How a Temper Tantrum Changed Our Diet

It’s 1982. Chatch is 2 years old. For 2 full hours, he lay on the floor, kicking and screaming “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” No one is touching him. I feel helpless, near his side but unable to soothe him.

Turns out the poor kid had a sugar allergy. We noticed that whenever he had something with sugar in it, he broke down with intolerable difficulties. We had to search through all our food looking for added sugar in our food, like pasta sauce and peanut butter. We told his grandparents not to serve him anything with sugar in it.

Then the research began, along with experimentation. He was not allergic to maple syrup. Thank goodness since we live in Vermont. He was not allergic to raw honey. He was not allergic to unprocessed sugars like Sucanat, Rhapadora, and Panela. He was not allergic to date sugar.

We are in Puerto Rico on vacation and we tour the Bacardî factory. We learn that sugar cane is pressed to extract the liquid juice, guarapo. Then, the molasses—which contains all the nutritious ingredietnts like manganese, magnesium, copper, vitamin B6, silenium, potassium, iron, and calcium—is removed through boiling. The resulting liquid, which is now crystalized, has a sticky brown coating. The crystals are bleached. The Environmental Protection Agency wrote that particularly children are sensitive to the effects of the bleaching agent.

The result is granulated table sugar. Further research revealed that several products are white sugar with a little molasses added back in, such as brown sugar. Chatch was only allergic to processed sugar alone or added to products.

We used unprocessed sugars with no problems and no more temper tantrums!