April 11, 2008

UK moves to ban artificial food colourings

Posted by buberfan under children's health, diet, health | Tags: , , , , , , |
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An update on my post of April 9. The UK’s Food Safety Agency has recommended that the six artificial food colourings implicated in a recent study should be removed from food products.

The six chemicals involved are: sunset yellow (E110), quinoline yellow (E104), carmoisine (E122), allura red (E129), tartrazine (E102) and ponceau 4R (E124)

For people in Australia, the numbers to look out for are: 102 (tartrazine), 104 (quinoline yellow) 110 (sunset yellow FCF), 122 (Azorubine or carmoisine), 124 (Ponceau 4R) and 129 (Allura red AC).

Note, that Australia/NZ numbers are the same as the European E-numbers.

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April 9, 2008

Food additives damage children’s intelligence

Posted by buberfan under children's health, health | Tags: , , , , , |
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The Independent is running a story that scientists are warning the British government that food additives are as dangerous to children’s brain development as lead fumes from petrol was.

Professor Stevenson and three colleagues wrote: “The position in relation to AFCs [Artificial Food Colours] is analogous to the state of knowledge about lead and IQ that was being evaluated in the early 1980s … Needleman [a researcher] found the difference in IQ between high and low lead groups was 5.5 IQ points … This is very close to the sizes obtained in our study of food additives.”

This is the same team of researchers from Southampton University who carried out an official study into seven common food additives funded by the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA). Back in September I reported on the governments inadequate response to the study. The FSA merely warned parents to avoid these additives if their children were showing signs of hyperactivity or ADHD.

Clearly the Southampton Univerisity group, led by Professor Stevenson, felt this was not enough, so they wrote again to the FSA linking the current state of knowledge about the effects of food additives to what was known about the effects of lead fumes before leaded petrol was banned.

The FSA is now likely to recommend that the government acts to ban these food additives.

A list of more than 900 products containing the additives is published on the UK Food Commission’s website actiononadditives.com.

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April 2, 2008

Mobile phones – fried brain anyone?

Posted by buberfan under children's health, environmental health | Tags: , , , , |
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The dangers of mobile phone use are becoming better known and, thank God, more and more mainstream media are reporting it. The latest has Melbourne’s The Age reporting on a 15-month critical review by one of Australia’s top neurosurgeons who says that the widespread use of mobile phones could turn out to be a bigger threat to public health than asbestos or even smoking. (more…)

 

July 23, 2007

Four times as many children prescribed antidepressants

Posted by buberfan under children's health | Tags: , , , |
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From The Guardian 23 July 2007:

The number of prescriptions for antidepressants and other mind-altering drugs given to children under 16 has more than quadrupled in the last decade, according to official figures released today.There were more than 631,000 such prescriptions recorded in the last financial year, according to government figures, compared to 146,000 in 1996-97.

The prescriptions, for drugs including antidepressants and treatments for mental health problems as well as for conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder were dispensed outside hospitals in England. Figures from 2000 include prescriptions made out by dispensing GPs.

The article goes on to quote David Laws MP questioning why so many prescriptions are given instead of searching for the root causes of the various problems.

My own answer to this would be to say ‘follow the money’. The pharmaceutical corporations have a vested interest in keeping us popping pills. Also, knowing how our own kids have reacted to various food chemicals, I would suspect that diet is one of the reasons for problems like depression and ADHD. But again, the big corporations don’t want us to think that and will throw a lot of money to keep us from thinking that.

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