this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Sounds legit.
There is actual evidence of some dyes causing behavioral issues in some children.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9052604/
It happened to my son. When he was 2, he would barely talk and had behavioral issues. We stopped red and yellow dye, and within two weeks he was much calmer and saying full sentences. No lie. Most people don’t believe us, but it most definitely happened.
For science, you must now reintroduce him to the dyes and record the results.
Further testing will be done on a double-blind basis.
Eventually he did start eating them again, maybe when he was about 8? It didn’t seem to cause the same issues then, but it’s hard to tell because he has severe ADHD, and I didn’t exactly measure his symptoms when in and off the dye. He is 18 now so it’s hard to remember.
Out of curiosity what foods had the dyes in them that you had to cut? I imagine it's in some things you'd never think of
A lot of it was obvious, like dessert foods. But some were sneakier. I couldn’t tell you for sure because that was 16 years ago. It was a whole diet called the Feingold diet, and it was pretty restrictive.
Kool-aid.
There may also be evidence of certain red foods being red because of ingredients other than red food dye.
No way! Water you trying to say food can have natural colours?
Almost as if what's in the photo, for all we know, might be strawberry mush.
I like that they'll admit that, then in the same breath say sugar has no affect on kids.
Sugar itself doesn't, I've never seen a study showing an actual link between the two. It's instead excitement to getting something special, not the sugar causing a chemical reaction. Causation and correlation are different.
As an ADHD person, the "all these problems are caused by sugar" conversation has always been an extra hilarious one for me.
And then I post this.
Heh, I was first laughing, but looks like it indeed caused behavioral problems for some kids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythrosine#United_States
Yeah, although sweet-and-sour sauce in the US typically has E129 (Red Dye No 40) rather than E127 (Red Dye No 3), which the FDA are banning. There is a whole bunch of anecdotal correlation drawn between E129 and behavior, though, so it wouldn't be a huge surprise to see it reviewed in the future.
It actually is. Several people I know have this issue, I think they're all autistic people or people with ADHD, so that may be related, just as a note.
I have ADHD and probably also the 'tism and I've never felt like hurting others or myself after eating sauce that happened to be red because it contained red ingredients. After eating anything, really, for that matter.
My son (diagnosed with the tsim but too young for his inevitable had diagnosis) gets very disregulated after eating items high in sugar or after having too much screen time. No clue why, he just becomes a little asshole and takes his energy out on the people and animals around him. Thankfully the screen time issue has gone down from "any" to more than 20-30 minutes so he can occasionally watch educational kids programming.
Count yourself lucky you don't have to deal with that. It's maddening at the best of times, especially when all the experts we talk to say we're already doing everything they recommended.....
I didn't say every autistic person or person with ADHD had this problem, that's not how it works. I'm just saying that anecdotally I know of this phenomenon, and have noticed a correlation with autism and ADHD.
My main point being that not every food that is red has artificial food dye in it.
That was not clear. Why is that your point? This post is specifically about one particular red dye that can cause behavioral symptoms.
The post is about sauce that happens to be red. The post cleverly avoids saying "food dye" and everybody just assumes it must be about food dye because of cultural context.
The post is in reference to this. https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-revoke-authorization-use-red-no-3-food-and-ingested-drugs
Listen, I know that the FDA in the US is banning that one type of red dye - even though I'm not from the US. That's how unavoidable the topic is if you're just a little too online. That's the cultural context. Now show me in the original post where it says "red dye".
In the title
The original original post.
I would note that the OP doesn’t talk about wanting to hurt people or intending to do it, just that they did. For a child that could easily be something like getting too excited and playing too roughly or acting impulsively in a way that winds up with them or someone else getting hurt.