Quiet returned to the Adeneys' Ottawa household as abruptly as it had left a few hours earlier. Four-year-old Virginia lay sprawled across her bed, sound asleep. Her mother, Catherine, stood at the open bedroom door and surveyed the scene - dolls with their limbs ripped from their sockets lay strewn across the carpet; a fresh hole in the wall marked the place where Virginia's little feet had kicked out in rage; clumps of her light brown hair littered the bed.

Catherine Adeney fought back the tears. For 18 months she'd battled with her daughter's unpredictable tantrums. A year earlier, unable to deal with the turmoil, her husband had moved out and hadn't been heard from since. Mother and daughter had seen a string of psychiatrists. They all said the same things: Virginia was traumatized by the marriage break-up; Virginia needed firmer limits; Virginia was seeking attention. Adeney didn't buy it - she knew her daughter best, she says, and their interpretations didn't ring true. Then, when a friend suggested that the food Virginia was eating might be provoking her incorrigible outbursts, she decided to investigate.

Adeney is just one of countless parents who suspect that certain foods trigger their children's misbehaviour - at school, at parties, at home. Teachers have implied it, friends have hinted at it, and they've noticed a link:

Every time their child eats a strip of red licorice he wants to tear his room apart; one strawberry and he cries incessantly. Some parents outlaw the questionable foods from their kitchen; others, like Adeney, try to get their child tested. The catch with a food sensitivity, though, is that there is no test - at least, not one that's backed by science. In fact, the link between food and behaviour, despite years of research, remains a hotly disputed topic in the medical community. If your daughter, after drinking a glass of milk, clutches her stomach in pain, runs to the bathroom to vomit or gets diarrhea, there's a good chance she's lactose intolerant - her body lacks the enzyme needed to digest the milk. But if, after drinking a glass of milk, she turns around, swears at you and pinches her little brother, the relationship is murkier.

"We are so ignorant about the specific ways in which the body adversely reacts to food and their components. We don't know what mechanisms are responsible for the reactions that we can observe and experience," says Janice Joneja, head of the allergy nutrition research program at the Vancouver Hospital and Health Centre. "So people in the medical profession go one of two ways: They either deny that there's any role for foods in causing symptoms at all unless they can be identified overtly, or they go the other way and start using any tests that could possibly indicate to them the kinds of foods that are causing the problem, and don't question enough the scientific validity of those tests."

Whereas food allergies cause an immediate reaction (rashes, hives or breathing difficulties) every time the allergic child eats the problem item, food sensitivities bring about more obscure reactions and they are idiosyncratic - each child reacts differently and inconsistently. Sometimes what a child eats may influence his actions, other times not. This makes any food-behaviour link tough to study, test or treat. It also opens the field to unconventional tests and interpretations.

In the 1970s, Benjamin Feingold, a paediatric allergist in California, claimed that food colouring, artificial flavouring and preservatives caused childhood hyperactivity, and prescribed a diet free of these ingredients. He reported that the behaviour of nearly 50 percent of the children on his strict regimen had improved. Hundreds of parents, caught in the hype, switched their kids' diets.

To test his hypothesis scientifically, in 1980 the Nutrition Foundation examined seven studies involving 190 children. The foundation concluded that there was no evidence to connect hyperactivity with food additives, adding that, "though one cannot prove that no such children will be found, sufficient numbers of highly selected children have been studied to feel confident that such specific sensitivity, if found, will be rare." A restricted diet sometimes worked, according to the foundation, because of the treatment's placebo effects - it worked because people believed it would or because parents, in controlling their children's diet, gave them extra attention.

Some years after the Feingold furor, a study directed by Bonnie Kaplan and published in the January 1989 issue of Pediatrics, found that some children's behaviour got better when they avoided certain foods. The diet was more extensive than Feingold's - it cut out additives, but also eliminated chocolate, MSG and caffeine. Yet Kaplan says that her findings matter little in the real world - after the study was over, the parents asked, "Is that all?" Restricted eating hadn't transformed the kids into little angels.

And it rarely does. Ottawa mom Judy Woelfle thought she'd found the solution when an environmental doctor confirmed her suspicions that her seven-year-old son, Kyle, had food sensitivities. (Environmental doctors are medical practitioners who believe that substances in food, air, water, homes, schools and workplaces make people sick and are the cause of many children's problems.) For months, Kyle's, teachers had grumbled that he was lazy, inattentive and easily distracted. Then came a new regimen - no dairy products, additives, preservatives or sugar. Kyle's grades shot up. "My brain's not dizzy anymore," he told his mom after two days on the diet - he said that he finally understood what his teachers were saying.

After about nine months, though, the change levelled out, old behaviours returned and the teachers resumed their griping. Sensing it was more than just the food, Woelfle switched doctors. This time a detailed family history revealed a background of learning disabilities - Kyle' s father and his cousin are dyslexic - and as it turned out, Kyle also has a learning disability. The diet did help but the diet wasn't everything.

That's why many mainstream doctors are reluctant to link food and behaviour - even when it comes to sugar, the stuff that parents maintain makes kids manic. Many observe that their kids get wacky after feasting on sugar-laden goodies at birthday parties. Skeptics point out other potential triggers - the excitement of the event, new children they don't know, kids being kids or, if it is the food, the additives or caffeine in the treats, rather than the sugar.

The research also suggests that sweets are getting a bad rap. "There have been about four published studies that have shown some improvement when they've [parents] tried restricted diets. But there have been 23 controlled studies in peer review journals looking at sugar, and they've all been consistently negative," says paediatrician Mark Wolraich of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Ross Mickelson, an Ottawa environmental doctor, contends that these findings are inconsistent with how kids behave in his office, and with what his patients tell him. One such patient was Virginia Adeney. Convinced that food was triggering Virginia's eruptions, he gave her a Vegatest. This technique identifies changes in the body's energy waves when exposed to different foods. An electrode is hooked up to various food allergy serums and placed on an acupuncture point on the patient's finger. It's a testing method, Mickelson acknowledges, scoffed at by traditional allergists. He also did an elimination-challenge test - the only method of identifying food sensitivities that's recognized by mainstream medicine. Virginia was taken off the suspect foods for a week. They were then reintroduced separately, one day at a time, and Adeney watched for adverse reactions. Mickelson's verdict: Sugar was the primary cause of Virginia's temper tantrums.

Mickelson prescribed a low-sugar diet and the change, says Adeney, was dramatic. "Even her kindergarten teacher noticed. She happened to have the same teacher for two years of kindergarten and after the first year they were going to test her for ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] and the second year they asked me what happened to her. She didn't talk back, and it wasn't just the case of a child maturing."

Still, reformed eating habits mean revised routines. Instead of cake and pop at birthday parties, Virginia sucks on her own stash of sugar-free lollipops. On Halloween, she trades bags with her mother. Mom gets the candies and Virginia gets a surprise sack filled with toy charm bracelets and other trinkets. New rules and limitations make it difficult to sort out what's caused the change - the diet or the added attention. Says Wolraich, "The whole issue of behavioural change is one that's very susceptible to suggestion or placebo effects. So if you get people who strongly believe it, they're going to see differences whether they're true or not."

Joneja has a different take on Virginia's metamorphosis. "Dr. Mickelson is wrong because it's the sugar with whatever it's with that's causing the reaction. So many parents have said, `Oh, my children just climb the walls with sugar.' And you say, `Well what did you give them?' And they say, `Oh, they had a candy bar, they had a doughnut.' Well sure, those contain artificial colours, they contain preservatives and a variety of different chemicals that can actually trigger that response."

It was a while before Sarnia, Ontario mother of three Sherry Hallett understood the reasons for her 2 1/2-year-old daughter's "hateful behaviour."

One evening, after a day full of tantrums, Elizabeth refused to go to bed. "I don't want to go to bed," she yelled as Hallett carried her upstairs.

She banged on the walls and pounded her mom's chest with her fists. The, as they approached her bed, Elizabeth bit her. Hallett threw her daughter on the bed. "Stop it!" she screamed. "Just stop it!" "I can't. I can't stop it!" Elizabeth screamed back. "It was like someone had thrown a pail of cold water on my face," says Hallett. "I suddenly realized that this was not something she was doing; this was something that was happening to her and was probably just as bad for her as it was for me."

Eventually, Hallett took Elizabeth to an acupuncture clinic where food-related problems were identified. The family banished products containing the 20-odd offending ingredients from their grocery list and adjusted Elizabeth's diet. "After two weeks," insists Hallett, "my daughter was a different child."

The scientific link between food and behaviour is, at best, a weak one. Still, with so many people convinced that food is at the root of their children's erratic conduct, many doctors recommend that parents trust their own instincts - if certain foods cause misery, cut them out, but ensure that diets stay healthy and balanced. Whether we are what we eat, what we don't eat, or even what we think we eat, ultimately, as Catherine Adeney discovered, when we're talking food and behaviour, it's whatever makes the difference.

Resources

Dietary Management of Food Allergies & Intolerances , by Janice Joneja, Hall Publications, 1997.

Is This Your Child? , by Doris Rapp, MD, Quill, 1992. This 627-page book examines the relationships between environmental illness, allergies, diet and behaviour.

January 1999