Do Food Dyes Make Kids Hyperactive?
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- Опубликовано: 30 янв 2024
- Avoiding certain food dyes to help improve a child’s behavioral issues is common advice, and not just on TikTok! Several doctors stand behind this recommendation as well. But several doctors also prescribe vitamin D, and that’s usually pretty useless according to the data. So where do the data stand on food dyes?
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As a primary school teacher, I came to understand that kids get excited not by sugar or the type of foods, but by the events that got us to be served cake and candies or junk food. Like Halloween, before-Xmas-break class party, bake sales, pizza lunch parties, etc. My classroom management was pretty good, just one look at them and they'd fall back in line if they were getting too rowdy. Same on those days and on those foods: if I kept the same standards of behaviour for calling them out, they weren't all over the place despite all they had ingested. Of course they were more rowdy because it's a special event and excited, but not uncontrollable like so many think. That is them allowing the kids to go wild because they blame an outside source.
Totally true! Great comment!
Controlling the little brats will damage their self esteem
My mother diagnosed me as being "allergic to artificial colours" as a child. What I did have was undiagnosed ADHD (girls in the 80's/90's didn't have ADHD) and an emotionally abusive mother. I think it was a cultural scapegoat at a time when artificial colouring were common and parenting could be questionable even when following the current scientific ideas of the time.
Nice summary. The scientific evidence on food dyes and children's behavior is still exactly where it was 25 years ago: most studies either show no clinically meaningful effect and/or are too small or otherwise flawed to reach any conclusions at all.
I'm glad to see you outside your channel, your videos are incredible at presenting complex issues with why we do things without reason easily.
@@dizzyboy92 Thanks!
Clinical studies run by who???
Not true, studies prove it affects 8 percent of children. oehha.ca.gov/media/downloads/risk-assessment/report/healthefftsassess041621.pdf
My PTSD, etc, as a child was blamed on 'too many sugars' so they tormented me more by limiting my diet. It didnt help in the slightest.
There is only one confirmed effect from food dyes that I’ve found from personal experience with colored breakfast cereals: green poop.
Really liked you showing the graph of which studies are high quality and not at 2:00. It helps more than just saying it out loud and I can also pause to check the other results. :)
It definitely looks like this is just another example of parents who struggling with their children's behaviour and looking for something they can blame and understand.
Which is obviously not how children work. But I get the impulse.
and there no way to convince a decent amount of parents that it isn't because of the dyes, or the sugar because when the kid has sugar or dyes, the idea somehow get reinforced over and over again even if there no difference before consuming sugar/dyes or after
What possible mechanism has been proposed in which food dyes would have to affect the brain somehow?
Proposed mechanism is something big pharma came up with to sell snake oil. When a scientist claims a mechanism of action they cat really prove it
So the same with sugar it is mostly just parent perception. As a parent I fully understand that my preschooler does not need a reason to be crazy because she is 4 and that is just how she is sometimes.
Wait, what about the vitamin D? My levels were incredibly low and my dr had prescribed it to me. It brought my levels up
He has another video on that if you search Healthcare Triage video list.
We have several vitamin D videos! This is the hill Aaron will die on, should he die on a hill. :) -Tiffany
I wish I could have involved my kids in some sort of study. I absolutely did not believe that food dye affected behavior until I started potty training my first child. We would reward her with a couple of small pieces of candy. Our diet was otherwise pretty healthy and didn’t involve a lot of processed foods. We noticed she went off the rails when we gave her skittles. She also developed a rash of tiny little red dots all over her belly. It took me a while to actually believe it was the food dye, but we found it correlated every single time. Yellow food dye also did it to her. our son had a similar reaction but a little less so than then our daughter. Could it be that some people have an allergy that is not very common? We realized she was acting out because she didn’t feel well. My niece would stay up into the middle of the night if she had red food dye. My sister is a very practical physicians assistant and believes in science over superstition, but she 100% saw a correlation between food dye and her daughters behavior. Her daughter is the type that is very rule abiding, and she would just be sweetly lying in bed, 100% wide awake for hours if she had red food dye.
hi! big fan of your videos, i think it would be helpful if you included transcriptions of your videos and/or put captions in your older videos!
I remember one kid at my school who used to get hyper after drinking a red drink. Like jittery, and talking so fast he couldn’t mentally keep up so he'd be stuttering and restarting. He was ONLY like that after a red fizzy drink. People would buy them for him just to see it happen again.
That said, the fact I remember one kid doing that means it was rare to me, so a tiny effect population-wide. Still, that was NOT a small effect size in that one kid.
Two hypothesis:
- did the drink have caffeine? in which case duh .
-was it placebo? If his mom had once refused to give him the drink and said "it will make you way too hyperactive", he then believes it will make him act out, and thus he does. You can also observe this effect when giving people alcohol-free drinks, but telling them there's alcohol in it. They will always concince themselves they are feeling a buzz and some will start acting drunk.
@@MichiruEll thanks, saved me some time.
What about when it's not behavioral? I seem to recall that some people react with headaches, etc.
Good to know. Still think adding dyes is unnecessary, so why do it.
Kids are kids and parents are strict- there will always be things strict parents are looking for to blame normal behavior on.
It seems food dyes are assume to be the problem first, but aren't those found in processed foods?
Define processed.
The bottom line is if a new drug really works its goung ti be obvious, not something where yiu have to run long studies, masage data and make grand claimes abiut barely noticeable effects. Its all about the stock market and payouts frim aquisition. The so called new drugs mostly com from smalk venture capital backed firms, tgeyve just been aquired by the big pharma peoples.
I'm confused.
How can you have a placebo food dye?
If its red, its red, if its not its the placebo?
Anecdotally I have observed an effect of the blue in UK Smarties (old info),
but I understand that's not data (relative but I am not the parent in this case).
Literally a double-blind study, in that all participants are blindfolded for the duration. 😁
Or maybe they compared one food dye with another that produces a similar color, like beet juice or carmine for red.
Drink a juice from a container and straw where you can't see it's color. Not hard to keep someone from seeing the color of what they consume. Then tell them it was whatever you need them to think it was.
He did mention that juice was used.
wait wait hold up.....prescribing vitamin D is useless...? is it because it's accessible over the counter or is it because vitamin D supplements don't work....? I've been taking Vit D supplements for literal years now per my doctors' recommendations...
Please keep taking it, if you use it to medicate bone problems. But don't expect "miracle" results if taken against anything else. There MIGHT be effects on blood pressure, diabetes, some forms of cancer and some other ailments. But there isn't enough evidence (yet) to really justify prescribing it for such things. And no evidence for an effect on behavioral issues.
He has other videos covering Vitamin D. Check the channel video list.
Definitely check out our vitamin D videos - there are several! Aaron is quite passionate about it :) -Tiffany
So the CA offices of EHHA put out a gish gallop report?
i wander if it's the case that a small subset of children are affected badly by dyes, and the majority that aren't dilute their effect in the data? I have one friend who remembers getting extremely hyper when eating food dyes as a kid. But me and my brother and other friends never noticed any effect. So doctors who have parents reporting hyperactive children to them might find suggesting removing food dyes works relatively often because they are seeing a self selecting sample. Just a thought
Raising well behaved kids is something we used to know how to do, but the people who are capable of doing it (without constant threat of corporal punishment) are not easily manipulated and are capable of doing the right thing no matter how undesirable or difficult it may be because they know it's worth it in the long run. These people are not the target market for our economy and they are actively marginalized because they are a "bad influence" on the people who are easily manipulated and not capable of doing the right thing because it's not easy or popular. We need to popularize the idea of free birth control that can't be "forgotten" as part of programs to help the poor, including forced vasectomies for child neglect or failure to pay child support.
Oh, I think we always kinda sucked at raising children. it's very hard to do right and most people have to learn on the job.
Actually no, that's completely wrong. All data points toward a millenia (yes you read that right) trend toward more social, less aggressive behavior in humans. Basically we humans are domesticating ourselves, and rather successfully so. Most new generations are indeed better then the previous.
Of course then there are flukes. Like the 1930s, where rabbid monsters sterilized (and in Germany murdered) other "undesirables". Forced vasectomies happened in Germany ... but also the USA, Sweden and many other countries. Ups... exactly what YOU suggest we should do. Barbaric, anti-social and all but well-behaved.
I discovered as an adult that Red 40 apparently acts on me like caffeine does other people, only with a much longer half-life. Several years later, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Whether the two are related isn't something I could say, but I do avoid Red 40 now, unless I really need to be awake for 36 hours straight...
Lol who wrote this script? The Sugar Lobby?
Nope, 'twas me! :) -Tiffany