Food additives are bad for you

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News story this morning:
Food Additives story

No s**t Batman!
almost as bad as yesterdays story Rock stars are more likly to die young - what will it be next "Bear s**ts in the woods!"

My guess is the level of impairment from such additives is low to zero in relation to ADD/ADHD. Something to keep in mind about studies is they are often wrong. One study for example says pine bark extract is good for ADD/ADHD. But I doubt you will ever find anyone not on the payroll of the pine bark extract industry that will say it helped their ADD/ADHD. The simple reason is even if it does help its so limited as to be undetectable by most people. You give me
$50,000 and I can make a study say what you want. I could say plum juice will boost sex drive in women and get the study featured on that same BBC website. I may not have to lie either. Just get a slight improvement in some small sampling. Then set back and watch my stock in the plum juice industry rise.

From the article

Why do people keep 're-discovering' the same thing over and over, then do nothing about it.

They have known this for the last 30 years

All true.
But so many of us have anecdotal evidence that food additives are not good. 40 years ago my school grew food in our own gardens and orchards for among other reasons to reduce additives in our diet.

Old news, yes. Skeptic? Have a child with hyperactivity and sensory seeking problems, mistakenly go on a diet you dont know about, go off the diet you didnt know about.....then discover the diet and have the offender set off blind studies just cause you've not learned to identify the offender in all products.

The diet works. The hard part is discovering the offenders. I've long known i cannot take pills. They all have some filler in them that causes me more anxiety, probably because my body doesnt know what to do with the crap. I dont give my daughter anything, and she follows the red dye free diet to this day, but not the casein free....puberty told her she needed the calcium, i suppose.

The gluten and casein free diets supposedly heal the gut of a malfunction that allows these proteins to turn into opiates in the brain, but, watching my daughter, and her understanding of her own self, and choosing of diets, makes me believe the additives are much more toxic. It's worth trying a diet to overcome anxiety or sensory overloads.

tygereyes

I get your point that research can be manipulated - sometimes accidentally, as the statistics usually specify 95% certainty.

But there are a variety of studies on pine bark extract on PubMed, and I don't believe they were all the results of sampling error or intentional manipulation. Pine Bark (and grape seeds and cocoa and many other plants) are rich sources of oligomeric proanthocyanidins, which can have some pretty amazing effects on organisms, especially those that eat an impoverished, processed diet.

I don't work for Big Pine Bark Inc., but I am open to the idea that it can help some people with a variety of chronic conditions, including ADD. From what I've read, it doesn't kick in instantly like ritalin - it gradually reduces some symptoms over a period of months. Which makes it hard for a kid with ADD to recognize the effects, although they might show up in a controlled study. Ritalin doesn't seem to improve the anti-oxidant deficiency that is seen in ADD, or reduce the characteristic DNA damage seen in people with ADD, as far as I know. But pine bark does.

Reminds me of study on the pesticide industry. When they were developing something to kill roaches, they weren't satisfied with something that would make the roaches crawl into crevices and die 24 or 48 hours after being gassed. They wanted something that would make the roaches go beserk and scurry around and go into convulsions and die in the middle of the floor. It wasn't more effective, it was more immediate and visibly effective. That's what people like.

Being open to the idea is fine. But what I said is you will likely
never find anyone who tried pine bark extract for ADD/ADHD
that said it helped(unless they work for the company that owns
the brand Pycnogenol which funds most the studies on pine bark extract).





I like to see the reference to "anti-oxidant deficiency that is seen in ADD".




A reference to the "characteristic DNA damage seen in people with ADD" also.

http://www.addforums.com/forums/index.php?

Is a fairly large(18,904 members) forum devoted to ADD/ADHD and the reports of pine bark /Pycnogenol working look limited to maybe 2 users with a small number of post. One of the posters gives a stern warning that generic pine bark extract is not the
same as brand name Pycnogenol.

Well, I did more digging, and found that you are right (sorta). If you discount all the studies funded by the Big Pine Industry and I discount all the studies from the pharmaceutical industry, then we are left with one study. It found that neither pine bark extract or ritalin are more effective than placebo in treating attention deficit disorders.

This seems to be a hot button topic for you, and I really don't think that any references I post will change your opinions. I don't have time to go round and round about whether the scientists were crooked, or if a particular study was well designed or how strong a particular body of ancecdotal evidence is. I'm not pushing any particular theory of what causes various attention deficit conditions, not pushing any therapy.

On the other hand, if you say something about anxiety/panic disorders or neurovascular headache that I disagree with, then its on!

True I've spent alot time researching all the treatment options for ADD/ADHD. I have extremely low confidence in the efficacy of known non-drug treatments for ADD/ADHD. And I'm very skeptical of the risk vs reward ratio of drugs treatments for ADD/ADHD also. The reality is its not an easy to treat condition. These studies and anecdotal reports saying avoiding food additives are useful for ADD/ADHD tend to make me mad.

I'm convinced... i'm going to immediately start ordering plum juice for my dates.