Red Dye 40: Friend or Foe? An Easy Test.

"Oh, Julie. There are times when I can't stand my own daughter! Her attention span is gone. She disobeys and says she can't help it. Then when she is corrected for it she cries and becomes hysterical, and says she can't stop!"
My little girl was almost 5, and over the previous 6 months or so, our sweet, enjoyable, obedient, and helpful child had deteriorated into an uncontrolled, frequently disobedient, and occasionally hysterical, mess.
I hadn't spoken to my friend Julie since the previous year, and felt full of guilt and shame to admit the truth and my inability to 'fix' it.
Her next question completely threw me: "Does K get red dye 40 at all in her diet?"
"Huh? Well, I don't know." was my automatic response. She asked what K ate on a normal day, and I started thinking out loud:
"Well, she has cereal for breakfast, Koolaid at snack time in the morning and afternoon and we often have hot dogs and jello for lunch..."
Julie, the former kindergarten teacher, was flabbergasted.
"Missy! Everyone knows that small children cannot handle red dye 40! It makes them hyper and out of control!"
Well she was totally wrong there: I didn't know that. In fact I'd never heard anything like it and it sounded a little nuts to me. My response was skeptical. It came from the understanding I had that the consumer sources I relied upon would not sell something for children that could HARM them. I knew innately that our government regulates, by virtuous protective agencies like the FDA, every product sold for human consumption. I had never actually thought about it. I didn't know I needed to. I just understood it to be true.
Sensing my hesitancy to buy into her extreme ideas, my friend convinced me with this:
"Missy-- it's an easy test. It takes 48 hours to clear a child's system of the effects of the dyes. Just don't give her anything with dye for two days and you'll know if this is true or not."
She had me there. I was desperate to find a fix and happy to invest two days of "easy" changes to try this one.
The test began.
Short story: My daughter was back exactly two days later, and we were shocked on multiple levels.
Long story: This was a big step in my journey towards understanding that the things I thought I knew about food, eating and health were not only not always true, but could even be harmful to my family.
But in one way my friend was very, very wrong: It was not easy to keep the dyes out of K's diet.
In fact, the more food labels I read, the more dyes I found! Besides Koolaid and candy, there was dye in breakfast cereal, jam, hot dogs, juice boxes, cake mixes (even chocolate!), lunch meat, canned fruits, her daily children's vitamins, a ton of other things (like shampoo, but that's for another post), and even her allergy medicine! (She had increasing allergy symptoms and occasional outbreaks of hives that the doctor said we could expect to never find the source of.)
It wasn't easy, but it was worth the effort. When we could keep her off the dyes, her behavior was good; she was happy, we were happy. Trickier, yes, to get others to honor our 'strange' requests that she not have it, and tough on us sometimes, too, when we had to say 'No' and weren't prepared with an alternative snack. But we all adapted. And her allergies subsided and the hives stayed away, as well.
Both her brothers were also notably affected by the same dyes, but it manifested more in anger and unconquerable distraction, so over time we just tried to weed the nasty stuff out of our family's diet altogether. (Which is much trickier now that they are teens, btw!)
More Steps:
Look up "Food Coloring" or "Artificial Food Dyes" or do your own online search and learn how these are manufactured and from what--you'll be shocked!, how many are banned in Europe, and some of the links that are made between them and adverse behavioral and health problems.
Wikipedia article on Food Coloring