least twenty books a day. I had discovered that this was one of the most relaxing ways for me to entertain her.

In the car

Travelling in the car presented a problem. We had tried to keep up our habit of going to the mountains every second weekend and on holidays. If Rachel was awake, I had to play with her to keep her interested. When she moved into a baby car seat, she sat in the front between us, and I always had a tray and a changing selection of toys plus books and snacks to entertain her, otherwise she squirmed and cried endlessly. Rattles and teething rings became blocks and puzzles as she grew. Occasionally she would have a brief sleep. A long trip was hard work and required frequent stops. By the end of her first year, we knew every playground between our house and Mount Cook National Park.

Some friends recommended their method of leaving home at 5 p.m., eating an evening meal after an hour, then letting the toddler sleep the rest of the way. We tried it once. Rachel was still awake at 11 p.m., exclaiming in wonder at the street lights when we passed through towns.

‘My child isn’t hyperactive’

When Rachel was nearly one, I left her with my closest friend Robin for a few hours. Unlike me, Robin is an organised person. When I called to collect Rachel she was looking rather hassled. ‘We’ve been making muesli,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve given up trying to do anything in the kitchen with Rachel, because she makes mess far faster than I can cope with it. The place ends up a shambles.’

‘She needs a lot more attention than Rosemary,’ Robin agreed. I could guess what had happened. Robin would have installed the girls on chairs while she fetched the rolled oats, dried fruit, nuts and seeds. Robin’s daughter Rosemary would watch the proceedings with interest and pour a cupful of ingredients into the mixture when asked whereas Rachel, if she wasn’t watched every minute, would grab handfuls of whatever she could reach and empty it into the sink, on the benches, the floor, everywhere except the appropriate container, losing interest and wandering off to create havoc in another room halfway through. She created so much work it wasn’t worth the effort of including her.

Soon after this we had a visit from a bachelor friend who also knew Robin and had not seen us since Rachel’s birth. The place was clean because I had finally admitted I couldn’t cope and had hired a cleaner, and for once Rachel was asleep. Looking around our tidy lounge room he noticed one small box of toys in the corner. ‘It’s easy to see you have a baby now,’ he chuckled. Howard and I exchanged looks. If he had arrived on a normal day there would have been toys all over the floor, piles of unfolded washing on the table, and Rachel would have interrupted every sentence.

‘I hear you’ve got a hyperactive daughter,’ he continued. Affronted, I answered with the words that I hear now so often from so many mothers, ‘Oh, no, she’s not really hyperactive.’ When I look back I try to think what motivated me to say that. ‘I know what a hyperactive child is,’ I thought. ‘It’s a little boy who runs around a lot, makes a lot of noise, is disobedient, unpleasant, aggressive, and generally to be avoided. My child isn’t like that.’

Mothers often assume their children are not hyperactive because they can be attentive in a one-to-one situation, and the common idea of a hyperactive child is one who never stops. Spurred on by our friend’s comments, I found a child-rearing book which described how many ADHD children started off as fussy babies. ‘Perhaps this is it,’ I thought.

The author observed that mothers react to these babies in one of two ways: immersion mothers raise the child themselves, and are constantly attentive to the child’s needs; escape mothers return to work and often leave the child with others. He recommended immersion mothering. ‘That’s what I’m doing,’ I thought, and then he went on to talk about consulting psychologists for behaviour modification and pediatricians for medication. ‘My child isn’t as bad as that,’ I decided. The book also advised avoiding highly processed foods.

The beginning of ADHD

‘In my general paediatric practice in Jackson, Tennessee (population 50,000) in the 1950s, my partners and I were “the only game in town”. There were no other full-time paediatricians and only a rare family practitioner. Yet we only saw an occasional hyperactive kid . . . In the 1970s, I saw so many hyperactive children that I kept records . . .’

‘I knew nothing about additives’

Fast food wasn’t common in New Zealand then. Most people still cooked for themselves. Howard and I were eating a mainly vegetarian, natural, wholemeal, low-sugar diet high in fruit and vegetables. We bought very few processed foods, although while pregnant I had started eating a vegetable relish on my sandwiches. I knew nothing about food additives. It never occurred to me that the relish might contain an artificial food colouring called tartrazine (102). It would be eight years before a group of Australian researchers showed that tartrazine could cause irritability, restlessness, inattention and sleep disturbance in children – exactly the problems I was dealing with every day. Another group would show that salicylates in fruits and vegetables could cause the same problems. These food chemicals can pass through breastmilk and affect babies.

At the time, however, I was determined to be unruffled about food, which seems rather ironic now. When Rachel was first introduced to solid foods, she ate well but as her range of foods widened, she became more fussy and unreliable about eating meals.

I shall never forget the first children’s Christmas party at the playgroup we attended. A trestle table had been set up with a tablecloth and party foods. Rachel was thirteen months old and it was the first time she had ever come across party food or sweets. The other children ate and then moved away to play. Rachel remained at the table, alone, for the whole two hours, stuffing herself with all these new treats. She was obviously having a wonderful time and everyone said, ‘Isn’t she cute?’, but I was embarrassed. Why was my child making such a pig of herself?

I decided it must be because I had been denying her sweet foods, so we started eating ice-cream for dessert. This was a disaster. It seemed to establish a craving in her and all she did was whine and fuss endlessly for more, so I stopped buying it. By now she was not eating at all well, still breastfeeding and showing no signs of stopping, but I was determined not to let food become a battlefield so I more or less ignored it.

The three Rs

We led a haphazard sort of life. Howard was easily bored by routine and preferred spontaneity. Because we were always tired, we always slept as long as we could until Rachel woke us, with the result that he worked different hours every day, we ate meals at odd times, and frequently went out on the spur of the moment.

Howard and I share a passionate love for the bush, mountains, wilderness and getting away from it all. We started hiking again, with Rachel in the backpack, and often went for day walks or camping for the weekend in the mountains, sleeping in the van, the tent or a hikers’ hut. Over the Christmas break we took Rachel on a three-day hike among the golden grasslands, beech forests and snow capped mountains that would later become famous in the Lord of the Rings movies.

She loved the constant change, riding high in the backpack, new places to explore and the undivided attention of two adults. Like Howard, Rachel thrived on variety, never wanting to stop, always wanting to do more. Looking back I can see that our life would have been much easier if I had established a firm routine early on. The spontaneity was fun and exciting but management of eating and sleeping would have been easier. Routine, regularity, and repetition are the best way to raise difficult children. We had none of those.

A move

When Rachel was just over one year old we decided to move to a house that was easier to live in. This was the first of many moves inspired by the need to find an easier place to live with a difficult child. Still constantly exhausted, we wanted a house that was quiet, so we could sleep – Rachel permitting – and a yard that was flat, so we could drive our car up to the house. We had had enough of lugging bundles up and down steps. So we said goodbye to our beautiful view of the Southern Alps and moved into an old house on a very large block of land bordered by ancient poplars. Here we established a sort of suburban ‘good life’. Howard, with his boundless energy, cleared away old fallen trees and planted rhododendron gardens, a pine forest, fruit trees and a vegetable garden. It was always easier being outside with Rachel, and now that there was no danger of her falling off a terrace we had more freedom.

I continued to take Rachel on many outings but I was beginning to notice that she was quite different from her little friends in a playground. She spent her time dashing from one piece of equipment to the next but was reluctant to spend much time on each. My parents commented that they thought she was timid on the swings. Timid was not a word I would ever have applied to Rachel, but I agreed that her attitude was unusual. All this time I was taking Rachel for her regular checks to the child health nurse. Rachel was learning to walk and run. I couldn’t pinpoint any specific worries about her coordination. I had already assumed that, like her father, she would be poor at ball games. The child health nurse never seemed to notice anything unusual. ‘Any problems?’ the nurse would ask me.

‘She seems to have a lot of pain with teething,’ I’d say, or ‘She wakes a lot at night.’

It was impossible for me to give a verbal picture of exactly why Rachel was such hard work. She didn’t do anything particularly different from other children, just more of it, or less of it, or at the wrong times. She was meeting all her developmental milestones such as sitting, crawling and walking at the right times. The few times I did try to explain to other people that I was scarcely coping, I was greeted by scepticism and ended up feeling foolish. The problem behaviours seemed so trivial when I talked about them, although it was the total sum which made life so difficult. I felt as if it was my fault I found it so hard to cope. Rachel was a charming little girl if I gave her my undivided attention all the time. There just wasn’t time to do anything else.

The hard-work holiday

Howard and I were discovering that holidays were hard work unless we had some help with Rachel. A neighbouring schoolgirl named Donna had started babysitting for us, and now she started coming with us on weekends away to the mountains. The three of us would take it in turns to give our undivided attention to Rachel. It also helped us to have my parents come from Australia to share the load.

When Rachel was eighteen months old we went on a three week trip with them to the Cook Islands. My parents doted on Rachel, who was their only grandchild. They were more than happy to devote large amounts of time to her, which was what Rachel enjoyed most. She spent hours walking on stepping stones around the hotel pool holding a grandparent’s hand.

One American tourist asked my mother, ‘Is that your granddaughter? She’s a doll, a real doll.’ It was continual comments like this which made me think, ‘She must be all right. How can there be anything wrong with this child?’ Yet sometimes Rachel was so restless and demanding that I needed all my self-control to avoid losing my temper.

My only goal was a good night’s sleep. Like any other parents, we loved our adorable little daughter with all our hearts and thought she was the most beautiful and intelligent child in the world. Although I could barely cope with caring for her, we had not accepted that there could be anything really ‘wrong’ with our sweet little girl. None of the experts – the doctor, the breastfeeding counsellor, the child health nurse, the authors of parenting books – had been able to help us understand or manage our problems with Rachel. I feel sad that, with the knowledge I have now, we could have enjoyed a calm and settled child during those first two years.

2 Beyond the terrible twos

When we moved back to Australia because of Howard’s new job, Rachel was nearly two and a half. We had survived the fussy baby and impulsive toddler stages and were launched into the terrible twos, a stage when most children are learning to say ‘no’. By the time we were established in a rented house in Wagga Wagga in south-western NSW, I was finding her very difficult.

In an attempt to meet people, I went to every parents’ group I could find and was lucky enough to make friends at playgroup straight away. The first breastfeeding association meeting I attended was quite crowded and Rachel was overwhelmed by all the people. She refused to join the other children playing in the playroom but wouldn’t keep still in the room where the mothers were having a discussion. Eventually she disappeared for a while.

‘Have you seen your daughter?’ one of the mothers asked me with a smile. People still thought she was cute. She had opened a packet of chocolate biscuits on the morning tea table and had taken one bite out of each biscuit. If she stayed with me she was noisy and restless but she refused to stay in the playroom without me. The only way to keep her out of mischief was to play with her in the playroom, although I wanted to be with the mothers. A counsellor found me there and had a sympathetic welcoming chat, for which I was grateful although I was really gritting my teeth and wanting to strangle my daughter.

I tried several more meetings. ‘It’s no good. I can’t go if I have to take Rachel,’ I decided. We still had playgroup, the park, the library and friends.

One day an article on hyperactivity appeared in a parents’ magazine. I read and re-read it and discussed it with Howard. ‘She hasn’t got all those symptoms and she’s not like that all the time.’ We were always confused by how charming and delightful Rachel could be at her best.

The never-ending party

I was finding that what children ate in Australia was quite different from what we fed Rachel in New Zealand. Here, every day seemed like a party: sweets, cakes, ice-creams and processed snack foods were constantly available. Rachel’s diet had suddenly changed. ‘She’s eating very badly,’ I fretted.

‘Don’t worry,’ Howard reassured me. ‘Children burn up so much energy at that age, they can tolerate more fat and sugar than adults.’ This was a view backed up by a popular Australian pediatrician who dismissed the idea that hyperactive children might react to food additives. So I ignored Rachel’s poor diet.

First mention of salicylates

One new friend kept telling me about her nephew who was on a diet low in salicylates. I had never heard of salicylates. In retrospect I can see she was observing my child’s behaviour and trying to get the message across. I was totally unreceptive. When my friend told me that most fruits contain salicylates I was horrified. Life without fruit was unimaginable. ‘I’m glad we don’t have to worry about that,’ I told her.

I couldn’t have been more wrong, but it would take me another eight years to find that out. Rachel was now three and Australian research about salicylates had just been published. But it takes many years for the results of research to find their way into doctors’ surgeries.

From the medical journals

‘This is the most comprehensive set of data on food salicylates yet published . . .’

Swain AR and others, ‘Salicylates in foods’, J American Dietetic Association 1985; 85(8):950–960.

http://www.sswahs.nsw.gov.au/rpa/allergy/research/salicylatesinfoods.pdf

‘Of 86 children who experienced improvement, nearly three quarters reacted to double-blind challenge with salicylates . . .’

Swain AR and others, ‘Salicylates, oligoantigenic diets and behaviour’, Lancet 1985;ii:41–42.  http://www.sswahs.nsw.gov.au/rpa/allergy/research/behaviour.pdf

Meanwhile, I was finding Rachel’s behaviour impossible and there were so many areas of conflict that I tried to concentrate on a few and reduce the battlefield. She refused to get dressed, so I took her out in her pyjamas. It didn’t seem to bother her. She refused to have her hair washed, so I had it cut very short, which was a battle, and left it unwashed for a month. She was an expert at getting her clothes dirty in no time at all. I think children should be encouraged to play creatively and not have to worry about their clothes, but Rachel had paint all over every item of clothing she owned. Getting her to change was so much trouble that I didn’t bother.

I didn’t like the idea of using TV as a babysitter but would have done anything for a break. Rachel would not even watch Playschool unless I sat with her. ‘Perhaps it’s because she’s not in the habit of watching television,’ I thought.......

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Table of Contents

Introduction

1 Rachel 0–2

2 Beyond the terrible twos