Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeytown2 | Hacker News Reader

TEDx talk on the effects of food dye on kids [1]. One of my kids is affected by food dye as described in the video

I'm glad you found out, I'm 50 now, found out around age 14 or so, avoiding them made a huge difference to my state of mind.

I hadn't heard about the mind state thing until I went onto Wikipedia just now, but I've known I was allergic to Yellow #5 since early childhood. It brings on rapid asthma type symptoms. Also discovered around Halloween time when I ate a large number of orange cookies from the grocery store, that I'll break out in hives all over my body if I ingest enough of the stuff. Have made a point not to do that again.

We found about (about our son's allergy) on Halloween, too, when he was 5. He got an uncontrollable neurologic eye tic that persisted for about a week.

So far as I can tell this is basically an anecdote. She doesn't even try to back it up aside from vague mentions of "articles" that she found (no specific studies were mentioned). Why should we give any credence to this over any other random HN commenter?

"The Food Standards Agency today announced its decision to recommend to Ministers the phasing out of six colours in food and drink in the EU. These six colours - sunset yellow (E110), quinoline yellow (E104), carmoisine (E122), allura red (E129), tartrazine (E102) and ponceau 4R (E124) - had been shown to increase hyperactive behaviour of children in a study published by a University of Southampton research team in September 2007."

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2008/04/food-standards-ag...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com