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Comment by p00ter | Hacker News Reader

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I don't believe that titanium dioxide and silicon dioxide are used in food colouring are they? And they didn't imply a behavioural link in the article - it's possible, but I think we're making quite a few (off topic) jumps.

Edit: I stand corrected, titanium dioxide was, maybe still is, but not considered safe.

As mentioned, TiO2 is perhaps the most common white pigment and is used in all kinds of things from candy to toothpaste to cosmetics. We eat a lot of it, and it's generally recognized as safe in the US (but not the EU!).

Si02 is just silica/quartz, and is the most common type of sand. It's usually an anti-caking agent but... it's sand. You are almost certainly getting some SiO2 any time you eat a vegetable. It is also generally recognized as safe.

The title says nano-particles. Is this nano-sand any different from the sand you find on a carrot?

Absolutely it is different. They mill the silica very finely and then filter out only the nanoparticles for use

Silt is basically naturally milled sand. There isn't anything exotic about it.

Do you eat or breathe a lot of silt? If you did, you'd probably get sick. Silicosis is a terrible and terribly common occupational ailment.

It's the size of the particle that matters more than what it's made of

The sickness is due to how the particles interact with the lining of your lungs, and breathing in enough to get ill effects will be much more than you consume through food over a short period.

There may be longer term effects, but I'd imagine we would have identified more of them by now, considering how severely dangerous silicosis is.

My property is built on the silt plume of a river that now empties out a few miles away. It does become a dust bowl when grass is removed and everything's dry. It otherwise stays in its place.

Titanium dioxide is used as a colorant to make things look whiter. It's common in cottage cheese, for example.

Not my cottage cheese :(

Even used to produce very bright stars in fireworks

And soy-milk too ...

There's something about one of the red dyes in america that is partially linked to adhd symptoms or restless kids?

I think almost everyone who works with children (teachers, day care, people who chaperone ski trips) believes that ingredients of junk food (sugar, food colorings, etc.) despite their being little evidence.

I was under the impression there was lots of evidence - not that the junk food causes bad behaviour, but that adults treat children who have just eaten junk food differently causing them to misbehave.

I'm allergic to tartrazine. It doesn't seem to affect me much as an adult but as a child I'd go into drastic coughing/wheezing fits from consuming orange-flavored drinks in which it's used as a food coloring. I have a solid ADHD diagnosis but not looked into any kind of larger overlap with other allergies, due to the cost of screening/testing.

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Tartrazine

Reading this made me think about how Twizzler Pull and Peel make me cough. Went and looked it up. Yellow 5 is in them. Have been diagnosed ADD for the last 22 years. Huh.

I’m tired of the constant “no evidence” bs. I have children and their behavior changes dramatically when they eat food with artificial coloring. I’m honestly tired of being told I’m crazy. You can take my kids and try it yourself.

There's a big difference between "nothing changes" and "it's not the color causing the changes".

And double blind tests aren't hard to do.

No, they are hard.

If you're going to feed kids candy that is colored with agent A you need to make identical candy colored with agent B so the kids can't tell them apart. You can test A vs B but not A vs no color. (Though maybe you can have the kids eat the candy while blindfolded)

If you're going to test the influence of sugar you could use sugar for candy A and some combination of Sucralose, Ace-K, aspartame and some strange carbohydrate like mannitol or xylitol in candy B and get pretty close in terms of taste and mouthfeel but in A/B tests people will notice the difference.

Then people will wonder if those other substances cause problems and none of these address the possibility that the sensory pleasure of junk food makes kids squee and lose self control.

If you're blaming a specific coloring agent it's pretty easy to hide a drop. And I'm not talking about sugar or sweeteners or anything.

Probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azorubine , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth_(dye), or another cousin from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azo_dye s.

I knew it from 'Strawberry Milk' which made me sneeze and feel strange long ago. Since then I'm avoiding E122&E123. But haven't seen it that much in the last years. Still wouldn't want to have it. It's cheap stuff to upsell cheap products. Mix/blend some real strawberries into your milk/yoghurt, or use organic syrup, marmalade.

I totally fucked myself at a job a few years back because some asshole put green candies in the meeting room and apparently Yellow #5 makes me agitated and irritable. By the time I figured that out the initial impression was already set. Now I'll split a bag of Peanut M&Ms with you but only if you give me the brown, blue, and red ones and take the rest for yourself.

I’m struggling with Poe’s Law on this one.

Unfortunately true. Pretty much all of the named ingredient food colorings are that way because someone somewhere reacts to them. Red M&Ms are a new thing. They went away in the 80's because that color turned out to be carcinogenic, so we had no red M&Ms for a decade or two, and then if memory serves they introduced blue first, which I think was probably a way to clear everyone's memories a bit more.

I had a friend who had avoided M&Ms for all of grade school because she was allergic to the old Red. I think it was a year or two after they phased it out before she learned they were safe for her to eat again. She was not pleased nobody told her.

The yellow #5 thing is apparently somewhat common for ADHD people, I'm not sure about people on the spectrum. It does give some credence to the old wives' tale about candy making children spaz out, beyond the generally accepted theory today about correlation with overstimulation. Some kids, and some candies, just enough to cause anecdotes to circulate.

https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-to-know-yellow-5-food-dye

I’m sorry you were downvoted. I agree completely as a parent of a child who goes entirely off the rails with even the smallest amount of food containing red 40.

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