Should Food Manufactures Use Food Colouring to Attract Young Children?
Hello everyone, This is my second post on this subject. In the last post, I did some research and explained briefly what food colouring is and the affects on your health if you consume it periodically. I’m looking forward to learning and presenting this topic.
1 – What is food colouring?
This is the first and most crucial step to this topic. I have to fully understand what food colouring is and how it is produced.
Questions I want to look into:
~ What are the different types of food colouring?
~ What is it made of?
~ How much food is made with food dye in a grocery store?
~ What food colourings are safe to eat?
2 – Food colouring and health
~ How can food colouring influence our health?
~ What are the alternatives for food colouring?
~ How can you avoid food colouring?
~ How food colouring affect children and teens?
~ How different types of colouring can have different effects on your health.
3. Experiments:
~ Making natural food colouring.
~ Avoiding artificial food colouring for a week
~ Making food with natural homemade food colouring.
~ Finding different types of food colourings in different types of candies.
Implications to other individuals and/or communities
~ I hope this inquiry can make people aware of the negative impacts food colouring can have on your health.
~ Influence others to limit their consumption of artificial colourings.
~ Help people make healthy food choices.
Websites to help me answer this inquiry:
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/color-additives-questions-and-answers-consumers
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/food-dyes#TOC_TITLE_HDR_9
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-food-coloring-safe-for-kids/
Hi Lucas,
I think for your second question, it would be very interesting to look into why some people are allergic to food dye. I’ve had friends who have been allergic to mostly red food dye, but I never figured out why. Looking into the components of food dye may help with this.
https://www.nyallergy.com/food-coloring-allergy#:~:text=Tartrazine%20causes%20the%20most%20allergic,their%20yellow%20or%20orange%20color.
Hi Nikki,
I never thought that people could have allergic reactions to food dyes. I definitely look into this topic. Thank you for the suggestions and the link.
Hi Lucas,
That’s an interesting topic!
For part 2 of your research, you can also say talk about how it affects children because I think they are the most important ones that are attracted to food colourings and the companies take advantage of that to make a profit.
https://www.thebrightesthub.com/adverse-effects-of-artificial-food-coloring-on-children/#:~:text=Many%20food%20selections%20contain%20artificial%20food%20coloring%20that,dyed%20foods%2C%20especially%20those%20with%20ADHD%20and%20ADD.
Hi Lokshana,
Thank you so much for the suggestion. The link was very helpful and I’ll definitely use it for my nest post!
Hi Lucas,
Food dye isn’t something that is good for kids so I totally understand why you are asking this question. Since people have been consuming food dye for a while, we know that it isn’t an immediate threat but it could be interesting for you to research the long-term effects of consuming food dye regularly. There are also some dyes that are more controversial than others.
here is an article listing some of those.
https://www.special-education-degree.net/food-dyes/
I think that we would be better off without food dye because it doesn’t change the taste of the food and it isn’t a good thing to have extra chemicals in your food. The problem is that people are used to seeing foods with dye. If one brand stops using the dye, they lose their customers. It would only really work if all of the brands agreed to switch to natural food dyes.
As for marketing towards kids, I think that that idea expands past food dye.. Kids are manipulated by shows and advertisements all the time, but I think this idea extends to adults too. I think it’s safe to say that adults also eat food with food dye in them. So an idea for your project could be looking into other immoral child attracting business tactics or the effect of food dye on adults and children. I really like that you are experimenting and researching with this project!
Here are some more links:
https://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1839&context=theses
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-advertisers-manipulat_b_718227
Good luck!
-Shieva Mokhtarnameh
Hi Shieva,
Thank you for the helpful suggestions and links. I agree with you that it is very hard for a company to get rid of food dyes. instead of getting rid of it, I will look into some ways to make healthy and natural dyes.
Hi Lucas It was very interesting to read about your research. I also agree that food dye is not good for kids. I think people would be better of without food dyes which are not really good because of all chemicals added and it does not change food taste.