Can someone explain why dyes are harmful?

[EmersonAilidh]

A friend was eating Hot Cheetos at lunch the other day & I really wanted some so I read the ingredients, saw that it was safe, & ate some. That was all I ate that day & I didn't really notice feeling bad. That night my Mom went & bought me a bag of Hot Cheetos, & I ate some once on Friday & once on Saturday. Then on Saturday for lunch two friends & I went to a vegan restaurant in Fort Worth. As most vegan restaurants are it was pretty weird, & the only gfree options they really had were substituting rice noodles for regular pasta. They had "Spelt-Quinoa Bread" & "Seitan", neither of which I had heard of before & the waiter told me they were gfree. WELL WELL WELL.... I basically ate a meal of gluten, & of course this restaurant didn't have a bathroom. Not ten minutes in we had to book it to a gas station, where I made some people very unhappy by cutting the whole bathroom line. & also, for some reason, apparently my school's little fun size bags of Cheetos don't contain Whey but the regular sized bags do? Just checked that. I have NOT been on my restrictive-diet game this weekend. :/

The reason I bring up dye here, excuse me for talking about stool here, but the BM at the gas station was not like my normal bad ones in the fact that it was RED. No blood at all, just... RED. My little brother (severely autistic & mentally retarded) has horrible reactions to Red Dye 40, which I just read in the ingredients list of those Cheetos too. I've never had noticeable reactions to dye before (Anything cherry flavored doesn't bode well with me but since I avoid it now I don't know whether it's necessarily the dye or not), but then again healthnutty glutenfree vegetarians don't exactly come across much artificially dyed food. All I drink is tea, the VAST majority of what I eat is all natural, & I don't have a sweet tooth (besides for Almond Joys. My weakness), so I really can't even remember the last time I would have eaten something with dyes like that in it. I had a HUGE anxiety exacerbation last night, too. I can't think of any other trigger besides having eaten so bad since my GI & anxiety issues are linked in a big way.

 

Anyway. My question really is... Why are dyes bad? I mean, I know artificial-anything is to be avoided if there's an alternative, but what exactly is it about dye that some people can't handle?

[momof3inTN]

go to www.feingold.org this site can explain everything for you. I have 2 children tat can not have any dyes at all.

[Chemar]

Red40 and many of the food dyes are made from petroleum , and are banned in UK, some European countries and Canada

 

there are numerous articles and reports on why dyes are bad, especially for people with neuro probs

Here is a short and to the point one from the "mainstream" media

http://www.cbsnews.c...130-500803.html

 

 

 

need I say more......................

[amyjoy]

one of the things that happens with food coloring, is that some of the dye molecules can interfere with the absorption of nutrients. for example, yellow dye #5, tartrazine, binds up the receptor site for vitamin B6 so makes it hard to assimilate that vitamin. other dye molecules have their own peculiar chemistry that may interfere with other similar reactions. Some of them are related to allergic reactions or sensitivities like blue #1 and #2 because when the body goes to break the dye down, some of the chemical intermediaries are really hard to process, especially in someone with any kind of liver processing issue already, or challenged digestion.

 

hope that helps.

[MichaelTampa]

Emerson,

 

Others have covered the dye issue too well perhaps, I think I just got scared straight, after starting to take my Tindamax in red dye tablets, I may have to go back to the more pure compounded approach! Yikes!

 

Sounds like you may know it by now, but just in case ... While spelt will have some gluten in it, just like wheat will, seitan is literally made FROM the gluten of wheat--that's all it is, is gluten.

 

Michael