Head in the Clouds

Colorful Behavior

My daughter was pacing back and forth between the bay window in the front of the house and the dining room table in the back, over and over. It was a few years ago, and she’d just gotten back from a Rockies baseball game. She's prone to doing cartwheels through the clutter in the living room and dancing on the stretchy climbing equipment at the school playground, humming “Wipeout.” But her pacing that game day had an intensity that was different from her usual playful energy.

Was it the excitement of having been in a crowded stadium watching a pro ball game? Or was it the pink coloring in the cotton candy she’d had at the ballpark?

A 2007 study in the medical journal The Lancet suggests it could have been the artificial coloring. In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, researchers found that a combination of artificial colors and the preservative sodium benzoate, in amounts a child might take in on a typical day, resulted in increased hyperactivity in a group of three-year-olds and a group of eight- and nine-year-olds.

"These adverse effects could affect the child's ability to benefit from the experience of school," said the lead researcher, quoted in a Time magazine piece (which I recommend). And he's talking about all kids; researchers selected the children in the study to reflect the general population, not for any already noted tendency toward hyperactivity. 

In 2008, the U.K.’s Food Standards Agency called for a voluntary ban on the six artificial colors in the study, and the European Parliament voted in favor of putting a warning label on foods containing the coloring, reading "may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children," according to the U.K. group Action on Additives. Psychiatrist Kenny Handelman reported earlier this year on his blog that the state of Maryland was considering a bill that would require a warning label on products containing ingredients in the study, followed by a ban.

But back to my daughter. She’s had that intense kind of physical energy a couple times since. Once was after the dental hygienist put bright red disclosing solution on my daughter’s teeth to show her where plaque was building up. The other was after she had birthday cake with a picture of some animal on it in brown frosting—and it wasn’t chocolate. I looked up how to color icing brown: You mix red food coloring with other colors.

I don’t mind having an active girl. In fact, I love it. But here’s what gives me the creeps: the fact that commonly used food additives might be having an unintended but significant effect on children’s developing nervous systems.

Britain’s Independent reports that sodium benzoate (the preservative used in the hyperactivity study) might also inactivate DNA in the mitochondria (our cells’ “powerhouses”) and combine with vitamin C to form benzene. Here’s an update, on the blog of the Independent’s consumer affairs correspondent. 

Medical News Today, Britain's Independent, and the University of Southampton's news service also covered the hyperactivity study.

Here's how to make cotton candy, in case you want to try making some without the coloring.

And in case you want to do something with food coloring that doesn’t involve eating it, here’s an easy and gorgeous science experiment:

Here's another science experiment that can involve food coloring, this one performed by real physicists, with music provided by NPR’s Science Friday:

Meditation for Kids

Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention. … But we never teach them how.

—Stanford researcher Philippe R. Goldin, quoted in the New York Times

Goldin has a good point. How do you pay attention? Can you teach someone how? Can you teach children how?

Some educators and researchers are trying to teach school kids how to pay better attention by teaching them meditation. My last blog post was about meditation and ADD. Research suggests that meditation can help with symptoms of ADD, at least in adults. But what about in children?

A little  bit of research plus some experience in schools suggests that meditation might help kids as well—on a wide variety of issues, as with adults, and perhaps directly with attentional issues. A 2007 New York Times article and a 2009 SharpBrains post are good places to start reading about this.

Much of the research on meditation is on a type called mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness might help both with primary ADD symptoms and with the type of fallout that can go along with ADD. According to the New York Times article,

Dr. [Amy] Saltzman, co-director of [a] mindfulness study at Stanford, said the initial findings showed increased control of attention and “less negative internal chatter—what one girl described as ‘the gossip inside my head: I’m stupid, I’m fat or I’m going to fail math.’”

Chances are you've heard of Transcendental Meditation as well. A piece in Medical News Today covers a small study suggesting that that type of meditation might also be helpful to children with ADD.

Further research on kids and meditation looks like it'll be worth paying attention to!

The website of the Association for Mindfulness in Education looks like a good place learn more about the topic and watch for research updates.

Stanford researcher Amy Saltzman’s website offers a few guided mindfulness videos for kids, including one on finding the “still, quiet place,” one with simple movements, and one on the “flashlight of attention.” (I love the metaphor!)