Child Diet and Learning Disabilities

David Wallinga, MD, direc­tor of the Food and Health Program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and a co-author of the arti­cle, recently sat down with Organic Connections to explain some of these fac­tors and their poten­tial influences.

“The arti­cle reviews, I would say, three dif­fer­ent kinds of inter­re­lated prob­lems,” Dr. Wallinga said. “The first is syn­thetic food dyes, which are largely petro­leum based. Individually, there’s already evi­dence that these con­tribute to prob­lems in chil­dren related to learn­ing, such as lack of atten­tion. There’s a call in the UK, for exam­ple, for food man­u­fac­tur­ers to phase out these syn­thetic food dyes completely.

“The sec­ond kind of prob­lem is just the gen­eral fail­ure of the American diet to pro­vide nec­es­sary nutri­tion. Most Americans don’t eat a healthy diet, period. And a big piece of that is they’re eat­ing foods that don’t deliver ade­quate amounts of essen­tial nutri­ents or min­er­als, like sele­nium or zinc—two that are men­tioned a lot in the article.

“And then the third piece is envi­ron­men­tal tox­ins, such as heavy met­als, that end up in the diet, either through con­t­a­m­i­na­tion or because they are inten­tion­ally put in foodstuffs.”

Dr. Wallinga pointed out that expo­sure to mercury—as an exam­ple of a heavy metal—is bad for the brain and can have impacts on learn­ing and behav­ior. There are also cru­cial nutri­ents that help expel mer­cury from the body, in which a per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion are defi­cient due to poor diets. On top of that, there are other fac­tors. “People are not uni­form in the degree to which they might be affected by this,” Dr. Wallinga explained. “There are nat­u­rally some peo­ple in the pop­u­la­tion who already are reduced or defi­cient in their abil­ity to expel mer­cury from their bod­ies. There are also some peo­ple who are more sen­si­tive to mer­cury. So this is a poten­tial prob­lem for every­one, but it’s likely to impact some peo­ple more than others.”

Interestingly, mer­cury con­t­a­m­i­na­tion occurs in cer­tain food chemicals—already poten­tially harmful—that end up in American diets. According to the arti­cle, mer­cury has been his­tor­i­cally used to man­u­fac­ture a num­ber of food ingre­di­ents, includ­ing color addi­tives, such as FD&C Yellow 5, FD&C Yellow 6 and high-fructose corn syrup. In an arti­cle pub­lished ear­lier this year in Environmental Health, sci­en­tists found detectable mer­cury in com­mer­cial high-fructose corn syrup sam­ples col­lected by the FDA in 2005.

High-fructose corn syrup is an addi­tive that has been widely used since the 1980s, and which, accord­ing to the arti­cle, can lead to zinc and other defi­cien­cies in humans. There is also likely much more to be dis­cov­ered. “I think that the jury is still out on what the long-term effects of high-fructose corn syrup are, espe­cially given its preva­lence in the American diet,” said Dr. Wallinga. “A huge por­tion of our daily calo­ries, espe­cially in our kids, comes from high-fructose corn syrup. And then I think, obvi­ously it’s not nec­es­sary; we got along just fine with­out it for eons. So it raises in my mind this sort of pre­cau­tion­ary argu­ment that there are other things we can add to our foods that don’t have some of these same con­cerns, whether it’s mer­cury con­t­a­m­i­na­tion or links to meta­bolic syn­drome. Therefore, as a par­ent, I just think the pre­cau­tion­ary approach is to try to limit high-fructose corn syrup con­sump­tion, even if it’s not made with mercury.”

Fortunately, efforts are under­way at a reg­u­la­tory level to elim­i­nate some of these prob­lems. The Center for Science in the Public Interest last year sub­mit­ted a peti­tion to the FDA to “ban the use of Yellow 5 and other food dyes, in the interim to require a warn­ing on foods con­tain­ing these dyes, to cor­rect the infor­ma­tion the Food and Drug Administration gives to con­sumers on the impact of these dyes on the behav­ior of some chil­dren, and to require neu­ro­tox­i­c­ity test­ing of new food addi­tives and food colors.”

Regarding dyes, Dr. Wallinga remarked, “We’re in this strange sit­u­a­tion where we have promi­nent food com­pa­nies mak­ing one line of prod­ucts with­out these brain-active food dyes for the UK mar­ket and another line of the same prod­ucts for the American mar­ket with these brain-active food dyes in them. That just seems like a silly state of affairs.”

Congress is also cur­rently debat­ing an impor­tant piece of leg­is­la­tion called HR 2065, Mercury Pollution Reduction Act of 2009. “This act would have the US sup­port steps to stop using out­dated mercury-contaminating processes world­wide,” Dr. Wallinga said. “The US has started tran­si­tion­ing into other ways of mak­ing chem­i­cals with­out mer­cury, which is good. But because we’re in a global economy—and a global food econ­omy in particular—does that do us much good if food com­pa­nies con­tinue to buy prod­ucts over­seas that are still mer­cury con­t­a­m­i­nated? We would never know, because these prod­ucts aren’t really being tested for mer­cury con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. It actu­ally needs to be a global approach, and that’s what this bill would do. It would put the US on record sup­port­ing a global phase-out of mer­cury being used in facil­i­ties that can lead to food con­t­a­m­i­na­tion with mercury.”

On a more prac­ti­cal level, what should we tell aver­age con­sumers, who might not be informed, about which types of comestibles to look out for?

“Instead of telling peo­ple what to look out for, I think it’s more effec­tive to tell them what to look for,” Dr. Wallinga con­cluded. “I think they ought to be look­ing for whole foods with­out added food dyes, with­out a lot of pro­cess­ing, because, again, it’s clear that we don’t often know what’s in those processed foods or what the brain-active impacts of those addi­tives are. Whole-food diets are more likely to meet their nutri­tional needs, which obvi­ously they’re not get­ting through the cur­rent diet.

“Parents and con­sumers have a role with our pol­icy mak­ers too. Their voices are incred­i­bly impor­tant for stop­ping the intro­duc­tion of mer­cury into the food sys­tem and hold­ing food man­u­fac­tur­ers in the US to the same stan­dard as those in the UK with respect to petroleum-based food addi­tives and the like.”

For much more information—including a table of the amount of mer­cury detected in 55 brand-name foods and bev­er­ages con­tain­ing high-fructose corn syrup as the first or sec­ond ingredient—visit the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy web­site at www.iatp.org.

An excel­lent guide to food addi­tives can also be found at the Center for Science in the Public Interest web­site at www.cspinet.org/reports/chemcuisine.htm.