Hello, this is Monica Reinagle, the nutrition diva, here with your quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

There's been lots of talk lately about artificial food colorings and whether they may cause hyperactivity in kids.

Just last week, in response to a petition from the Center for Science in the Public Interest,

an FDA committee held hearings to decide whether to recommend changing the rules for these ingredients.

The FDA committee concluded that there was not enough evidence to warrant banning these

ingredients or even including a warning on foods that contain them.

Nonetheless, many parents are very concerned about this issue and at the end of the show I have some guidelines

for those who want to take matters into their own hands. But first let's take a

closer look at the evidence on the connection between artificial dyes and hyperactivity.

The idea that food colorings might be linked to hyperactivity in kids

dates back to the 1970s when a pediatrician named Ben Feingold proposed a diet that eliminated all artificial

colorings and preservatives as a treatment for hyperactivity.

And he claimed that this protocol was highly effective in reducing symptoms. Now other experts

have questioned his results claiming that when kids didn't do well on the diet

he simply excluded those cases from his data. Nonetheless Dr. Feingold's hypothesis spurred others to research the question.

It turns out this is a really tricky subject to study. Measuring the level of hyperactivity in a child is essentially a subjective judgment,

and it turns out that the results depend a lot on who is doing the rating.

For example, it seems that parents are more likely to rate their kids' behavior as hyperactive

than teachers or clinicians are. And not surprisingly, their expectations also color their perceptions.

When parents think that their kids have been given food additives,

they tend to perceive an increase in hyperactive behavior,

whether or not the kids actually did ingest them.

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