Food Dyes: Harmless or Harmful?

Raise your hand if you use to hate vegetables as a kid! Before high school, the only vegetables I recall ever eating were french fries and green peppers. I was never encouraged or offered a variety of colorful fruits and vegetables.  When talking to others, I hear about similar upbringings.  The only color you got in your diet was from the artificial food dye in your morning cereal or a nutrition bar.

Really, it’s a shame that brightly colored foods are marketed to children.  Children prefer bright colors and still have that primal instinct to eat colorful foods.  This is nature’s way of encouraging you to eat a variety of vitamins and minerals to keep you healthy.  Unfortunately, when you give in and serve them up fake foods, they get a taste for salty and sugary foods, not nature made foods. These fake colors come at a price in your and your children’s health.

The Harm They Cause

Originally, food dyes were synthesized from coal tar.  Now, they’re made from petroleum. They come in a variety of colors and each color can have a different number behind it & sometimes even have names similar to the natural version to cause further confusion. Below, I’ll share with you just the US approved color and the problems it causes:

1. Red: contaminated with benzidine and other carcinogens, causes cancer in animals; creates a hypersensitivity reaction;
2. Yellow: in a double blind study, was seen to cause irritability, restlessness, and sleep disturbances in some children; contaminated with benzidine and other carcinogens; microbiologic and rodent studies have shown it to be genotoxic (causing cellular DNA damage); possible adrenal and
   testicular tumors 
3. Blue: a study published in the Lancet found that it can cause hyperactivity; test tube studies found a decrease in growth of nerve cells; possible linked to brain and bladder cancers

Where Food Dyes Hide

You can see food dyes in some obvious things. Like colorful sports drinks, brightly colored food, but even those little cakes can use food dyes to make them a brown color. If you think you’re giving your kids or you yourself are eating ‘just one’, remember, they can hide in all kinds of places.  Make sure to read on how you can avoid these pesky guys.  Other places you’ll see them are:

• Red: sports drinks, sodas, canned fruits, yogurt, cereals, nutritional shakes, flavored applesauce
• Yellow: cheeses, waffles, soft drinks, puddings, juices, caramel candies,  flavored oatmeal packets, pickles, pancake syrup, beef jerky
• Blue: candies, drinks, yogurt, salad dressings, cereals, flavored applesauce

How to Avoid Them

The best way to avoid food dyes is to eat your plant based foods! Cook food in your home.  If you make air popped popcorn, oatmeal, waffles, or your own applesauce, you’ll get to control what goes in them. Making banana pancakes with flaxseed ‘eggs’ are a favorite in our home. You can also try these oat recipes for your family.

If you have to buy processed foods, read your labels.  You want the label with the least amount of ingredients and you want to be able to pronounce all your ingredients.  You can even download an app to analyze ingredients for you too.  This also helps you avoid unnecessary ingredients and you’ll start to see things that are added to your food that you don’t want in your body.

I hope this post inspires you to look more into your ingredients.  I hope you have a healthy and blessed day!

xo Meg

Check out next week’s post here about how to eat plants more easily.