Coloring Your
Perception of Food
By Emma Gottschall
Today,
it’s common to see articles that read “A Dangerous
Rainbow” or “What
are we feeding our children”. The conversation around safety of colors is
being led by popular food activists like the “Food Babe”,
and artificial food colors have come under fire. Push back from consumers has
led top food manufacturers like Kraft
and Mars to begin removing artificial food colors from their
products. But why are consumers fighting for the death of artificial food dyes and
if they are dangerous, why hasn’t the FDA banned them already?
Food dyes have been used for
thousands of years, originating around 1500 B.C. These original food dyes came
from natural sources like saffron, squid ink, and certain flowers. With the
advent of food colorants, food vendors had the ability to misrepresent their
products—often for economic gain—by making lower quality foods more appealing
to consumers. Often these colorants were toxic, like copper which was used to
color pickled vegetables in the 1800’s and Scheele’s green, containing arsenic,
which was used to color candies in the early 1900s. Today, the FDA
regulates the use of synthetic and natural food colors in Foods, Drugs, and
Cosmetics. Some food dyes (eg: Red #40) can cause sensitivities, and so food
manufacturers are required to label their usage in food products.
Much
of the current controversy over food dyes is their potential to promote
hyperactivity in children. Hyperactive behavior has been linked to children who
suffer from ADHD, and some studies imply
that artificial food colors may affect children without behavioral conditions.
These studies have prompted the EU to restrict the use of these artificial
colors; requiring disclosure text on products with these colorants.
The
Center for Science in the Public Interest is petitioning
the FDA for the second time, to ban the use of all Artificial Food Colors in
the food industry. After an initial petition in 2011, an FDA
committee ruled that there was not enough conclusive evidence that food
dyes cause hyperactivity. The committee concluded that more research was needed
before they could prohibit the use of synthetic colors.
Since
the 1970s, several studies, often using exclusion
diets to study what happens when artificial food colors are removed from the
diet have shown improvements in children’s behavior and attention when
artificial colors are removed from the diet. However, these diets usually
remove other food additives, like preservatives, at the same time; making it
difficult to identify a single cause for the behavior changes. Not to mention
these studies often use parental or teacher observations to measure child
behavior, which is difficult to compare.
One cause of these behavioral
effects might be related to aspirin
sensitivities. Although pain relievers may seem completely unrelated to
food dyes, some food colors, including Yellow #5,have a similar chemical
structure to aspirin, both contain salicylic acid residues. In fact, many
exclusion diets recommended to treat behavioral problems suggest removing foods
containing natural salicylates for the same reason. Other researchers
hypothesize that tartrazine
(yellow #5) might bind Zinc in the blood. Zinc is necessary for proper brain
function and deficiencies can cause behavioral changes. When tartrazine is
excreted in urine, any bound zinc would also be excreted.
With growing consumer concerns, retailers are reformulating
their products with natural colorants. But consumers have an expectation that
some foods need to be brightly colored—and those vibrant shades are often
difficult to achieve without the use of artificial food dyes. General Mills is
one of many retailers who understands that education is key, and has begun a campaign
to show consumers what their foods will look like with natural food colors. If
people aren’t prepared for these changes, they may avoid foods creating food
waste. Consumers want bright
colors and right now there aren’t many natural colors which can replace
these bright synthetic dyes. Understanding what the switch will entail is important
before artificial colors can be completely replaced. If Cheetos were suddenly
pale instead of neon there might not be riots in the streets, but there would
certainly be complaints!
Examples of snack food seasonings containing artificial
food colors (A,C) and their counterparts made with natural food colors (B,D).