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I really don't know whether or not the additives in sweets can cause misbehavior, but I have a few suggestions that might help you determine if additives are haveing this effect on your daughter. The first is that you ought to try getting her sweets that don't have many additives in them. I don't know where you would get them in the UK, but where I live there are stores that sell organic food and health food, and these stores generally have a candy section where you'll find candies that don't have a lot of crap in them. Even if you don't have stores like this, you could read the ingredients of numerous different candies at your local grocery store to find candies that don't have a lot of strange stuff in them. They'll probably be the more expensive candies, and the ingredients will say things like "sugar, cocoa, vanilla extract..." rather than listing chemicals that you've never heard of. Most of the candies at regular grocery stores around here have lots of strange ingredients in them, the strangest (IMHO) is "natural and artificial flavors". This supposedly means that the company has a secret ingredient that they don't want to tell anyone about, so they can't duplicate the flavor, but I suspect that rather sketchy ingredients are sometimes called natural or artifical flavors so that the company doesn't have to tell the public what kind of crap they're putting into foods. It's also a bother that they do this because people with unusual allergies or who eat non-mainstream diets (like vegetarians) can't tell exactly what's in a food product and whether or not they can/should eat it. Other strange ingredients can be looked up on the internet or in the dictionary, so that you can find out what they are (did you know there are insects in some Snapple drinks? it's listed as something like 'extracts of cochineal'). Some ingredients that may look strange are probably harmless (like soy lecithin, which, according to this link "is extracted from soybean oil"). If you can't or don't want to avoid all strange ingredients, you might want to write down all the strange stuff in the candy before you give it to your daughter, and then write down how she behaved afterward, and over time you might be able to notice a pattern that indicates certain additives.
Something to think about is that in the situation you described, it might not have been the candy that caused your daughter's misbehavior. She might have felt as though she was under a lot of pressure to behave well while at your mother in law's house, and the stress might have contributed to her misbehavior once she was back in a familiar environment where she didn't have as much pressure on her. If you're generally giving her candy as a reward for enduring stressful situations, it might be that it's the stressful situations, rather than the candy, that's causing the misbehavior, even if the misbehavior doesn't start until she's out of the situation. I don't know whether she would find your mother in law's house to be a stressful situation, as that really depends on the dynamics of your family, but it's something to consiter. |
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