 It is estimated that there are currently thousands of additives in our food supply. Some are good, like supplementing foods with vitamin B12, for example. Others you have to weigh the risks and benefits, like the nitrites in processed meats. Yes, they may increase your risk of cancer, but as preservatives they decrease your risk of dying from botulism. Then there are additives used for purely cosmetic purposes, like food dyes used to provide color to colorless and fun foods. According to the FDA, without color additives, colas wouldn't be brown. Margarine wouldn't be yellow, and mint ice cream wouldn't be green. Heaven forbid! According to the FDA, color additives are now recognized as an important part of practically all processed foods we eat. Because we are eating a lot more processed foods, we're now getting five times more food dyes in our daily diet than we were 50 years ago. Fifteen million pounds of food dyes are used every year in foods, drugs, and cosmetics in the United States. I always wondered why they called them like blue number one instead of their actual chemical names in their list of ingredients. Then after reading this report from the Center for Science and the Public Interest, I realized why. Here's a box of Kraft mac and cheese. It has yellow number five. I think people would be as likely to buy this product if instead of quote-unquote yellow number five, it said this instead on the label. This list of approved colors used to be longer, but different dyes keep getting banned, including violet number one, which ironically was the color used in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's meat inspection stamp, so they may have been actually further cancelling up the meat. Years ago, I featured this landmark study, a randomized double blind placebo-controlled food challenge, posting perhaps the most prestigious medical journal in the world, showing artificial colors increased inattentiveness, impulsivity, and hyperactivity among young children. So, what happened? Well, the British government said, okay, there's no health benefits to these dyes, only health risks, so it's no brainer. The British government mandated that food manufacturers remove most of the artificial food colors from their products. In fact, a whole European Union said, fine, you want to continue to use these dyes, then you have to put a warning label, stating, look, may have an adverse effect on activity and the tension in children. So, many international food companies have taken them out of their products in Europe, but they continue to use them in the same products here in the U.S., where similar regulations are not currently in place. Why not? The FDA put together a committee that looked at that same landmark study and conceded that the food additives may have resulted in changes in behavior, but the type of treatment effects reported in the study, even though the investigators referred to increases in levels of hyperactivity, were not the disruptive excessive hyperactivity behaviors of ADHD, but more likely the type of overactivity exhibited occasionally by the general population of preschool and school-aged children, to which a distinguished toxicologist responded, look, low-level lead exposure may only shave off a few IQ points off of kids, but just because they'd still fall within the normal range doesn't mean it's okay to expose kids to it. In fact, now looking back, the lead in leaded gas may have been causing brain cancer and even urban violence. The aggravated assault rate in cities around the U.S. seem to follow the lead levels in the air pretty closely. Anyways, CSPI continues to call on the FDA to ban food dyes of food companies to voluntarily stop using them. Good luck with that. In the meanwhile, some researchers recently suggested a way to see which food colors may be damaging your children's brain. Advising parents to test artificial colors by purchasing little bottles of food dye at the grocery store, then have your child do some homework or something, and then have them chug down an artificial color and see if it affects their handwriting, reading, math at 30 minutes, then at 90 minutes, then at 3 hours. Also see if they get irritable later, have problems sleeping. Then if that's okay, you try even more to see if that will mess up their mind. If I may offer an alternate suggestion, maybe we shouldn't be buying our kids processed crap in the first place.