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...- Well, of course.
I mean, because the current system at the end of the day,
what we have right now doesn't do enough
to protect children.
Food coloring, artificial color, food dye,
artificial dye, synthetic food dye.
Not all that exciting, huh?
Why would anyone choose to watch a documentary
about such a seemingly pointless topic?
If you're feeling skeptical, you're not alone.
I, for one never in my wildest dreams imagined this
even being a topic of conversation,
much less the theme of my first ever documentary.
Synthetic dyes at a glance seem fairly innocent,
and though they may be pretty obvious
and brightly colored junk food,
they often hide in places you wouldn't think about.
Like white foods, brown foods,
medications, and sports drinks.
Heck, that bag of popcorn you're munching on right now,
well, you get the picture.
The unavoidable fact that they're in so much
of our food supply is one thing, but the dirty little secret
of what these chemicals are doing to our body is another.
And something I was completely oblivious to.
It's not as though the information wasn't out there.
It's been a topic of discussion
and concern for decades.
I suppose it was just never part of my narrative,
so it seemed insignificant.
A new focus tonight on the effects
of artificial food colors.
They're in most everything you eat,
helping to make them look vibrant and appealing.
In the United States, the approval of the amount of dyes
that are used in food has quadrupled in recent years.
Dyes that some doctors
and parents say can affect your children's behavior.
You see that fellow right there,
the one immersed in the editing process
amongst his impressive Back to The Future collection.
Well, that's me.
And for the past two years I've been passionately working
on this film.
In all honesty, I probably had no business taking
on this endeavor.
By trade, I'm an advertising photographer
and cinematographer whose experience
in creating actual films is limited to a music video
about my city and an eight minute short film
about a time traveling couch potato with a magic watch.
Had I known what was involved in taking on a project
of this magnitude, this film may not exist.
But alas, they say ignorance is bliss and conviction
is a pretty strong motivator.
How did I arrive at this conviction you may ask.
Well, that's where this story begins.
And let me clarify.
This story doesn't start with me. It starts with her.
At the heart of this film
is a mother's unwavering commitment
to her children's wellbeing despite the obstacles
in her path.
That mother is my wife, Whitney.
You ready?
- Yeah. - Okay.
One plus one is two.
If you were to look at our son today,
you would never guess that he faced any challenges.
You would see a child that is smart and sweet,
he's compassionate and kind.
He's a bundle of virtues,
and he is everything you would want in a child.
And I feel very fortunate that God made me his mama.
Atreyu was a bit of a puzzle between ages one and three.
We were getting some really concerning reports
from his Sunday school teachers and his teachers,
and it was just starting to feel like a series
of like gut punches.
He was really struggling to control his emotions,
and to keep his hands to himself.
And so we were constantly doing this balancing act
between is this normal toddler behavior
or is there something wrong?
So the real puzzle was trying to figure out
why some days ended in multiple phone calls,
several writeups, just these really big emotional meltdowns
that we as a family had to recover from.
And then other days were surprisingly serene.
Like you could talk him through situations,
whereas some days you couldn't reason with him at all.
So as his mom, I was really determined to help him.
I'd devoured every parenting book
and podcast I could get my hands on.
We consulted doctors and therapists,
but nothing seemed like it was helping.
And it was at that point that we were really at a juncture,
something had to change.
So the only change that I could think
of at this point was his diet.
So I started doing some research, searching for foods
that could cause behavioral issues in children.
And I came across an article
that suggested eliminating wheat, dairy,
and synthetic dyes.
This was a 30 day elimination diet,
and we started reading labels and we eliminated wheat, dairy
and synthetic dyes.
48 hours later, we quite literally had a different child.
Hey mama.
Those good days, those like glimpses
of a really easy going, kind, calm,
easy to reason with child,
that was a child that we had for 30 days straight.
After the 30 days we reintroduced wheat
and we saw no effect.
We reintroduced the dairy and we saw no effect.
And then we reintroduced synthetic dyes,
and within 15 minutes all the behaviors we were seeing
before the elimination diet came flooding back.
So we were pretty surprised because the only place
that he was really regularly getting synthetic dyes
were through his allergy medicine
and the occasional prescription
or over-the-counter medication that we were giving him.
And so we were really shocked that something so small,
and such a small amount of something could dramatically
impact his behavior.
And so we quite literally
have not touched synthetic dyes since.
I think the world needs to know that the best science
that we have shows that dyes can harm children.
In terms of the kind of harm that dyes can do,
its effects on neuro behavior,
effects on attention activity, restlessness.
And also some studies have shown effects on sleeplessness,
irritability, and aggression.
So there are nine synthetic color additives
that are approved for use in food.
There are others that can be used in cosmetics,
and they are blue 1, blue 2, citrus red 2,
green 3, orange b, red 3, red 40,
yellow 5 and yellow 6.
Because of the way that they're made,
some contain compounds that we know are carcinogenic,
or cancer-causing compounds.
Also, we know red 3 and yellow 5 can be genotoxic,
which means that they directly cause DNA damage,
that can potentially lead to a tumor
or something that's passed from parent to child.
The synthetic dyes were first to introduced
the United States way back in the middle
of the 19th century over 160 years ago.
The FDA first began to regulate them at the beginning
of the 20th century around 1906.
By the 1920's, we had begun to see
the first publicly published worries
that food was somehow related to child behavior problems.
And then in the 1970's we had a major interest in it
generated by Dr. Feingold's claims that food dyes
and additives and salicylates are affecting hyperactivity.
He thought that synthetic food dyes
were causing adverse behavioral effects.
This was just based on his own observations,
but it really created a firestorm,
and studies started to be done
and the studies were done over the years, over the years.
And now here we are,
and we now know that Benjamin Feingold was right.
So for a long time I was really apprehensive
about sharing our story,
not really out of self-preservation,
but I really felt like our story was kind of hard
to believe, but I decided to be brave
and I started sharing our story with friends and family.
And I was really surprised
because not only did people believe me,
but they started sharing their stories,
or their cousin's stories or their friend's stories.
And so I wanted to create a space for families like ours
to come together and help each other.
So I started a Facebook group and it really blew up.
As the Facebook group grew, it made me realize
just how common these kinds of reactions are,
which in turn started to create some anger in me.
And I became really angry that children,
and maybe even adults were suffering
and they had no idea that the culprit
of their suffering could be something like synthetic dyes.
So I became really obsessed with synthetic dyes.
What are synthetic dyes?
What are they doing to our bodies?
Does it go beyond neurologic issues?
And so I really started digging deep into research articles,
and I was trying to decode this scientific jargon.
I'm college educated,
but I still found myself being really overwhelmed
and I had a lot of questions.
So I really wanted to speak to these researchers in person.
So I asked Brandon if he'd be willing
to document our journey, and it took some convincing,
but obviously you're watching a documentary.
So he agreed.
And just like that,
we were in the documentary business.
This adventure would take us across the country,
and eventually overseas in pursuit of the truth
behind the effects of synthetic dyes.
But it had to start somewhere.
With no prior credibility and armed only with the vision,
we managed to convince Dr. Rebecca Bevans,
renowned professor of psychology,
known for her TEDx talk on synthetic dyes,
captivating audiences with over 300,000 views on YouTube,
and a staggering 10 million views across TikTok
to sit down with us for an interview.
Little did we know this interview would be the catalyst
that snowballed the rest of our film.
- Hi. - Hi, how are you?
- This is so crazy. - I know, right?
You've got this girl!
Alex was a super sweet baby.
He was easygoing, just a really gentle,
really fun, super happy kid.
As he started getting older,
he was definitely an energetic little guy.
He was go, go, go, go, go.
He was just all over the place,
into everything, super curious.
And the older he got, the more intense kind of he got.
When he went off to kindergarten,
his teacher on the second week tried to tell me
that he had ADHD.
And his doctor, you know, refused to assess him for ADHD.
He said, he's just a really brilliant little kid,
and he'll settle into school.
And so he did, he settled into kindergarten,
He did all right.
First grade, he had an amazing teacher
who kept him busy, giving him work from grades ahead
and there wasn't a lot of behavioral problems,
but the behavioral problems really, really started
when he was in second grade.
We started to see the inability to focus,
and to pay attention and to get along with other kids
and to get along with the instructor.
And he would just get up out of his chair,
and get back down in his chair and get up out of his chair
and get back down on his chair.
So I kept asking him, you know, come on bud,
let's just focus, just focus and get this done.
And he says to me, I can't. I can't focus mom.
My brain buzzes.
And I was like, okay, what do you mean?
He goes, it's just buzzes.
And I was really grateful that he could articulate that.
My PhD is in cognitive neuroscience,
brains aren't supposed to buzz.
So I started down the Google rabbit hole
of looking for all the information on brain buzzing.
And I found a blog, and it was a 15-year-old
who was talking about how when she ate red 40,
her brain buzzed.
I was like, all right, this is the only thing I got going,
let's give this a shot.
We pulled all the red 40 from his diet
which was rough at first, but we noticed within a week or so
that the brain buzzing wasn't there anymore,
and the other ADHD type behaviors.
So we waited until there was winter break,
we pulled it out, he went back to school.
Not a totally different kid, but a different kid.
It was much easier for him.
In hindsight, I don't know why we thought it was okay
to give him other colors.
Most of the time there is a correlation
between red 40 and hyperactivity.
So we thought, okay, fine, red 40 was the problem,
and we didn't think about yellow, and green and blue.
So he switched from his favorite candy being red
to his favorite candies being yellow.
Now towards the end of second grade,
he was having these emotional meltdowns.
Once a month he would throw a fit.
And then it was like once a week he would throw a fit.
And I'm talking, hey bud, can you turn off the television?
We got to eat.
And he would have a meltdown.
He would cry and he would scream,
and he would scratch at himself or he'd pull his shirts.
He would just have this little rage reaction.
So we get him through second grade,
and then we go on vacation and we go to Hawaii.
We're eating shaved ice once to twice a day,
and he would get the yellow.
So he went from having a meltdown a week,
to a meltdown a day to three meltdowns a day,
to just almost a constant.
By the time we got home, it was really bad.
And that's when...
And it's still hard for me to talk about.
We were in his room and he is sitting on his bed,
and he was just screaming and he was like,
I just need you to get me a knife so I can kill myself.
To look at a 7-year-old who just wants to die,
I was like, oh my God, if he continues like this,
he won't make it to his teenage years.
In the middle of the last century,
there was sort of this growing concern
about harmful chemicals in our food
due to a variety of factors.
And so this and sort of mounting public pressure
led Congress to pass two amendments
to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.
The first one passed in 1958,
and that was the Food Additive Amendment.
And the second passed in 1960,
and that was the Color Additive Amendment.
And basically those two laws require
that new food chemicals be approved by FDA
before they went into the market.
As a result of the Color Additive Amendment,
many color additives that were in use at that point in 1960
are no longer in use today.
So there was some recognition,
and there has been recognition since
that the color additives
that were in use were no longer safe.
And so in the process of trying to regulate color additives,
manufacturers of food dyes have to send a sample
of every batch of color that they produce to FDA.
And as far as I know, those are the only food chemicals
that are subject to that type of certification.
I guess, because again, there's just this great concern
about the safety of color additives,
more so than other additives.
Oh, that's a relief.
Glad to know there's somebody looking out for us, right?
So even though policymakers recognize
that there are some potential harms
that come from ingesting color additives,
particularly synthetic color additives,
they really haven't recognized the neurobehavioral effects
of dyes yet.
FDA really has danced around that one,
and won't do much of anything to acknowledge that.
They still characterize food dyes
as very safe on their website.
In looking back,
it was very much almost an abusive situation
where the person that's being abused
doesn't wanna make their abuser mad.
But my abuser was a five-year-old child.
Evan was born in 2013, and he was the cutest little baby,
and he was the sweet little thing that would sit and cuddle.
And in 2016, my next child was born, Eric.
So we had a little girl and two little boys at that point.
We were super happy and life was wonderful.
And then in 2017, Evan started going to preschool
and I didn't notice anything weird,
but I remember the teacher telling me once in a while,
like one of his little friends got up,
and he was sitting next to her
and he just pushed her back down into her chair.
But it's preschool and everybody's doing crazy stuff.
And I remember her saying,
that kind of thing happens once in a while, not a big deal.
And then in 2018, he turned five during the Summer,
and so he was gonna go to kindergarten in the Fall.
And we started seeing a lot of aggression
just as this little five-year-old boy,
he would lose control and turn into,
we call it the Incredible Hulk.
And I started to develop exit strategies
for anywhere that I went.
If I went to the park,
I wanted to park close to the playground.
So if Evan got upset, I could him to the car quickly.
If I was going anywhere, I knew how to get out,
and if I didn't know how to get out, I wouldn't go.
And so my world kind of closed in,
and I couldn't go anywhere and I couldn't be a mom.
I just spent all of my time trying to keep people safe
instead of enjoying my children.
As kindergarten started, it didn't get better, it got worse.
And I started getting daily reports from the teacher
that he was hitting people, kicking people,
ripping things off the bulletin boards.
After school time was terrible.
And I remember his first day of kindergarten,
he hopped on the bus excited and happy.
And when he got off the bus,
I was so excited to hear about his first day of school
and he screamed in my face, just Ahh!
Like from the bottom of his soul.
And he stormed up the stairs and stormed into his room,
and didn't come out
and you could hear him throwing stuff around
and being angry.
And this was my tiny little five-year-old boy
who just had a huge milestone that I wanted to hear about,
and I didn't get to hear about it.
And he didn't come out for an hour.
And every day was like that.
By February of his kindergarten year,
I called his pediatrician and I said, something's wrong.
And our pediatrician gave us a referral
to a neuropsychologist.
And I came in and we had an interview,
and I told him everything that was going on.
And I remember trying to put it into words like,
my kid is having a hard time,
but it's not that he had a bad day,
he's kind of having a bad life
and so we're all having a bad life.
And he said, you know, from what you're telling me,
he sounds consistently inconsistent.
Yes! That's what I've been trying to describe,
consistently inconsistent.
That's why as I've been reading a book about ADHD,
or reading a book about anxiety or reading a book about OCD,
it didn't make sense.
It was not that.
And so we had him do some neuropsychological evaluation
and the doctor explained to us, he said,
we can keep him in therapy or we can add some medication
and see if that can help.
So we went back to the pediatrician,
and he prescribed some medication and we started him on it
and we saw a blip of improvement.
The Center for Science In The Public Interest
is your food and health watchdog.
We've been around for more than 50 years,
and we've been sort of the major pushers
behind some of the biggest policy wins in the food,
nutrition space in that time.
So for example, we led the charge
on getting the nutrition facts panel added
to food packaging, and then thereafter
we got the added sugar line added
to that Nutrition facts panel.
So we've been deeply invested in improving transparency,
and safety and accountability in the food system
in the U.S. for decades.
My job at the Center for Science In The Public Interest
was evaluating the safety of additives.
Most additives are perfectly safe,
even if they're synthetic.
And of course some natural additives are not safe.
So of all the additives I've evaluated,
synthetic food dyes are very close to the top of my list
of additives that I'm concerned about.
You might be surprised to know
that there are thousands of chemicals that are permitted
to be added to food.
And I think most people think that there's somebody
in the government that's making sure
that each additive has been well tested before it's allowed
to be added to food.
But unfortunately that is not the case.
Many additives added to food hardly have any data
on them at all.
That's why synthetic food dyes are so unusual.
I can't tell you how unusual it is
that we have 27 clinical trials in children
on synthetic food dyes.
I can't think of any other additive like that.
In terms of the clinical trials,
food dyes are like air pollutants.
What you see is a general effect on the population.
So kids who have no problems
with attention will move along the spectrum a little bit,
but they're still in normal range.
Kids who have some problems will move along the spectrum,
perhaps into the problem range.
The same is true for lead exposure at low levels
for certain air pollutants,
they have a general population effect.
Some people are not affected at all,
some people are affected somewhat,
and then it depends on what the baseline is,
whether that becomes a problem for them.
FDA has the authority to reassess a chemical,
a food additive whenever they want,
but they're not obligated to do so.
So chemicals we know are harmful stay
in our food way too long
because FDA is not proactively reassessing chemicals.
They don't spend, it seems almost any time looking back
at color additives that were approved decades ago
based on studies that are nowhere near up
to today's standards.
Those just stay on the market.
It seems forever
until a group like Center for Science In the Public Interest
petitions them to ban them.
It's just so crazy how something you don't know about
could have such a huge effect on behavior.
Can you imagine like all these kids
that get labeled as behavior kids, what if it was just dye?
If I had to think back to his life before and after dyes,
I mean, it is literally like Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde.
I mean, it's night and day, it's been a switch.
For me and Rex, a lot of other things have become easier
because we took care of this dye situation.
I decided to become a mom through using a donor.
One of my very best friends donated for me
to be able to have my son.
I, you know, still looking,
I'm just kidding.
No, so I became a single parent on purpose.
When we started our journey,
you know, as mother and son, kind of our two team,
I started noticing things about him and reactions
when he was about 18 months old.
But it just took a little bit of more time
and education before I figured out what it was.
Looking back, our story started when he was four,
right before pre-K.
He was at a camp,
and he had been eating this colorful cereal every day
as a snack that was provided.
Probably three weeks into the camp
is when I started getting phone calls every day,
every other day that he was running out of the building,
he was hitting other kids.
He was just exploding.
The kind of final straw day was when I got a call
that I had to come get him again.
So I went into the room and he was basically manic.
I mean, he was crying and laughing at the same time,
and I said, what's going on? What's wrong?
He said, I don't know, mommy.
My brain is fuzzy, my brain is fuzzy.
So I remember sitting on the staircase with him,
and I'm crying and he's crying.
I just said, what's going on buddy?
He's like, I don't know.
I said, why are you doing this?
He's like, I don't know. I can't help it.
I don't know why I'm doing it.
And I said, okay, let's go home.
We're gonna figure something out.
So I go home, get him settled
and I start Googling sugar and behavior.
You know, he'd been having a lot of sugar lately.
So in that Google thing,
I saw a red dye behavior article, clicked on that,
found a YouTube video about red dye.
And I said, okay, there's something behind this.
Let me see what I can figure out.
I just knew this wasn't my kid.
I knew something was wrong.
In 1990, FDA themselves concluded
that the color additive red 3 causes cancer
when ingested by animals.
As an effect, they banned the use of red 3 in cosmetics
and externally applied drugs, but did not ban it in food
and ingested drugs.
So animals ate the red 3,
got cancer, FDA bans it in cosmetics,
and externally applied drugs,
allows it in food and ingested drugs.
And the reasons why that came to be
are sort of complicated regulatory process.
It's not because FDA somehow thinks that it's safe
for use in food.
And in fact, FDA is actually statutorily, legally obligated
to prohibit color and food additives that induce cancer
when consumed by animals or humans.
This is called the Delaney Clause,
and it's a part of both the Color Additive Amendment
and the Food Additive Amendment.
After the Color Additive Amendment was passed in 1960,
all of the color additives that were in use at the time
were basically put on this provisional list
that allowed the continued use
while FDA sort of vetted their safety.
Then proponents of the color additives,
the people who make them don't want to use them could
petition FDA and ask them to take them off
that provisional list, make them permanently approved.
This happened for red 3 in food
and ingested drugs in 1969.
So when FDA originally approved red 3,
it did so on the basis of the studies at the time.
And we've known that it causes cancer since the early 80's
and it was banned from cosmetics in 1990,
but it had already been permanently approved
for use in foods and ingested drugs.
So FDA decided that they couldn't ban all uses at once
in response to the cosmetics petition.
They said they were going to take steps to ban it in food
and ingested drugs.
And red 3 is still present in food and drugs.
All right, so coincidentally as I'm editing
the section of the film,
there's some pretty interesting things going on.
So just last week in the state of California,
legislature passed a bill that would ban
the use of red 3 and three other chemicals in food
and drinks in the state.
California's unprecedented bill
to ban four food additives is now heading
to Governor Newsom's desk.
It includes red dye number 3, potassium bromate,
brominated vegetable oil, and propyl paraben.
The chemicals have been linked to cancer,
reproductive problems and developmental issues in children.
So I know what you're thinking,
like that's cool for California,
but what if I don't live in California?
Well, let me put this in perspective for you.
California is about 12% of the U.S. population,
which gives it a pretty significant amount
of economic influence.
It's said that if California were a separate country,
it would rank as the fifth largest economy in the world.
If the governor signs this ban,
manufacturers using red 3 face about three options.
Stop selling their products in California,
which is unlikely due to the population.
They could create two versions of their products,
one for California and one for the rest of the country.
Or they could change their formula removing red 3
altogether so they could continue
to sell their products everywhere.
This could be the start of something big.
It's just like not, it's not part of the conversation.
I would not believe my story if I hadn't lived my story.
I'd be like, she's crazy.
I knew it was my last time being pregnant and having a baby,
so I soaked it up.
Mercie was attached to me, my Velcro child.
Like wanted to be in my arms, and be held and right near me.
And so it was a very...
Just really sweet babyhood.
When she was about two and a half,
she had, had back to back ear infections.
We had to move to a different type of antibiotic
that we hadn't used and our pediatrician had warned us,
you know that a lot of times it causes red stool in babies
and children and not to worry like that was totally normal.
So I was like, okay, no big deal.
If that's what she's recommending, it must be okay.
The second day, something just changed
and she was raging like inconsolable, and crying
and everything was irritating her.
And just lay down the floor fits like, and it scared me
because I couldn't console her.
I couldn't calm her down.
So I called my doctor and explained what was going on.
I think she thought I was a little bit cuckoo,
and we got her off that and her symptoms went away.
Within a day or two after that, they improved.
But I thought it was something unique to that.
I didn't place it at that time.
Six months later, Mercie's behavior started to change.
She wasn't as easygoing.
She was having more fits, having more tantrums,
melting down over things that she hadn't before.
That went on for about a year and a half,
and it was progressing.
And in her 4-year-old year being verbal,
and being able to express so much,
she would scream that she hated us,
that she wanted to kill us, that she wanted us to die.
In the car, she would unbuckle her car seats
and take off her clothes in the car
because she'd get so mad and so hot.
It was like she was wanting to crawl out of her skin.
Like she was so uncomfortable in her body,
and it felt like we were walking around eggshells
all the time.
Her sleep was insane.
She could not sleep in the evenings,
she would be awake till two and three, just restless.
And then she would sleep in every morning.
So that was another part of why it was so hard to like plan
and go places.
And we felt like we weren't parenting right,
and we were doing something wrong,
and all that we could do was stay out of her way
and try to keep her safe somehow.
It felt like whatever was going on with her
was holding us all hostage.
And that is not a typical tantrum.
It was something we could not contain.
So take her to a child psychologist.
They said she's too young,
but she had all the markers for bipolar.
You need to bring her back in another year or two
when she's a little bit older
and mood stabilizing medication
is gonna be your only option.
And I was so crushed and I felt so scared for her.
I felt scared for our family.
Like I didn't know if Dustin and I were gonna be able
to hang on and hold us all together.
It felt so terrible for our other kids.
It always felt like they were getting hurt by her
in one way, verbally or physically.
And I was so sad to think of like, this is her whole life
and is she even gonna make it to 18?
Is she even gonna like see 21?
I don't know, because she feels so volatile.
I got invited to participate in a meta analytic study
of all the literature on food dyes.
I was invited because of my work
on environmental risk factors and genetic risk factors
in ADHD and how they fit together.
And I initially agreed to lead this review thinking
that we would debunk the, what I viewed as an overemphasis
on things like food dyes and so on.
And I was partly motivated by knowing
that there are a lot of phony claims about ADHD,
and a lot of bogus treatments proposed.
And I was on a mission to help debunk some of this stuff.
And so it came as a bit of a surprise to me
when we looked at the data and actually saw
that there actually seemed to be an effect there
for food dyes.
If synthetic dyes are having a small but real effect
on the population, which the data seems to suggest they do,
that is gonna generally lead to a slight increase
in attention problems
and hyperactivity problems in children.
And all that follows from that with a slight increase
in diagnoses, a slight increase in kids
who are having problems in school,
and associated costs of that.
So it's like any other risk factor.
The more of these you have, the more you slightly move
the population into a direction
where more people are actually having clinical problems.
So if you ask a scientist
if they think there should be more research,
they're always gonna say yes.
It's like if I ask my partner
if he would like another tool for his garage,
he's gonna say yes.
But the fact is, is that we know enough now
to say we should not be exposing children
to synthetic food dyes.
We've been working on this since the 70's.
There's enough science now to show
that these shouldn't be in any products ingested
by humans at all.
It's incredibly frustrating to me
to see these multinational companies based in the U.S,
mass produced products for the European market
and other countries in the world
with natural alternatives in,
but leave the synthetic food dye here in the U.S.
There's just genuinely no point to having dye in there
other than to market to us to make money.
The three most used dyes in the United States,
red 40, yellow 5 and yellow 6, those are all azo dyes.
And the reason you hear about azo dyes
is because the British government sponsored a study
of azo dyes.
The food dye that can be a trigger has mostly disappeared
from the food supply in Europe.
European regulators ordered food makers
to put warning labels
on things containing certain food dyes.
Many food companies decided instead to remove
the synthetic dyes, reformulating the recipes there,
but continuing to sell the old versions here.
Since the beginning of this project,
one of the most controversial and often misunderstood topics
has been the presence of a warning label
or outright ban on synthetic dyes in certain countries,
while the U.S. still allows them to remain.
To learn more about the why and the how,
we traveled across the pond to London, England
to have a conversation with Dr. Jim Stevenson.
Dr. Stevenson is a leading researcher
whose work in Europe has been instrumental
in shaping policy around synthetic dyes.
I got involved
because I thought it was an important public health issue.
This is something that you can act on
without particular cost.
You can take additives out of children's diets,
and it's something that's simple.
The rest of the influences on children's behavior,
particularly ADHD, for example, are complex
and are things you can't do anything about.
Things like genetics, you're not gonna change the genetics,
but what you can do is to change the diet.
But what happened in the UK was that the British government
were under some pressure from parents
to investigate whether dyes were having an effect
on not just children with ADHD,
but children in the general population.
I was then working with a pediatrician, John Warner
who was interested in that issue.
And between us, we applied for funds
and did one study on the Isle of Wight,
which is a small island off the south coast of England.
That showed some initially encouraging results,
encouraging in the sense that we got a positive effect
of dyes on children's behavior.
And we were then commissioned by the UK government
to then replicate that in what became known
as the Southampton study.
What we were doing in these two studies was looking
at the effect of dyes
on what we call hyperactivity in children.
Now, hyperactivity in the way that I'm using that term
is a measure of three aspects of behavior.
One is activity lever itself, how much they move around.
One is impulsivity, how much they respond immediately
to actions without thinking.
And the other is inattention,
whether they can remain on task.
Quite large samples.
On the Isle of Wight, about 250.
And in Southampton, two samples of about 150.
We took those children from ordinary schools,
and then got their parents to put them on a dye free diet
for a week.
We then gave them a drink, which we had constructed,
which either had the dyes in or didn't.
And if it didn't have the dyes in,
it was just ordinary fruit juice.
We then monitored their behavior in a number of settings.
One was in the school.
We also got the parents to rate their children's behavior
and their teachers to rate their behavior.
We also, with the older children,
sent them a computer-based task
that measured things like attention.
What we found was that when they were on the dyes,
their scores on the hyperactivity measure were elevated
compared to the time when they're on the placebo.
At the time, the UK was part of the European Union.
The European government decided
that on the basis of our work, that there was evidence
that there was an adverse effect on children's behavior,
and they required manufacturers to put a warning label
on the foods to that effect.
What of course happened was that the manufacturers
didn't like having their foods labeled,
so they decided to take the things out the foods themselves.
The important thing about the work
that we did was that it's called a randomized control trial.
Now that is the gold standard for demonstrating causality
in this kind of world.
It is us manipulating experimentally
what the child's being exposed to at a particular time,
and we're demonstrating an adverse change
in the child's behavior.
To explain the kind of effects we're seeing,
not all children respond to dyes.
Some children respond more, some children respond less.
So it's a small change on average for the population,
but it's one that has some long-term consequences.
With all of the data
and scientific evidence underscoring the potential hazards
of synthetic dyes, it's only logical to expect
that some of the major players would step up
and remove these chemicals.
It's a seemingly straightforward move,
eliminate a potential health risk
and demonstrate genuine concern
for your consumer's well-being.
A win-win scenario, right?
Well, as it turns out, a couple actually tried,
well, kind of.
In 2015, General Mills announced with great fanfare
their commitment to rid their product of synthetic dyes,
a quest for healthier, more natural ingredients.
A year later, Mars Incorporated made a similar commitment
following a viral petition on Change.org,
asking the company to take dyes out of M&Ms.
We did a petition on Change.org,
which was incredibly successful.
We were fortunate enough to get over 200,000 signatures,
which is what prompted M&Ms and Mars to contact me.
And they explained
that they were going to take out the dyes,
it was gonna take a while and they invited my son
to be the first one to go to the factory
as soon as they had made the change.
So my son was so excited,
and it was really exciting stuff.
However, as the projected timelines approached,
each company performed a U-turn on their commitments,
blaming the lack of consumer demand.
The iconic General Mills cereal Trix actually did eliminate
dyes for a brief moment.
But after a public outcry of criticism,
accusing them of tarnishing childhood memories,
the neon hues promptly returned.
We really thought we won,
and I was so sad that it just didn't end up working out.
It's easy to pick on those two, right?
Because those are very public examples of companies
that have talked about this and promised,
or did something about it and then broke that promise.
But there are many, many, many companies
who've been silent on the issue,
and still use food dyes with impunity.
So I want to point the finger at the entire food industry,
not just a couple of people who have at least
at some point tried or said they were gonna try
and do something, even if they didn't end up doing that.
So why didn't we as consumers rally
to ditch these dyes?
Was there a crucial piece missing from the puzzle?
Was there ever any mention of the potential dangers
of these additives?
Or was it just presented as a more natural option?
Without knowledge of potential health risk,
why would we want to eliminate them?
But armed with that information,
would the outcome have been different?
Would people still prefer the vibrant colors of the past?
With these questions in mind,
we conducted a small experiment with friends
and family to gauge how this knowledge would impact
their consumer preferences.
Do any of you practice a dye free diet?
No, I...
Honestly, this is the first time I've ever thought about it
until maybe five minutes ago.
- No. - No.
We do limit dyes, but we are not completely dye free.
We buy food that tastes good based on price and taste.
And calories.
There's a lot of companies
that claim there is not enough public demand
to justify replacing synthetic dyes in their products
with a more natural option.
So we'll be doing some blind taste test,
some visual comparisons,
all to see how these dyes play a role in your preferences.
Y'all ready to go?
- Okay. - Okay.
Alright, let's put on our blindfolds.
Okay.
Go ahead and pick up the one on your right
and give it a taste.
Ah.
Hmm.
Taste like childhood?
Mhm-hmm.
If you think the one on your left was dye free,
raise your hand.
Oh, I'm a little...
I'm going counterintuitive.
Yeah, so I wanna say left has dye,
and the right does not.
I'm gonna say the same.
Left has dye.
This is gonna be the dye free one.
This has dye in it.
There's not much of a taste difference to me.
So which one would you say
is the dye-free version?
This one.
All right, go ahead
and remove your blindfolds.
- Okay. - Oh.
Wrong!
- Oh, wow. - Whoa. No way.
Dude.
They should start selling these anyway.
Those are better.
We continued this process
with a number of different products.
Some of them were the same brand from different countries.
Others were a name brand compared to a generic brand.
One with dyes,
one without.
Sometimes they guessed right.
You all got that one right.
- Whoa. - Okay.
And many times they're pretty surprised.
They look the same to me.
As they compared the taste and appearance
of a variety of different dyed foods next
to their dye-free counterparts,
we shared with them some of the information we've learned
while creating this film.
These dyes are used to brighten the appearance
of our food, but are purely cosmetic and are associated
with a number of risks.
And we concluded by asking the question,
do you think this information could have an impact
on consumer behavior?
I do think that if the population was educated
on these studies that have been done on the effects
of these synthetic dyes, I think that would outweigh
the need to just have something beautiful on my plate.
When you buy cigarettes or you buy alcohol,
there's warning labels, can cause cancer, you know.
I don't understand why there's adult consumption
warning labels and not kid consumption warning lables.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not...
Honestly, I'm not the kind of person
who thinks heavily about what I eat.
For better or for worse.
But I mean, like, just from a cost risk analysis,
like I don't understand why companies
would be so adamant. - Concerned.
About keeping these ingredients,
and I really don't think it pushes the needle.
So one of the questions is, whose area is this?
Should this be Nationals Institute of Mental Health?
Should this be EPA? Is it FDA?
My hunch is that different agencies
aren't sure this is in their wheelhouse to fund.
It's a big gap. I think we should be funding more studies
of food dyes, food additives, and diet in general.
There's substantial evidence now
that there's something going on with food, nutrients,
vitamins and minerals, as well as additives
that affects brain development that can affect ADHD,
and other mental health conditions.
And personally, I would advocate
that we significantly invest in this area.
I think the most important, you know, new development
in the dyes research space was the report that came out
in 2021 from the California Office
of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, or OEHHA.
It's a group of, you know, highly trained physicians,
toxicologists, epidemiologists, statisticians.
And their job is just to look at the science.
They don't get into politics, they don't get into economics,
they just look at the science.
And their job is to assess the health risks of chemicals.
They conducted what I would consider
to be the most thorough review of this literature ever done.
Really the best resource we have on
what we know about food dyes and their effects on behavior,
and brain development.
Randomized double-blind clinical trials
are the gold standard for showing a cause
and effect relationship.
We've got 27 of those.
Each study by itself might be small, it might have a flaw,
but when you combine them together, they get very powerful.
27 human clinical trials, animal evidence,
and in vitro mechanistic evidence,
so they really got all of it.
And this was a multi-year long process
that involved public input and expert panels,
and peer review.
And this culminated in the publication of this 2021 report,
which concluded that synthetic food dyes can cause,
or exacerbate neurobehavioral problems in some children.
There's a state senator in California, Senator Wieckowski,
and he authored two bills, both of which were aimed
at requiring a warning label on dyed foods.
If California had a warning label on dyed foods,
that would have implications across the country.
You know, if you're a company,
you don't wanna put a warning label on your product,
you'd rather reformulate it to avoid the warning label.
If you have to reformulate your product for California,
you might as well reformulate it for everybody.
So the first bill, it's passed the health committee,
but it ended up being defeated.
There was tremendous industry opposition to the bill
as you could well imagine.
After the first bill failed, he was able to obtain funding
for the state of California for this OEHHA Office
to conduct the assessment.
So it's thanks to Senator Wieckowski
that we have this fabulous scientific assessment
on the effects of dyes.
What's the cliche that people say,
you may lose the battle, but you win the war.
And I think legislation is that way
where you introduce an idea,
and then people start talking about it.
The enthusiasm and the excitement that has been created
by this report that OEHHA has produced for scientists,
and academicians all around the world has really helped
that snowball and drawn some attention to this area
of public policy.
It's funny, people are binary.
You had a successful bill, you had an unsuccessful bill.
So I have a unsuccessful bill, but what the bill wanted
was the California Department of Public Health
to promulgate regulations for foods
that contain synthetic dyes.
Didn't work out, didn't get done,
but I've learned to be tenacious and to keep pushing.
And my chief of staff, Derek Chernow, very clever guy,
he said, you're the chair of the budget subcommittee
and you have control over OEHHA,
why don't you put the money in the budget?
So very quietly in 2017,
California's budget had a allocation
for the Office of Environmental Hazards
to go and do the study.
So I lost the bill, but won the battle.
I think the biggest message I wanna get out there
to other families of color and other single families
is that going dye free is not an income level thing.
And it's not a crunchy yoga mom, rich people problem.
It is a neurological reaction.
Your brain has no color, your brain has no income level.
Just try it.
It does require some diligence,
and it does require some action.
But if you do it and you see a difference, can you imagine
how much better you and your child's life would be?
So I went on this group I'm on in Facebook
that's like these awesome moms that work in colleges,
and I said, has anyone ever heard of red dye behavior?
And immediately had like 40 responses.
Yes, my brother, yes, I've heard of this,
my neighbor's kid has this.
And I was like, oh my gosh, there's something here.
So that day I went through our pantry, our refrigerator,
cleared everything out I could find that had red dye in it.
So then it got a little bit better for two days,
and then it happened again.
I was like, I don't know what's going on.
I got rid of everything.
And so by this point I had joined the dye-free group.
So I was asking in there,
and they're like, oh, you need to look at these other dyes,
yellow and blues.
You know, check your freezer.
Have you looked at toothpaste?
I was like, toothpaste, what?
So I go in there, lo and behold,
his toothpaste has dye in it.
I was like, okay, get rid of the toothpaste.
Finally though, after I'd say a month,
I think we got rid of like pretty much everything with red,
blue, and yellow dye in it.
And three years later we are,
I mean I'd say we're a 100% dye-free.
But it has been a journey.
It has been a journey.
There's a lot of other little, you know,
if you're looking at a timeline, it's not just here to here.
There's a lot of peaks and ups and downs in that journey.
But since then, it's been so much better.
You know, everyone, his teachers like him more,
you know, getting along better more with kids at school.
He's got a couple of little things
that have happened more due to anxiety.
Not due to dye, but taking the dye away has taken
the behavior away.
Now it's more of just trying to figure out,
you know, what's going on here?
But I can't imagine the ADHD anxiety going on plus the dye.
I can't even, like, I can't imagine
what our life would be like.
Industry clearly has a dog in this fight.
They use these food dyes to make their food look good,
so you buy it, right?
So they stand to lose money,
if people stop buying their products
or I think...
And their greatest fear is if they're banned,
they definitely don't want warning labels on their food
because that gives consumers the impression,
the right impression that there are chemicals in them
that can cause harm.
And then in the case of red 3,
FDA itself said it causes cancer.
So there's really no excuse, right?
But it's in their interest in terms of profit, right?
In terms of their bottom line
to not have to reformulate their products.
You have no idea how much opposition there is to the idea
of a warning label on dyed foods.
There is so much industry opposition to this notion.
They are out there lobbying, saying that dyes are safe,
saying it would be too costly to require a warning label.
They're opposed to giving consumers
the information they need to protect their families.
This is a multi-billion dollar food industry,
folks that are making a lot of money having these dyes
in their products.
You know, as soon as the bill was introduced,
I had everybody and their uncle
from the restaurant association, the confectionary folks,
the chemical companies saying,
you could run us outta business.
This is gonna have an adverse effect on us.
And you know, you have to say,
okay, everybody take a big deep breath.
This is not new. You knew of the bill in 2017.
This is now four years later.
At the end of the day, all we're trying to do
is we're not trying to put anybody outta business,
we just wanna inform the public
of what are you digesting here.
Ultimately, FDA has final authority.
They bear the ultimate responsibility,
but that doesn't absolve the companies
from the responsibility to protect their customers.
Any change you wanna make?
Oh no. You know, too costly.
All the science is bad.
Those scientists are crazy.
But at what human cost?
At what human cost, right? Right.
What we know is that in Europe,
any harm to health is paid for by taxes,
and by the government and the people as a whole.
Whereas here in the U.S. there's no benefit
to the government in preventing health issues
because they are not gonna pay the cost.
Just because we have regulatory authorities
does not make these products safe.
Are synthetic dyes
the only issue in our food system? Absolutely not.
But eliminating synthetic dyes
has dramatically impacted our lives.
And we think it's just a really great place to start.
It's a good conversation to be had.
And we believe that it could impact millions of lives.
It sounds crazy that we have to say use food
to make food, but we're not.
We're using artificial things to make food.
So companies use synthetic dyes for two reasons.
One, for cost.
It's so much cheaper just to use the synthetic dyes.
Second thing is time.
It's really hard actually
to create a product using real food
that will always taste the same and always look the same
because every batch of strawberries
is going to look different.
But we know in Europe they have higher standards,
and so a lot of companies will have their U.S. version
or their recipe of the product
and their version that they use in EU.
And the problem is the EU one costs them more money
to make for Europe.
And so if they can get away
with making the American version,
they're going to do that purely for their profits.
One of the reasons I actually started my company
is because I had so many neighbors, extended family members,
community members struggling with ADHD, migraines,
depression, anxiety, autoimmune issues.
And you can't just go ask somebody,
hey, can I come cook for you?
And so I was like, how do I teach all these people around me
that are struggling?
And so I thought, you know what?
If I just start a little Instagram account
and teach like a daily tip, and an easy tip of things
that people can do in their homes,
maybe then these people will start feeling better.
Because a lot of people think that you need
to have this huge new like kale and sardine diet,
and that is truly not the case at all.
You can still have the mac and cheese and the hamburgers
and the waffles and things,
but let's make them with real food ingredients
that are actually going to nourish the body
and take care of the body.
Diet actually plays a huge role in mental health.
People out there are spending thousands and thousands
of dollars on prescriptions or medical bills,
or therapy or all different things,
which sometimes are needed, don't get me wrong.
But at the same time, a lot of that could just be fixed
with the knowledge about our food.
We tried behavioral intervention
and behavioral training for three years. Three years.
And I look back and I feel terrible not recognizing
that it was something that he absolutely cannot control.
Being a psychologist,
we tried every psychological angle first.
In a way, it's a double-edged sword.
If I wasn't a psychologist,
I probably would have not done all of the things,
and maybe we would've figured it out earlier 'cause yeah,
I blamed his behaviors on us, on him when it wasn't.
So we pulled yellow, we pulled green,
we went through the entire house, we gutted everything.
And it was cold turkey from that day.
And it was like watching a drug addict coming off of drugs.
The emotional toll that it causes these kids,
it's just heartbreaking to watch them suffer.
But he calmed down.
His mind stopped racing and he could focus.
The begging to die was gone within days, days
to never come back.
Emotionally, he was still kind of a wreck
because he had those years where he didn't learn a lot.
There wasn't a lot of emotional development
because he was high.
It's like the way that we kind of explain it
was he was high for years.
It took about probably six months for him
to catch up with that.
But then school wasn't a problem anymore,
and making friends wasn't a problem anymore.
We removed the dyes, man he's the easiest kid to parent.
He went from eighth grade to college.
He tested into English 101,
he skipped four years of high school English.
He just turned 17.
He'll be graduating with his associate of business
and his associate of science,
and then moving on to a bachelor's degree.
He's doing fantastic.
He works on campus, everyone loves him.
He's a great kid.
His whole problem were dyes. That's it.
He doesn't have ADHD,
he doesn't have any other neurological behavioral problems.
It's just the dyes.
It's like those night thoughts when it's late at night
and you're just laying in your bed staring at nothing,
and you have nothing to think about.
It's those intrusive thoughts like,
hey, are you sure you're on the life path
you wanna be on right now?
And it's those little pecks
that normally you just brush off
and you don't think about.
When you're on dyes, they get loud, they get to be like,
hey, are you sure you want to be alive right now?
And it gets really hard to not listen.
Whenever I do an interview or I talk to you lovely people,
my end goal is to at least talk to one kid.
If that's one kid that's not on anti-psychotics,
or one kid that's not on some list somewhere
because he or she had a violent outburst
where they hurt another kid,
I want to get to at least one of them just to be like,
hey, here's an option.
Knowing that there are kids my age or even younger,
or older that have a sensitivity to dyes like me
and they don't know it yet, I definitely can't imagine
what it would be like to go through a breakup
or something that, you know, it would hurt
and you're like, oh, I think my life is ending.
And thinking that and be like, this sucks.
But not having the self-control and the cognition
because of dyes to say to yourself, well it's temporary.
I'll get over this.
I have a whole life ahead of me. I am 15.
I can't imagine what it would be like to be like,
no, my life's done now.
There's no going forward from here.
I definitely do not enjoy the fact
that there are some kids who think that.
And there are, of course, there's other reasons.
There is of course mental illness
and I'm not writing that off.
That will and forever always be present.
But the one thing I wanna try to avoid
is unnecessary instances of kids who
just think I'm done. This is it.
All because of some little ingredient
to make your food brightly colored.
In September, 2020,
we were expecting a new baby, fourth child.
Just a few weeks before our baby was born,
my husband was talking to his sister,
she suggested a Ted Talk about the effect
of food dyes on children.
So my husband sent me a text with that link to it,
and I kind of rolled my eyes and I thought,
that just sounds stupid
because it's food coloring.
Like it's in everything. Why?
Why would this be a problem?
It's just a color.
And my husband said, no, no, you should watch this video.
And I said, whatever.
That's okay, fine.
I had a friend post something on Facebook
that resonated with me.
The title of the video like caught my attention.
I'm like, I don't know what this is,
but I trust my friend who posted it.
She shares a lot of same viewpoints as me.
I'm gonna watch this video.
And I watched it like jaw on the floor,
resonated so much, Rebecca's story of what was happening,
and what she was experiencing
and how removing dyes instantly remove different
behaviors and different things they were experiencing.
So I popped in my headphones, and I listened
to this video while I was making dinner that night.
And there were things that kept coming up that wait, what?
Oh my gosh, she's just described Evan.
And the ah-ha moment was when the presenter said,
my kid doesn't always have ADHD.
I was shocked.
His preschool never said anything like that.
I mean, yes, he was interested in a lot of things
and yes, he was enthusiastic but ADHD?
And why did it seem like he only had ADHD on some days?
And I remember thinking her kid
is consistently inconsistent.
My kid is not always a bad kid.
Sometimes he's delightful.
And I thought, I'm desperate.
I have no other options at this point.
So I started doing a little research,
and reading labels and pulling stuff out
and making a pile that he could eat
and a pile that he couldn't eat
and we just started.
We didn't see immediate improvement,
but we'd made all these changes getting rid of things
in our pantry, so we just continued with it
and it took us several weeks and then boom,
our world changed.
So we saw an article where the FDA says,
"If you're worried about dyes, then just read labels."
But I mean, what if you don't know?
That's crazy, right?
Right. Yes, you can look at the ingredient label
and find these dyes in the ingredient list
if you know what you're looking for
and if you know you need to look for them.
Consumers might have this idea
that they can identify foods on site
that contain these dyes.
They think, oh, if it's brightly colored,
if it's a bright red sports drink,
then I know it's dyed.
And you're probably right,
but they're not just in these conspicuously colored foods.
Recently we looked at a food label
and found red 3 in a mashed potato product.
It's like, you know why first of all is that there?
But it's not just these brightly colored vibrant foods,
it's kind of permeated everything.
I think the thing is that a lot of people don't know.
And so you can argue we should just let people make
their own choices.
But a lot of people aren't armed enough with the information
to be able to do that.
And these things are so pervasive it's almost impossible
to avoid them.
Even if you know what to look for.
People aren't always able to study or understand
the list of 30 or 40 ingredients in some of these foods.
So that's where the wording label saves a tremendous burden
on the population of having to police their own food.
That's part of why I think it's sensible.
I think it's especially alarming how many products
that are marketed to children contain these dyes
because that's who we're talking about is impacted
in terms of neuro behavior.
We're talking about children.
People generally, probably don't know
that this is a problem.
And so a warning label would essentially solve that problem,
make it more apparent to consumers that these dyes
are present in their food.
And also let them know that maybe this is something
that they should be aware of and avoid if their child
is being impacted.
Why would you not let a parent know
to try to avoid these foods,
or industry, take those additives out of the food
and nobody has to avoid anything.
One of my driving motivators for creating this film
is my experience as a teacher.
I used to teach in a high poverty school,
and so there were a lot of families
that were just in absolute survival mode.
And for many families in this circumstance,
chemicals like synthetic dyes or even reading labels at all
is just like not on their radar.
So for the FDA to just say avoid them,
it's just really missing the mark.
And in my opinion, it's kind of an unfair statement.
I wrote a thesis for my education law class,
and I was looking specifically at foods
that are provided by the free and reduced lunch program
and breakfast program and the potential harms
that are coming from those foods
that could be causing behavioral issues,
could be causing misclassification for special ed
and different issues like that.
I was really interested in this
because there are a lot of conversations and papers
that have been written about why students
from low income areas are disproportionately represented
in special education and disproportionately represented
in disciplinary behavior and even expulsion from school.
And when the numbers don't line up,
there's a reason behind that, there's something going on.
So when I was researching potentially the cause
of these behaviors and especially low income schools,
I was shocked to see the amount of food
that contains artificial food coloring,
thousands of foods that schools can choose from
to serve for breakfast or lunch that are completely covered
by the government programs.
To suggest that parents
or students should just avoid food dyes
if they don't want to consume them,
that's not always an option for some students
because especially students who qualify
for free and reduced lunch or breakfast,
that's typically about 70 to 80% of the nutrients
that they're gonna consume all day long.
And so to put a restriction on those students to say,
don't choose that, that's not something that they can do.
And then on top of that,
school lunches don't come with a label on the back of it.
So students don't know if there's food dye.
We see it time and time again from all the studies
that artificial food dyes have a very negative effect
on children's behavior.
And when schools are feeding children breakfast
with food dyes in them, lunches with food dye in them,
snacks with food dye in them it's something to think about
that there may be a link between their behavior
and what they're eating.
So let's say you've removed dyes
from your household,
you've mastered the grocery store shuffle
and you're one of the lucky ones whose school is on board.
There's still the issue of prescription medications.
For many families, these medications are non-negotiable.
They're vital, even lifesaving.
Take ADHD medication for example,
they're often brightly colored,
which for kids sensitive to dyes can spell trouble.
It's a tough pill to swallow, pun intended
for families striving to minimize
the impact of these additives.
Finding over the counter drugs has not been a challenge
because those do come in dye free.
Ironically, the bigger box stores,
the cheaper ones are the ones that are dye free,
which has been amazing.
So finding those has not been hard.
But when he gets prescription medication, antibiotics,
ironically, ADHD medications are almost all colored.
And so that's been the hardest part.
So I've got a really good relationship
with the compound pharmacy right down the street.
If we can't find the medication dye free,
I have to call them and have them make the medication,
which is of course more expensive.
I am a single parent, so affording that has been tough.
I, you know, I worked my insurance to be able
to have some help on that part of it.
But that's exhausting. It is exhausting.
Especially when you need immediate things, right?
So he had strep throat, and I needed an antibiotic.
Well the only antibiotic they had was dyed,
so then I had to call the place over here.
Did they have a dye free option? No, they don't.
Okay, we gotta go back here.
We gotta call the pharmacist or the doctor
'cause the doctor's gotta call the prescription in.
I mean it's exhausting.
An ADHD medication is actually one
that's interestingly has dyes in it,
which exasperates the symptoms
and it just kind of levels in each other.
And so example we just had was a medication he needed,
we wanted to go up from one milligram to two,
well the two milligram has dye in it,
but the one milligram doesn't.
And so they wouldn't give him two one milligram medications
until we got special approval
because they thought we were trying to get more medication.
It took a week of back and forth with the doctor
and the pharmacy to be able to get approval
to have two one milligrams instead of one two milligram
because of the dye.
And now I just keep thinking as he gets older,
how are we gonna do this, you know.
It's frustrating that they just can't figure out a way
to dye medication with non-synthetic dyes.
And I understand you have to color medication
maybe differently, but there's so many things
you can color medication with
that you don't have to use dye for.
And so I just feel like if food can figure it out,
medicine should better figure it out.
For sure, the first 24 to 48 hours we were missing things,
I know, but we removed a ton
and it was like someone had let out some air.
You could just feel the pressure like in her,
and in all of us decreasing, we were just so amazed
and confused and happy.
And also thinking like any second, it's all gonna change.
Like this can't last,
and this can't have any sort of connection.
And the days and the weeks that followed,
we really like went through everything at home
and found dyes in marshmallows,
and I'm like, they're not colorful,
why would there be an artificial dye in that?
All the things that we looked on and pulling everything out
and reading everything and making changes in our bathroom,
and our medicine cabinet, everything.
She like stabilized and she went from being sad
and angry all the time to like smiling and peaceful.
Like I hadn't seen her be that way since she was a baby.
Like where things wouldn't set her off, and she was loving
and affectionate and smiling and she could just be calm
and she started sleeping like normally,
like being tired in the evening and being able
to wake up in the morning and be happy.
And I know we all like tiptoed around her
like we had been thinking this is gonna set her off.
And I remember with the other kids looking at them like,
you don't have to be scared of Mercie anymore.
And like what a heartbreaking thing that was to say to them
and how much it helped me realize how bad it was
that I'm telling them like, you don't have to be afraid
of making her mad, like she can handle it.
And so now it's been five years, almost six years since then
and she is healthy and happy, and spunky and sassy.
She is not without her character and her spunk,
but she is a whole healthy child all because of removing
the artificial dyes.
So I had my baby at the beginning of October,
and everything was chaos.
I wasn't sleeping, I had a new baby, I had four kids,
I was trying to figure out how to live life.
And Halloween that year was on Saturday night.
And so I had been bracing myself all month,
we can do this.
Sunday's gonna be terrible, we'll be okay.
So we went trick or treating, we stayed out late.
We went through Evan's candy,
and he had very carefully read the labels
and so we had a dye pile and a not dye pile
and he just ate from the not dye pile.
And I went, well that's a lot of sugar
and it's gonna be a mess anyways.
Our family, we go to church every Sunday
and church was at 9:00 a.m.
that Sunday morning right after Halloween.
And that was what I'd been dreading.
I was going to have to get four kids
including a newborn ready for church,
hung over on Halloween candy and staying up late.
And I had my baby on the floor
as I was putting on her little tights and her dress.
And Evan walked in and he didn't have his shoes on,
and I braced myself and I said, Evan,
I need you to get your shoes on.
And he looked up at me and he said, okay mom.
And in that moment
I knew,
I knew it was the food dyes.
That's something he would've reacted poorly to.
On a regular day when he'd been well rested
and wasn't full of candy, he would have exploded at that.
But that day with so many things going on,
he said, okay mom and put his shoes on.
And we got to church 10 minutes early.
After church when we got home
and we were just talking about our day,
I said,
I think the food dyes worked.
I think we've turned a corner.
And we kept seeing improvements,
and I realized how many experiences that I had missed
and I remember realizing what a dramatic change we've seen
and that something had switched in his brain.
He'd gone from violent, incredible hulk
nuclear level meltdowns to a super sweet little boy
who'd been hiding there all that time.
Come here buddy.
I love you.
The stories and the science shared
in this film demand more than just passive awareness.
They beckon for change.
And though the film may end when the credits roll,
we are now standing at the crossroads of awareness
and action asking, what's next?
Most companies are not going to get rid of dyes
unless something forces them to do so.
They're not gonna just do it
because it's the right thing to do.
So that's why a documentary like yours is so important.
We need to get the message out there
and put pressure on companies.
It's only consumer pressure,
or policy changes like warning labels or better yet,
get these dyes banned that will make them stop using them.
So with that being said,
it looks like it's up to us, the consumer.
The natural first step is removing dyes from your household.
Learning how to read labels and avoid dyes
is by far the best way to remove
or limit dyes for you and your family.
So when you're reading a label,
the artificial dyes have to be on the label.
There is actually lots of other ingredients
that can be hidden.
You can hide a whole slew of ingredients
under the term natural flavors,
but with artificial dyes you do have to list them.
So you will see the blue 1, the red 40, the yellow 5,
the yellow 6 listed on the label.
It seems overwhelming but when you get into it,
just like most things,
it's not as hard as you think it's gonna be.
You just have to be more cognizant of what you're getting,
and reading all the labels.
But it's everyday advocacy of like him and what he can have
and what he can't have and explaining and talking,
and answering questions and those kind of things.
How do you tell if a child has a food dye sensitivity?
You remove it from their food,
you feed them foods that are dye free
and you watch 'em for two weeks
and you will know.
If you see a behavior change, you know.
So no risk in removing them, but everything to gain.
Secondly, spread the word, tell your story.
It is so simple in practice like yeah,
it can feel overwhelming at first,
but the reality is to be able to give that information
to families that feel like they are drowning,
and they are stuck and they're hopeless is huge.
I had people, after I shared my story on Facebook,
strangers and friends reach out to me
talk about their grown children.
They're like, you just described my entire,
my entire raising of my child.
So when I'm sad that like it was two years
of literally hell on earth in our family,
it also was only two years
and like we have so many healthy years beyond that,
I'm just super grateful.
Get involved with your school systems,
and help educate the boards and decision makers.
Education is key because like Thomas said.
People generally probably don't know
that this is a problem.
There are federal laws that require any schools
who are recipients of the free and reduced lunch program
or breakfast programs, the board of ed has to have a policy
that has to encompass student wellness.
It has to address obesity,
different health issues within the school
and for the students.
Within that policy, parents can demand
that artificial food dyes are addressed.
There's education surrounding it.
You can start at the local level.
If we really wanna make an impact,
we're gonna need to make some racket.
If companies are citing lack of public demand,
then let's demand it.
Reach out to companies and brands,
and let them know you aren't happy with these chemicals
and write your politicians.
We are currently witnessing a handful of states
make a stand against food dyes and other chemicals.
Let your state legislators know
that your state wants those changes to you.
Policymakers, either personally or through their staff
read the correspondence that people send to them.
Until things get hot, you don't change behaviors.
And every legislature,
whether it's the United States Congress
or the state legislators, listen to the public.
So if the public comes in and says, why would we protect
the kids in California and not protect our kids?
What's wrong? I mean, you represent me
and you can articulate your desire
to have change in many ways.
You don't hear from people, you might not do anything.
You hear from a couple of people,
eh, you know I can take a little heat.
You get a lot of folks that galvanize a clear message
of we want change now.
Then you start having change.
Together, we have the power to drive change.
It starts with us and it starts now.
We are a force to be reckoned with and your voice matters.
So let's make it heard.
We did it!
I can't believe we actually made a documentary.
Me too!
This has been the adventure of a lifetime.
And we couldn't have done it without the support
of our community.
Where can people go to get more information
and learn how to get involved?
- Todyeforthedocumentary. - ...com.
Good job.
Click on the resources tab
where you can find our 30 Day Dye-Free Challenge
as well as templates for writing decision makers.
Even though the film's over,
this is really just the beginning.
And we can't wait to see what we can do together.
What do we say guys?
That's a wrap!
♪ I'm counting my blessings too many to remember ♪
♪ I'm singing your praises
♪ Each and everyday I live my life in surrender ♪
♪ I'm counting my blessings from January to December ♪
♪ Gotta keep up with all of His goodness and wonder ♪
♪ Every day I make the choice to remember ♪
♪ I'm counting my blessings
♪ You never fail to remind me I'm enough ♪
♪ I look around and see all the things you've done ♪
♪ Then you fill me with your peace and perfect love ♪
♪ You tell me you're working it all for my good ♪
♪ Making a way when I didn't think you could ♪
♪ I'm counting my blessings too many to remember ♪
♪ I'm singing your praises
♪ Each and every day I live my life in surrender ♪
♪ I'm counting my blessings from January to December ♪
♪ Gotta keep up with all of His goodness and wonder ♪
♪ Every day I make the choice to remember ♪
♪ I'm counting my blessings
♪ Name them one by one
♪ See what God has done
♪ So much to be thankful for
♪ So much to be grateful for
♪ Name them one by one
♪ See what God has done
♪ So much to be thankful for
♪ I'm counting my blessing too many to remember ♪
♪ I'm singing your praises
♪ Each and every day I live my life in surrender ♪
♪ I'm counting my blessings from January to December ♪
♪ Gotta keep up with all of His goodness and wonder ♪
♪ Every day I make the choice to remember ♪
♪ I'm counting my blessings