Food Additives and Hyperactivity

Environ Health Perspect. doi:10.1289/ehp.11182 available via http://dx.doi.org [Online 27 May 2008]

Referencing: Hyperactive Ingredients?

In the December 2007 Forum article on the links between food additives and hyperactivity, Barrett (2007) offered a somewhat distorted perspective on the public health implications of these additives. Barrett described a clinical trial testing the proposition that consumption of a blend of artificial food flavors and sodium benzoate induces changes in children's behavior (McCann et al. 2007). The results of that study support such a claim.

Barrett (2007) fumbled the significance of the trial (McCann et al. 2007) for environmental health. The Forum article emphasized how food additives might contribute to the clinical diagnosis of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder rather than on the more significant finding that food additives, particularly synthetic colors at levels prevailing in the diet, induce adverse behavioral responses. This is hardly a novel finding. In 1980, such effects were documented in two different groups of subjects with two different experimental designs (Swanson and Kinsbourne 1980; Weiss et al. 1980). Many later publications have confirmed their results. I briefly reviewed the data in Environmental Health Perspectives (Weiss 2000).

According to Barrett (2007), a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official, Mike Herndon, maintains that the agency sees "… no reason at this time to change our conclusions that the ingredients that were tested in this study that currently are permitted for food use in the United States are safe for the general population." This is a rather baffling statement. In fact, our study (Weiss et al. 1980) was funded by the FDA, and its results, along with a number of others from that period, definitively demonstrated adverse behavioral effects of synthetic food colors (Weiss 1982). During the intervening years, with a plethora of confirmations, the FDA has remained blindly obstinate. It continues to shield food additives from testing for neurotoxicity and apparently believes that adverse behavioral responses are not an expression of toxicity.

Herndon and the FDA should seriously consider what the late Philip Handler said about balancing risks and benefits:

A sensible guide would surely be to reduce exposure to hazard whenever possible, to accept substantial hazard only for great benefit, minor hazard for modest benefit, and no hazard at all when the benefit seems relatively trivial. (Handler 1979)

The FDA has never clarified the health benefits of artificial food colors.

The author declares he has no competing financial interests.

References

Barrett JR. 2007. Hyperactive ingredients? Environ Health Perspect 115:A578.

Handler P. 1979. Some comments on risk. In: The National Research Council in 1979; Current Issues and Studies. Washington, DC:National Academy of Sciences, 3–24.

McCann D, Barrett A, Cooper A, Crumpler D, Dalen L, Grimshaw K, et al. 2007. Food additives and hyperactive behaviour in 3-year-old and 8/9-year-old children in the community: a randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial. Lancet 370:1560–1567.

Swanson JM, Kinsbourne M. 1980. Food dyes impair performance of hyperactive children on a laboratory learning test. Science 207:1485–1487.

Weiss B. 1982. Food additives and environmental chemicals as sources of childhood behavior disorders. J Am Acad Child Psychiatry 21:144–152.

Weiss B. 2000. Vulnerability of children and the developing brain to neurotoxic hazards. Environ Health Perspect 108(suppl 3):375–381.

Weiss B, Williams JH, Margen S, Abrams B, Caan B, Citron LJ, et al. 1980. Behavioral responses to artificial food colors. Science 207:1487–1489.

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Editor's Note

Weiss correctly points out that several investigators, including himself, have reported links between food additives and hyperactivity in children. He is also correct in stating that food additives appear to exacerbate existing hyperactive behavior in children, rather than contribute to the clinical diagnosis of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The study by McCann et al. [Lancet 370:1560–1567 (2007)] supports that conclusion, as described in Barrett's December 2007 Forum article [Environ Health Perspect 115:A578 (2007)].

We believe it was important to mention ADHD because hyperactivity and clinically defined ADHD are often conflated in the science news press. The point of referring to ADHD and therein clarifying the relationship between ADHD and hyperactivity was to put the import of the findings by McCann et al. (2007) into proper perspective. 118