Raise Your Child's IQ

Eliminate Food Intolerance to Improve Learning Performance

Everyone wants to make their childern smart and successful. Certainly, these are noble goals. You can take giant steps toward success by removing road blocks that limit performance. Food allergy and intolerance are big factors that need to be considered. If your child is not feeling well, work at school will certainly suffer. Food problems are very common causes of discomfort that affect attention, learning and performance. Take a look at the table below and marvel at the percentages of the world population harmed by troublesome foods. Your family would be very lucky not to be touched by one part of this problem. Our modern society complicates food intolerance by including far too many ingredients in most packaged foods. For instance, Betty Crocker Hamburger Helper is a typical modern product with the following ingredients:

Betty Crocker Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper: wheat, corn starch, soybean oil, salt, cheddar cheese, whey, maltodextrin, tomato, sugar, buttermilk, onion, corn syrup, disodium phosphate, MSG, dextrose, garlic, natural flavor, blue cheese, yellow #5, yellow #6, glycerides, citric acid, sodium caseinate, soy flour, egg white.

Lactose milk sugar is found in whey and buttermilk, causing trouble for those with a lactose intolerance. Wheat is the first ingredient listed and it might trigger a gluten reaction. There is hidden sulfur dioxide in corn starch, maltodextrin, corn syrup and dextrose. And, there is plenty of FD&C yellow color which is bad for attention deficit disorders. For a moment, let's assume your son had hamburger helper for dinner and didn't want to finish his homework. Is he tired, upset, lazy or suffering from a food intolerance? What about his afternoon snack or his evening dessert? The truth is a lot harder to pinpoint than most people think. But, if you are willing to divide the problem up and take small steps, you can usually figure out if a food intolerance is present. Then avoiding those foods will improve your family's life at home and in school.

Intolerance	Description	Percent
Lactose	Milk Sugar Intolerance	60% of World
Wheat	General Gluten Intolerance not limited to Celiac Disease	15%
Sulfites	Sulfite Preservatives, Sulfa Drugs and Sulfur Dioxide	6%
Most Common Allergies	Immune System Response to: Milk, Eggs, Peanuts, Tree Nuts, Seafood, Shellfish, Soy, Wheat	4%
Artificial Color & Preservatives	Attention Deficit Disorders caused by FD&C Artificial Food Color and BHA, BHT, TBHQ Preservatives	12%

Lactose Intolerance: This is the most common food problem and it should be investigated first. The sugar in milk is known as lactose and is constructed from two simpler sugars, glucose and galactose. Before the body can properly utilize lactose, it must be broken into its simpler components by a digestive enzyme called lactase. Most babies produce this enzyme allowing them to digest milk whether from the human breast or from a cow. As we age, many of us stop producing lactase and we become milk intolerant. Improperly digested milk produces gas and other symptoms of discomfort. To find out if anyone in your family is lactose intolerant, remove milk products from your menu for a few days while paying close attention to their well being. The most important dairy items are milk ( no matter whether low or regular fat ), yogurt, milk shakes and ice cream. All of these contain approximately 12 grams of lactose per 8 ounce serving. Cheeses and butter are highly processed and contain only about 0.1 grams of lactose per serving, a hundred times less than a glass of milk. So, concentrate on replacing milk and don't worry much about cheese and butter. Rice milk is available as a substitute at most stores and tastes pretty good if you buy the sweetened versions. For a valid test, make sure your family understands your goal and doesn't cheat away from home. After a few days of avoidance, put real milk back in your diet and compare notes. If avoiding milk helps, you can make lactose avoidance permanent and look into the full range of non-dairy products. This might even include taking lactase enzyme supplements when a meal cannot be fully controlled. If avoiding milk does not help, you can scratch it off your list of concerns and move on to the next step.

Wheat Intolerance: Wheat intolerance, although not new, is a newly recognized problem. During World War 2, wheat was in short supply and rationed in many parts of Europe. After the war, it was noticed that many digestive problems returned just as wheat became more available. It is now recognized that as many as 1 in 7 people have trouble with the protein in wheat ( called gluten ), especially those of Celtic origin from Ireland, Wales and Scotland. John F. Kennedy was our first Irish president and he suffered from many autoimmune symptoms. It is reasoned by some modern doctors that he was wheat intolerant and that many of his ills could have been corrected by diet. Celiac Disease is the most aggressive form of this intolerance and the resulting inflammation can permanenly damage the lining of the intestine. Celiac Disease occurs in only 1/2 percent of the population but milder forms of wheat intolerance affect 30 times as many people. The symptoms can be quite broad and include digestive upset, headache, depression, arthritis, eczema and chronic fatigue to name a few. It is a difficult condition to both diagnose and treat because wheat is so prevalent in our society. To see if anyone in your family is wheat intolerant, remove wheat for a few days and then reintroduce it. To accomplish this, you have to read food labels very carefully and avoid wheat, barley, oats and rye. The table below gives some ideas for replacing wheat.

Wheat	Wheat Replacements
Wheat, barley, oats and rye	Rice, corn and quinoa
Wheat noodles and pasta	Rice or rice noodles/pasta
Bread, bagels and crackers	Corn tortillas and corn chips
Hamburgers on wheat buns	Hamburgers on lettuce alone
Macaroni and cheese	Amy's frozen Rice Mac & Chesse
Cookies, cake and pie	Fruit and ice cream

Sulfite Preservatives: Did you ever look closely at a bottle of wine? "Warning: Contains Sulfites." Some unlucky folks can die of allergic shock from the sulfite preservatives present in wine. And many, many more suffer a wide range of symptoms including hives, rosacea, facial swelling, throat constriction, leg cramps, digestive upsets, headache and allergic shock. Many diseases are complicated by sulfites including asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, heart arrhythmia, irregular blood pressure, thyroid and liver disfunction. The problem chemicals are sulfite, sulfur dioxide and sulfa drugs. They are used extensively in the processing of wine, wine vinegar, some fish, lemon juice concentrate, dried fruit, instant potatoes, pizza dough, pickled peppers, caramel color, gelatin, corn starch, corn syrup and molasses. From there, they wind up in over 2/3 of all packaged products sold in America. If anyone in your family has asthma, your family is at very high risk for being overly sensitive to sulfites. How can you find out for sure? Ask yourself how well you tolerate wine and how well your children do with dried apricots or peaches? Wine and dried fruit are very strong sources of sulfite and sulfur dioxide. If they do not cause trouble, you do not have a sulfite problem. If they do cause trouble, you are probably sulfite sensitive. If you wish to pursue sulfite intolerance further, look over the table below and visit the Learning Target No Sulfites website. I believe sulfite intolerance to be grossly underestimated by the medical establishment. For a deeper understanding, visit the website at www.learningtarget.com/nosulfites/ and decide for yourself.

True Food Allergies: Most of the conditions discussed above are intolerances that do not involve the body's immune system. For instance, lactose intolerance is caused by a lack of sufficient lactase enzyme to completely digest milk sugar. If your immune defense against germs becomes confused, it can target the protein in food instead of the protein on the surface of invading bacteria. When this occurs, your body produces antibodies ( called IgE, IgB, etc. ) that bind with food protein and initiate a cascade of chemical reactions that make you feel sick. We call this a food allergy. Food allergies are less common than food intolerances but they can be more intense and require only minute amounts of food. The protein in milk, called casein, can trigger an allergy with symptoms very similar to those of the more common lactose intolerance. However, a milk allergy is usually much more sensitive, even requiring some people to be careful of kissing a milk drinker. The most common food allergies involve Milk, Eggs, Peanuts, Tree Nuts, Seafood, Shellfish, Soy and Wheat. Since symptoms appear quickly and are quite severe, most people recognize these allergies. However, if you often feel sick after eating and aren't sure why, pay careful attention to what you eat. Sometimes writing things down and comparing notes can be helpful. It is important to avoid the foods that cause your allergies since repeated attacks can make the allergy grow stronger. On the flip side, if you can remain attack free for many months, some allergies will diminish. You should talk to your doctor about food allergy and ask about taking Benadryl to control the symptoms when an attack occurs.

Artificial Color and Preservatives: If a member of your family suffers from attention deficit disorder ( ADD or ADHD ), you are not powerless. Many cases of attention deficit disorder respond to dietary changes, specifically the removal of FD&C food colors and the preservatives BHA, BHT and TBHQ. This is a very subtle food intolerance that overloads the brain with chemicals that compete with neurotransmitters. The relationship between food color, preservatives and attention deficit was established by Dr. Feingold, head of the Allergy Department of Kaiser Permanente Hospitals. The next article, The Feingold Diet, describes in detail the Four Day Feingold Diet which can used to see if the program will work for your family. Doing nothing is a big mistake. Attention deficit can make your child an outcast at school that begins an unhealthy spiral of poor performance and bad behavior that rarely ends well. If dietary changes do not help, talk to your doctor about prescription drugs for this condition. Today, there are many choices that include non-narcotic alternatives to the older Ritalin class of drugs. The right diet or the right drug for your child can be life transforming. You have nothing to lose unless you do not even try. If you don't like the results, you can always stop and look for something else.

The information presented is for general education only and does not pretend to represent medical advice. Before attempting any medical or dietary intervention, please consult your doctor or other professional to insure the safety of your child and to explore the complete range of treatments available.

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