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I Spy Something Red
Could Your Child Be Sensitive to Red Food Dye? By Deborah Boehle
Dr. Ronald Kleinman, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition at Massachusetts General Hospital, says there may be some children who are bothered by artificial dyes, but he does not believe they are responsible for a large number of children who have been diagnosed with ADHD or other behavior disorders.
"It's very hard to pin down food dye as a major cause of attention deficit disorder," says Kleinman. "No child needs red food dye to survive. It's not essential to life, so for any given child, if a parent wants to do that experiment and they see that there's some marked behavior improvement, I'm not going to argue with them about that."
Studies have shown that some children have classic allergic reactions to red and yellow food dyes, but Kleinman would like to see more scientific studies done to correlate food dyes with behavior problems in children.
Kathy Bratby, RN, MSN, a clinical assistant professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook School of Nursing and the president of the Feingold Association, says her son's first grade teacher validated the correlation between her child's behavior and food dye at a school party where the boy consumed an artificially colored drink.
"The teacher saw it within 20 minutes of him drinking a couple cups of it (the drink)," says Bratby. "She said, 'I had a different child, running around the room, bouncing off the walls.'"
Bratby encourages parents to look at diet first if they have a child with behavior problems or a chronic medical problem, such as headaches or bedwetting.