TRYING to avoid food additives has become a minefield as companies get craftier about marketing, a food intolerance expert says.
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The author of the bestselling Fed Up series, Sue Dengate said most people wanted to avoid additives but they were being misled en masse.
“Twenty years ago it was easy because we had a list of numbers to avoid,” Ms Dengate said.
“Long-lasting tasty food equals tidy profits for companies so they’re removing numbers, taking away chemical-sounding names and using lots of health claims.”
A former Corowa Public School student, psychology graduate and high school teacher, Ms Dengate became interested in the effects of food additives after the birth of her first child 20 years ago.
She said it took more than a decade to uncover the additives behind her daughter’s health and behavioural issues.
“It took 11 years for us to find out what was going on,” she said.
“I have a lot of parents saying to me they were wasted years with their children.”
Since then Ms Dengate has focused on the effects of food chemicals on children's behaviour, health and learning ability.
She said for some sensitive children fruit might be a problem because it was loaded with salicylates, chemicals that occurred naturally in plants.
“If you’re giving your child sultanas and juice each day suddenly their diet is loaded in salicylates,” she said.
“People are better to stick to two pieces of fresh fruit and five vegetables and avoid juice and dried fruit.”
Ms Dengate’s groundbreaking study about the behavioural effects of a common bread preservative was published in a medical journal in 2002.
She said cultured dextrose had been linked to irritability and restlessness, insomnia, rashes, irritable bowel problems and even seizures.
“You don’t see it with one or two slices of bread a day; you only notice when your child stops eating it for two weeks,” she said.
Ms Dengate and her food scientist husband Dr Howard Dengate run the Food Intolerance Network through fedup.com.au.
They have a petition to remove food colouring Annatto 160b from Streets ice cream.
Ms Dengate will speak on food intolerance at Jindera on August 18 from 6.30pm.
Tickets can be bought from St John’s Lutheran School on (02) 6026 3220 or at the door.
