Page 61 - Summer 2017 Journal

The Accidentally Healthy Diet The Feingold Protocol as a Gateway Diet
By Jane Hersey
What?! You allow white sugar? You allow refined flour? You call this a healthy diet?” Well, no, a healthy diet was never the aim. We prefer to call it a “healthier” diet because it’s healthier than the way most Americans eat.
The year was 1976 and parent volunteers from around the country met in Washington, DC. We created a national support group to help other parents of children whose behavior was out of control. They were good parents, doing “all the right things,” but their best efforts were not working, and the professionals they consulted were not helping. Like us, they had tried nearly everything they could think of, although most had not tried drugs since these were not as widely used back in the 1970s.
But we volunteers were the lucky ones. Thanks to the work of a re- markable doctor, we learned that the majority of children like ours would improve (often dramatically) if we removed a group of synthetic chemi- cal food additives. The doctor was Ben Feingold, MD, chief of allergy at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco. He had already been working with what he dubbed the “K-P Diet” for over ten years, had conducted clinical studies and written the book, Why Your Child is Hyper- active.
SUMMER 2017
Wise Traditions 61