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Blog Entry 13 of 17 Health Hint of the Week

Each week I will provide a health tip, easy ways to get and stay healthy in today's busy world.

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To ease ADHD - eliminate color dyes, add oils

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Contributed by: Kathy Loidolt on 5/2/2008

Color dyes such as: Yellow Lake 6, Red 40 Lake, Blue 1 and many others are in most foods and personal products. Check the ingredients on your favorite cereal, candy, juice, chewable vitamin, soda, toothpaste and shampoo. You will find color dyes listed on most of these labels. If we could read the small-print ingredients on make up and lipstick, we would find color dyes among many other hazardous ingredients.

Color dyes have been implicated in the rise of ADD/ADHD cases. Dr. Benjamin Feingold, author of the "Feingold Hypothesis" did research on over 1,200 children with ADHD and found half of them had allergic reactions to color dyes that aggravated ADHD symptoms. We took our four kids off color dyes and found that it improved mood and behavior in everyone, particularly in our more sensitive child. Watch yourself and your kids: after eating foods with color dyes are you/they less focused and more irritable? Remember that color dyes can be absorbed through your gums and skin, so read all labels.

It is tough to get kids off the candies and processed foods that have so many color dyes. To help, try this idea from a friend of mine: for small children, tell them if they choose not to eat a candy or treat given to them at school or after sports, they can put it in a jar at home. When the jar is full, they can be paid $5 or taken for a non-candy treat. It helped motivate my young kids! (We adults and grown kids will have to rely on self control and the desire to feel focused and calm!)

After you get the kids off color dyes, add fish oil and excercise to their daily regime. We take our lemon-flavored fish oil with a bit of lemonade and chug it down. Fish oil provides omega 3 oils, which help calm and improve brain function, many times improving ADHD symptoms. Excercise releases endorphines, which also calms the brian.

by Kathy Loidolt, Author of Shopper's Guide to Healthy Living

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