April 9, 2003
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
11:05 AM (Pacific)
I have discovered something rather interesting. My son, who is five years old, cannot eat candy.
By "cannot" I do not mean he cannot put the candy in his mouth and chew it. I mean, he gets totally unrecognizable when he eats candy. He turns into a monster. I'm not joking. He turns into a horrible discipline problem, the kind of kid other parents pity you for being the parent of.
It's not as if he ever ate that much candy. My daughter, who is three, can eat the same amount of candy and it doesn't affect her one way or the other. Of course I am familiar with all the stereotypes that children get hyper when they eat sugar, but somehow I never thought of it that way...that my son's "horribleness" (for lack of a better word) came from something so simple and seemingly innocuous, as a single Jolly Rancher lollipop per day.
For the past three days I've cut off all candy...by candy I mean anything that's 99% refined sugar. And I can hardly recognize him now. He's...okay. He's...sweet, even. He's civilized and polite. Naturally, he misses those Jolly Rancher pops, but he seems to be able to eat stuff like chocolate and fruit...which have lots of sugar in them but are not pure-pure sugar.
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