The Fat Diaries: Does Junk Food Cause ADHD?
The FDA now blames food coloring. But it amounts to the same thing.
Another year, another new food study on ADHD. This time the FDA is looking into food coloring as the link between children’s diet and ADHD.
Did anyone else just sigh and say “here we go again, ” or was that just me?
Since I was an 8-year-old, Ritalin-popping space-queen diagnosed with ADD (along with half of my 3rd grade class who were either ADD or ADHD) all I’d ever heard of was about the FDA investigating diet links to ADHD and other behavioral problems. For the longest time sugar was named the reason for the hundreds of thousands of children being diagnosed with ADHD (later we found out that a large percent of the diagnoses were suspect). “ADHD? Too much sugar!” “Your kid has ADHD? You’re obviously a bad mom who gives them too much sugar!” It was only recently that food scientists admitted that while sugar did not cause ADHD, which is in fact genetic, it did exacerbate the symptoms.
For years we’ve known that one of the keys to managing children with ADHD was with modified diets and exercise. A diet that consists of mostly junk food and a sedentary lifestyle would exacerbate ANY condition in a child. It would even affect kids with no pre-existing condition and put them at risk for obesity, heart problems and diabetes.
Now that food coloring is in the defendant’s dock, I think we need to take a closer look at the types of foods that typically have a lot of food coloring. Yep. They’re all cram-packed with sugar, sodium, preservatives, and highly-processed ingredients. They are less foods than they are food-stuffs, and they’re EXACTLY the sort of foods that doctors have been telling parents of ADHD kids to steer away from in the first place!
So the big question is, is the food coloring really to blame, or should the FDA be looking at the big picture here? Maybe it’s not just the food coloring but the also the sugar, sodium, chemicals and complete lack of nutrition that is triggering reactions in ADHD kids? Is simply outlawing food coloring going to really fix anything, or is the FDA missing the forest for the trees? If the ban does go through, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more audits of this nature on other things found in junk food, like high sodium, preservatives or maybe even sugar again.
Of course this doesn’t mean that food coloring will be eliminated. If chemical dyes are outlawed they’ll just go back to making natural beet-root and turmeric dyes to get those awful shades. I’ve had a turmeric-colored lollipop before. If you think Yellow 5 is hard to get out of clothes, JUST WAIT.
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