E-asy Does It

How to subtract the additives

THREE-YEAR-OLD Daisy Gray didn’t eat much junk food and her parents didn’t allow her fizzy drinks. Then the family went to visit friends, who gave Daisy a big glass of cola. 

Her mother Ann couldn’t believe the change. “From a charming little toddler, she turned into a whirling dervish,” she says, a Scot now living in America. “At midnight, she was still running back and forth, bouncing off the walls. Then when she was about five-years-old she went hyper after a huge chocolate ice-cream with multi-coloured sugary stuff on top, with all the trimmings. It was similar to the cola incident.” 

Ann now limits Daisy’s intake of any food with artificial additives, with the result that there have been no further whirling dervish episodes. Parents are increasingly checking labels on food they buy for ingredients such as monosodium glutamate (MSG) and orange colouring tartazine, concerned that food additives can affect children’s behaviour. And it’s not just food –research conducted by the Food Magazine, published by the Food Commission, found that 40 out of 41 medicines examined contained additives that are banned in food and drink for the under-threes. 

Sue Palmer, a former teacher, is the author of Toxic Children: How Modern Life Is Damaging Our Children And What We Can Do About It. “My personal experience, and that of many parents and teachers I interviewed, convinces me that additives can affect children’s behaviour and, through that, their potential to learn,” she says. “It seems likely to me, parents and teachers that the worst problems occur when children take in a cocktail of additives – and a survey showed that the average snack food contains at least five additives. As one teacher put it: ‘Just think of the cocktail in a typical packed lunch box: packet of crisps, plastic cheese, a chocolate biscuit and a blue drink’.” 

The connection between children’s behaviour and food additives can be traced back to the 1970s, when an American paediatrician named Ben Feingold suggested that symptoms of hyperactivity could be reduced if artificial food colourings were removed from the diet. However his ideas were not, as a whole, endorsed by research, though many parents still adhere to them. 

These days, the flag is flown by Dr Alex Richardson, author of They Are What You Feed Them, co-director of the Inverness-based Food and Behaviour Research charity and research fellow at Oxford University. Richardson has been researching difficulties in children’s behaviour, such as autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), for the last 20 years. And her findings have increasingly led her to focus on nutritional influences. 

“The basic point is that good foods make bad commodities and bad foods make very good commodities,” she says. “For the producers, it’s all about shelf life. Salt, refined sugars and starches, hydrogenated – almost plastic – fats and other non-nutritious ingredients suit them down to the ground.” 

Richardson acknowledges that finding out simple, useable information about artificial additives can be difficult, which is why she wrote the book. 

“From the moment I started working in the field, parents, teachers and other professionals were desperate for information but most of the information is incomprehensible to them unless they’re prepared to swot up and learn how to read scientific papers for themselves,” she says. “I hope [the book] will inspire them to think ‘crikey, I never knew that – I’m going to look more closely at the labels’.” 

Richardson singles out a number of additives that should be a cause for concern. Some of these are banned or restricted in other European countries or America but are permitted in the UK. Tartrazine, for instance, is an orange dye derived from petroleum products and used in anything from orange juice drinks to fish finger crumbs and mushy and processed peas. Several trials have shown that tartrazine or E102 can negatively affect children’s behaviour; both those with conditions such as ADHD and without. It is banned in Norway and Austria.  

The preservative sodium benzoate, which is antibacterial and antifungal, has been found to aggravate asthma and, in combination with vitamin C, can form benzene, a cancer-causing carcinogen. Richardson points out that drinking water is legally allowed one part per billion of benzene, but commercial drinks containing eight times this amount have been deemed safe. 

Richardson also recommends watching out for the colourings sunset yellow (E110), carmoisine (E122) and ponceau 4R (E124), the flavouring MSG and artificial sweetener aspartame. One of the problems of artificial additives such as these is that they are tested individually by food companies, but often appear together in food products. In the course of her research, Palmer interviewed a toxicologist, Vyvyan Howard, who told her: “A number of these substances are related very closely to transmitter substances in the brain, which is the way nerve cells talk to each other. If you interfere with that, you interfere with brain function”.  

A further cause for concern for both Richardson and Palmer are trans-fats. These are polyunsaturated fats – which are good – that have been hydrogenated, or converted from liquids to solids. The problem with them is that some of the molecules of vegetable oils do not harden during the process and these cannot be properly digested. Found in cakes, biscuits, margarine, crisps, fast food, to name a few, trans-fats are linked to similar health problems as saturated fats, such as increased cholesterol and heart disease, though some research suggests trans-fats can be worse.  

“Manufacturers stick trans-fats into all sorts of things, including packaged bread, because they prolong shelf-life,” says Palmer, whose new book, Detoxing Childhood, is out in August. “For this reason, children’s consumption of trans-fats has increased markedly in the last 20 or 30 years. The fact that companies are now starting to remove trans-fats from [their products], without making much song and dance, shows they’ve cottoned on.”  

Yet Richardson’s basic advice is that parents read the evidence themselves and make up their own minds. Above all, they shouldn’t feel guilty if they haven’t been vigilant in the past. “One has always got to look forward and not back,” says Richardson.  

“Parents whose children have got this or that wrong with them worry it’s something they did wrong during pregnancy, but I say start from where you are. You can’t be blamed for things you haven’t been told. “That said, parents have to get their priorities right. Food isn’t ‘another thing to do’, along with the ballet lessons. Food is fundamental. Sorting out their own attitude to food can make parents feel better. So many mums have started eating according to the advice in the book and they say the sugar overload and mood swings have stopped.”  

Palmer agrees that parents are not to blame for how the food industry has changed. “There are so many complex reasons that food has become such a worrisome issue, and it’s so mixed up with other side-effects of contemporary culture that are affecting children’s behaviour,” she says. “Many children live a sedentary, screen-based lifestyle which often means they graze on convenience foods. Most mums now work and so aren’t there to cook healthy meals and make sure children eat them.  

“Children are constantly bombarded with messages promoting junk food as ‘cool’, ‘tasty’ and ‘exciting’. This has infiltrated playground culture, as one mum put it: ‘The wrong brand of crisps in your lunchbox is social suicide’. Lastly, parents now think they should allow their children choice – and the children choose junk food.”  

How do we begin to reverse the situation? Start early, says Richardson. “The dietary habits established early on will usually be the ones that stick,” she says. “That really comes out in research. “Between birth and five-years old, encourage your child to taste and eat a wide range of foods and make sure everyone in the family is trying new, healthy choices. All children will have a phase of saying no to anything new, but the general rule is that if the family eats a wide range of healthy foods, the child will do the same.”  

Avoiding children’s menus in restaurants and convenience foods designed for children is another tip. “When did we ever decide that children should have different menus or that there is a difference between children’s food and adult’s food?” asks Richardson.  

“Traditionally, children would be weaned onto mushed-up versions of adult food. Instead now we have a whole industry geared towards a children’s menu, such as chicken nuggets. As for giving children choice, let them choose between a sweet pepper and a cucumber. Peas or carrots. Parents can’t abdicate and think children can make informed, rational decisions about food.”  

If this sounds like it may be a challenge, Richardson suggests we are at least in a great place to start eating traditional, healthy food free of artificial additives. “Let’s bring back the traditional Scottish foods,” she says. “Porridge. Fish. Soft fruits.” 

AXING THE ADDITIVES - Establish good eating habits from an early age 

- Get your kids to try a wide range of foods 

- Don’t be fooled by no sugar added or low-fat – read the label 

- Make sure you set a good example 

- Avoid children’s menus or ready meals 

- Make the most of Scotland’s own fresh food