Nutrition

Hi,
My 10 year old daughter is very beautiful, intelligent, and highly creative. She can be very focused, and she is very good in her school work too. But she consumes a lot of sugar in any form available. Cookies, pasteries, chocolates, icecream, doughnuts and candies. As a result she got in to dental problems. Also she gets sugar hyper. So we stopped her sugar. However she would turn into a very dull child. When she is fed sweets, she excels in her work, is very obidient, focused, responsible, shows great sense of humor, eats well, keeps pulling our leg and is a lot of fun, but she changes as the sugar dips. She becomes cranky, irritable, screams a lot, fights with her friends, lies, won't eat properly. I spoke to her pediatrician but he said not to worry as she isn't putting on weight and she will come around. But I am very concerned about her sugar intake. She needs to eat sweets at least 5-6 times a day. Mostly candies which she buys in her school. Please suggest  

[Renee Radenberg]

Suggest giving her fruits and dairy products, such as yogurt smoothies (yogurt and fruit blended) which has natural sugars as you cut back on refined sugar (cakes, candy, etc) and see how that works. The combination of protein and sugar will not have the sugar 'bottom' out so much as you described.