Food Dyes Free

So, I have been diligently working this past week to clean my cupboards and remove all food with dyes in it. Why you may ask? I have a very hyper active child so I did some research and found that food dyes could be affecting his behavior. Now we still have many talks about behavior at home and about making the right choices. After all the talking and disciplining still did not work, we sought out extra help to ensure our child was successful.
 I talked with many friends and several had already cut dyes out of their children's diets for the same reasons, some did this 10-20 years ago and it is still working with their kids.
Here is a link to an article a friend sent me. It explains not only dyes but other things in the foods that we feed our kids.
http://healthychild.org/blog/comments/which_food_additives_make_kids_behave_badly/
So for now cupboards are being cleaned and we are getting rid of dyes.
We have done this for a little over a week. It has been 7 school days, our son has received 3 green days, 3 yellow days and 1 one red day. Before that he had only had 3 green days the whole school year and he got 3 in one week. I also want to note that the red day came after a day that he was fed dyes at school during snack time.

Here is a list of some of the food that we have gotten rid of and also next to it is the alternative that is dye free.

Gogurt  instead he gets Danino yogurts in his lunch, they are smaller and have less yogurt in them, but are dye free.
Name Brand Marshmallows believe it or not these have blue dye in them, we switched to store brand which is dye free
Mac and Cheese this is a favorite of his and mine but totally not good for us even not counting the dyes. We now serve just noodles and shredded cheese melted on top, not the same thing but he doesn't mind.
Doritos this was a hard one for him to give up, but thanks to a friends mom he discovered corn chips. Still not healthy but they are dye free and he will use them instead when we have one of his favorite meals, nachos.
Fruit Snacks you have to watch these, some have dyes and others do not. Currently we are buying Mott's medleys fruit snacks, he loves these.
Sugary Drinks like Hi-C and Koolaid he loves these kind of drinks even though they are full of sugar. Of course we limit these but I have found an alternative he can have. Capri Sun is dye free.
Candy most candy is not ok and has dyes in it. It is not good for him anyways. However he can still have chocolate and we have found that white chocolate chips work well as a reward for him. Plus side is the store had a huge sale on them so we stocked up.

Most of the things he can no longer have are not good for him anyways, so it was a good thing to get rid of them anyways. We are starting with dyes because it is extremely easy. This is not the end of our journey just the beginning.