Death, Candy, and Food Additives: A November 1 Grab Bag

Reasons not to fear sugar or food dyes, plus a remembrance

Photo by Tamas Pap on Unsplash

My husband’s grandmother died last week, shortly after her 100^th birthday.

“She lived a full life,” most people have been quick to say, and it’s true—few of us will get that many years, and she filled them with joy and family.

She raised four kids and helped care for more than a dozen grandkids and two-dozen great-grandkids. Up until a couple years ago, she kept every one of their birthdays straight—and marked each occasion by calling to sing unselfconsciously into the phone or voicemail. She recalled names and details from her 1920s childhood as easily as she remembered things that had happened last week or last year.

She could tell a great story, and she laughed easily and often. She loved a big party, though she was happiest chatting for hours over a pot of tea. And she was incredibly supportive of her family’s creative endeavors and nontraditional career paths, of which there have been a few. Each time we spoke, she asked about my work and listened with interest and empathy.

In some ways, she truly was a woman from another century. She never held a job outside the home, never drove a car. For as long as anyone can remember, she couldn’t bear to be seen without makeup on or hair done, or with a messy house. When her kids were grown, she still cooked multi-course meals (including dessert) each night and served them to her husband, while eating very little herself.

After he passed away several years ago, she became so undernourished that her doctor prescribed candy bars to help restore her weight. She refused to eat them, worried that she would “get fat.”  

I wish she’d been able to enjoy those candy bars—and her life—free from the pressure to be thin, to look a certain way, to keep a perfect home.

Women her age didn’t have many options, and her strict adherence to that era’s standards of femininity was one way of keeping herself safe, though I’m sure she didn’t think of it in those terms. And of course complying with beauty standards is often still a means of finding some measure of safety in a society that can be profoundly unkind to anyone who deviates from its strictures.

I hope my daughter reaches 100, and that when she does—in the 2120s—she’ll have no reason to fear fatness, or food, or being seen without makeup.

I hope she’ll be able to accept herself exactly as she is, and to feel as unencumbered as Gram was when telling a story or singing Happy Birthday to her grandkids.  

Now we’re getting ready for Gram’s funeral and gearing up to explain death to our daughter, using scripts handed down to us by other parents who had to have this conversation with their toddlers far too soon.

“She died because she was very old and her body stopped working,” we’re planning to say—a rough plank of facts that I hope can hold the weight of this conversation without giving way beneath our feet.

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I don’t have a new Q&A for you this week, but I thought I’d share a couple pieces from the archives that address some of the diet-and-wellness-culture fears that often come up in the days after Halloween.

The first is an episode of my first podcast, Food Psych, about sugar and health. I answered an audience question about whether eating sugar is objectively unhealthy, with a deep dive into what the research really says.

If you’ve ever felt bad about eating sugar, or ever wondered about the connection between sugar and health conditions like diabetes, this episode is for you. (Click the link to listen, and scroll down to the bottom of the page if you want to get the transcript.)

The second piece I want to share isn’t technically from the archives, but rather an upcoming episode of the Rethinking Wellness podcast: an interview with sociologist Karen Throsby, author of Sugar Rush, which is available now for paid subscribers and comes out for free on Monday.

In the episode we discuss why sugar became demonized despite a lot of actual uncertainty in the science, how anti-sugar sentiment is bound up with anti-fat bias, the different rhetoric around sugar that’s dominant in diet culture vs. wellness culture, what the research really says about the supposed addictiveness of sugar, and lots more.

Finally, below is a Q&A about food additives that I ran last Halloween, which is available in full for paid subscribers, with an extended preview for free subscribers.

I hope these are helpful, and I’ll look forward to coming back soon with some new answers to your questions.

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Fears About Food Additives

It’s Q&A time! You can ask your own question here for a chance to have it answered in an upcoming edition.

Just a reminder that these answers are for educational and informational purposes only, and aren’t a substitute for medical or mental-health advice. Although I am a registered dietitian, I’m not your dietitian (unless you happen to be one of my 1:1 clients—hi!—but even then, this email isn’t a session).

Fyi, there are some specific ingredients mentioned in the question and in my answer. 

I’m wondering your take on ingredient differences between the United States and other countries. I have read articles that claim that the same products that are sold in other countries have extra dyes, sugars, and other additives in the States. What is your take on “unnecessary ingredients” (are they harmful?) and the government’s role in protecting consumers? There are a few questions in here, my main question is….as a consumer in the United States, are there harmful and unnecessary ingredients in our food and could our government be doing a better job at protecting its consumers from that? 

Thanks so much for this question. Before we dive in, I just want to say that I’m no fan of or apologist for the food industry. I’ve never taken money from major food manufacturers (though I did work at a couple of independent restaurants and cafes in the past, and I once ran an ad for a small tea company on my podcast Food Psych). No special‐interest group is paying me to write about food additives or sugar, and opinions here are my own.

There’s been a lot made of the fact that some food additives are banned in Europe but not the U.S., but I think it’s important to take a critical look at this issue and not just give in to the food fearmongering that’s so common in wellness culture.

Artificial food colorings are probably the additive most often deemed “unnecessary and harmful,” so I’m primarily going to focus on those here. The main concerns cited with these dyes are potential effects on children’s behavior and the idea that they’re linked to cancer. 

In terms of child behavior, there has been some evidence linking artificial food dyes to a small but statistically significant risk of increased hyperactivity in children, though the research is quite mixed and much of it is low quality, with small studies, problematic sample selection, and other flaws in design. (Sugar, on the other hand, is NOT linked to hyperactivity or other behavioral or sleep issues.) 

But it seems that if there is any risk of hyperactivity associated with food colorings, it only affects some children—perhaps those who already experience hyperactivity or other symptoms of ADHD, although we don’t know for sure—and more research is needed.

This isn’t the kind of evidence to support a recommendation for everyone (or even all children) to avoid these dyes completely. It certainly isn’t reason to take away kids’ colorful Halloween candy! Still, the possible link does warrant further study and ongoing consideration by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which I’m sure they are doing. 

In terms of cancer, the evidence for any link with artificial food coloring is even weaker. There have been numerous studies over the course of many years looking at whether exposure to food dyes induces cancer in animals, and none of the dyes approved in the U.S. have been shown to cause to cancer. 

That’s true even of the most controversial food coloring, Red #3 (aka erythrosine), which is a good example of an additive that’s treated differently in the U.S. and Europe, and which I think the FDA is handling appropriately.