Chemicals in Food are Shown to Affect Children
One of the under the radar health stories from last year has to do with food additives and their effect on children. Maybe the publicity was minimum because most people would read a headline like this one and say "duh". It is interesting, however, in that it seemed to show many of the behavioral changes blamed on sugar in food might actually be the fault of other ingredients.
Many parents have long believed that certain high sugar foods can cause children to become hyped up and inattentive. The study purported to show that it is not the sugar that causes the most trouble, but the fact that most high sugar foods that children eat also contain chemical colorings and preservatives. In my mind the anecdotal evidence from raising of my own children does not completely let sugar off the hook.
A team of researchers in Great Britain determined that young children’s behavior is directly effected by their intake of artificial coloring and preservative chemicals. The three to nine year old children were given one of three drinks. One contained a common food preservative, another, a widely used food color, and the third was free of chemicals. None of the three contained sugar.
Using a standard and widely accepted test for attention, results showed that the students who drank the food preservative or coloring were easily measured to have more than double the level of hyperactivity as the children given the coloring and preservative free drink. The results also showed that some children were less affected by the additives than others. On average though, the level hyperactivity in children given the chemicals was more than double the level of children consuming fruit drinks without the chemicals. This was shown to be true regardless of the age of the children.
I know that these chemicals have been tested and claimed to not cause harm to humans. The good old FDA has of course cleared their use, but studies like this do make you wonder. Maybe they don’t kill you, make you turn green, or cause you to grow an extra eyeball, but do you really want to be consuming these chemicals? I don’t.
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Choose from box
The big bad boy we’ve been trying to avoid like the plague is high fructose corn syrup. I’m convinced it is the root of many problems, along with artificial flavors. Preservatives scare me a little less, maybe because they do seem to be a more necessary evil.
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Comment by Jennifer Robin (39 comments.) — June 4, 2008 @ 9:22 am
It constantly amazes me how willing people are to participate in essentially wide spread experimentation with their health and their children’s health.
Our capitalist economy, including the food industry, is based on the concept of Creative Destruction. Put simply, this means that as products, or in this case, ingredients become ubiquitous they become cheaper. We all remember how much blank CD’s and DVD’s used to cost, right? This usually works well for consumers by quickly making exotic technology and products easily obtained. I still remember the first day I noticed that my local convenience store carried 3-Packs of blank writable CDs. Treating the food industry the same way, however, concerns me.
This means that companies that produce the flavorings and preservatives and colorings in food need to constantly develop “new and improved” offerings in oder to maintain stable or increasing profits.
For much of human history, we have had generations and generations of food consumption on which to base the safety and desirability of various foods. It’s only been a couple hundred years since Pellagra was killing people in Europe after the introduction maize to people’s diets without the proper preparation to unlock the nutrients in the grain.
We now are introducing new chemicals and molecular forms to our bodies so fast and for such short - historically speaking - periods of time that it becomes nearly impossible to track down exactly what, if any, problems are being caused by food we feed ourselves and our kids.
Comment by JD (2 comments.) — June 5, 2008 @ 6:36 am
Will:
A agree with you all the way on this one. Food additives are questionable and should be avoided whenever possible. On a slightly different subject, my daughter (a practicing microbiologist) recently told me that something boils off the insides of plastic water bottles that have been left in the sun. I forget what it was, but she said that it’s definitely not good for human consumption. Have you heard anything about this?
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Comment by Swubird (27 comments.) — June 5, 2008 @ 9:33 am
Hi Swubird - I am glad you posted that. I have heard that as a problem in addition to all the other reasons not to use the plastic water bottles. Having a microbiologist back that up gives it more weight. I have mentioned it to the girls on my daughter’s soccer team but I don’t know if it has made any of them think about it. So many bring a plastic bottle of water to practice and them just throw it down in the sun. Usually the have partially frozen the bottle beforehand, so maybe that lessens this particular risk. But, I have read that you should not freeze the plastic bottles water comes in because that affects the plastic also. Best just not to use them.
Comment by Will — June 7, 2008 @ 9:24 am
JD - You are exactly right. But the thing about it is that most us end consumers do not think about the potential risks. People are just not apt to analyze it, they just go with the easiest, fastest, cheapest, product. It does not seem to matter if it is CDs or dinner!
Even most people I with whom I talk about this, even though they are nice about it, seem to think I am worrying about nothing. Once in a while someone will even dispute concerns like this saying something like this. “Look how long people are living right now. My parents have been exposed to this stuff and worse for a long time and they are healthy and 85 years old now.”
Comment by Will — June 7, 2008 @ 9:31 am
Yes Robin, the HFCS is one that I tell everyone to avoid like the plague also, except it is not as easy to avoid as fleas! It is something that has immediate bad influence on your body. Big negatives are on blood sugar levels and pre-diabetes conditions.
Comment by Will — June 7, 2008 @ 9:35 am