Food Dyes: Too Much of a Bad Thing?

Bright colors in our food have for millenia indicated freshness, deliciousness, and a host of other positive qualities. But these days nearly anything can be made to look fresh, even if it is highly processed. Check out these tempting-looking donuts - see the bright sprinkles? To your brain, that looks delicious. It probably thinks you've discovered some kind of fruit with multicolored seeds.

It's not just donuts and packaged goods. Farmed salmon has for many years been artificially colored.

There is now new research about the effect of these dyes on children's health. Take a look at this article from the L.A. Times. There is probably no single cause for the sharp rise of ADD and ADHD in the United States and other "developed" countries, but these studies may provide a clue towards finding the contributing factors.

Fast Food Moratorium in South L.A.

For the past month or so, there has been a ban on new fast-food restaurants opening in South Los Angeles. In combination with incentives and tax breaks for grocery stores and restaurants with table service, the idea is to give people healthier eating options.

I think this is a great idea. Fast food is essentially junk food, empty calories that will make you feel full for awhile but lack important nutrients that your body needs. On top of that, fast food restaurants often serve the cheapest meat, which can be loaded with contaminants, unfriendly bacteria and filler. When you eat a lot of junk food, your body can only make junk energy. It's no surprise that diabetes is at epidemic levels among poor people (see the New York Times series from 2006).

This is a great first step in fighting obesity and all its related illnesses: diabetes chief among them, followed quickly by heart disease and high blood pressure. If we can get new grocery stores to open, or farmers markets to set up (click here for a list of farmer's markets in Los Angeles County), that will be a good next step.

Recommended Reading:
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser

Why 32% of American Children are Overweight

"Herbal" Soda Not Good For You Either

You've seen the energy drinks, probably at the gas station or the corner store, bright green tallboys with aggressive graphics and names like "Monster" and "Rock Star". Mostly sugar and caffeine, they also have herbal extracts of the latest and hottest energy herb. Guarana and ginseng are often-abused herbs in these sugar bombs.

For the vast majority of people who take these drinks, it will be the only contact they have with guarana or ginseng, and that's a shame. It would be like only knowing Marlon Brando from The Island of Dr. Moreau and never seeing On the Waterfront. Instead of experiencing these herbs in the context where they can do the most good - a spare, well-directed herbal formula - they see them only as fat, ineffective addons to an already disgusting product.

Now comes news that the Coca-Cola company has set up a huge research center in China, partnering with the prestigious China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing to (choose one):

a) Sponsor important research on eliminating epidemics in developing nations using low-cost, highly effective Chinese herbal formulas
b) Investigate the connection between soda drinking and childhood obesity, diabetes, ADHD and autism
c) Discover great new flavors for herbal Coke!

Answer (sort of) here.

See also:

• Diet Soda is Not Better Than Regular Soda

Diet Soda Is Not Better Than Regular Soda

A new study further confirms that diet soda is bad for you. It's nice to know that some scientific studies follow the principles of common sense. From the New York Times:

Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels, and elevated blood pressure.

This study looked at the eating patterns of real people, rather than trying to calculate the nutrient value of specific foods those people ate. Take a look at this quote from ScienceDaily.com:

In general, the Western-pattern diet was heavy on refined grains, processed meat, fried foods, red meat, eggs and soda, and light on fish, fruit, vegetables and whole grain products.

Prudent diet eating patterns, by contrast, favored cruciferous vegetables (e.g., cabbage, radish and broccoli), carotenoid vegetables (e.g., carrots, pumpkins, red pepper, cabbage, broccoli and spinach), fruit, fish and seafood, poultry and whole grains, along with low-fat dairy.

Guess which one is better for you.