Kids love sweets

Now children cannot have simple pleasure of having candies and sweets. We, living in Pakistan don’t even know the true ingredients of the sweets consumed by our children. This is very worrying for me as a parent because I have seen more and more children suffering from allergies of different kinds. Common colds, coughs and flu spread very quickly. Here in Islamabad allergy is a household problem.I read an article which I would like to share with you.

How one father found his daughter’s treats were full of additives linked to eczema,asthma and hyperactivity.

My four-year-old daughter and I sit in front of a great heap of sweets. Her eyes are alight, like a pirate’s with his treasure: Sweets are her greatest passion. Just back from a friend’s party, she thinks she’s hit the jackpot. But I’m going to have to tell her she cannot have any of them. Not a wine gum, not a chewy snake, not one Roses chocolate. I’ve been sitting painstakingly going through the ingredients list on the back of each jazzy-coloured packet – occasionally with a magnifying glass. Amazingly, almost all of them contain some additives that I’ve had to decide are actively dangerous to her.

These are additives that are banned in many countries, ones that our government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) decided over a year ago should not be in our children’s sweets. But they are still on sale in every supermarket and sweet shop across Britain.

Alex Renton’s four-year-old daughter Lulu with her pile of banned sweets

I’m no health-obsessed ‘helicopter parent’. We don’t hover above our children, banning sweets and sugar. In fact, I roll my eyes at the army of organic-only fusspots: Children can usually be relied upon to eat what their bodies need. A little pleasure won’t hurt them.

But what I’ve discovered about chemical food colourings and preservatives terrifies me, as it should the most happy-go-lucky parent. British sweet manufacturers, I’ve had to conclude, no longer deserve our trust.

Six commonly used colourings in sweets, soft drinks and even children’s medicines have now been proven to cause attention disorder and hyperactivity in children – not just those already prone to such problems, but all children.

What that means is that the notorious ‘sugar rush’ that we’ve all seen in children on a sweetie or pop binge may not be caused by sugar at all, but by obscure colourings and preservatives.

And there are added dangers from these completely unnecessary chemicals. My daughter, like nearly one in 20 British children, is prone to allergies: in her case, severe asthma that means a trip to A & E once a month during winter.

During my investigation, I found dangerous colourings and preservatives in famous names such as Cadbury Roses chocolates, Maynards, Wrigley’s gum, Jawbreakers, Jelly Babies, Kiddies Mix, Refreshers, Lovehearts, Hubba Bubba bubble gum and Fizz Bombs, as well as a huge range of corner-shop sweets sold as Nisha’s or Family Favourites.

Novelty sweets branded on Bratz dolls and cartoon character Scooby-Doo had them too. A build-it-yourself gingerbread house from the John Lewis toy department had more bad dyes than any other item I found.

If it’s cheaply made and highly coloured, it seems, it’s more likely than not to have an ‘azo-dye’ (a synthetic nitrogen-based compound dye) in it – and that includes all the children’s favourites: the snakes, marshmallows and bootlaces sold loose in corner shops.

Dangerous colourings and preservatives were found in famous names such as Cadbury Roses
The chief villains – the ones everyone agrees are dangerous – are mainly colours derived from coal tar. These are known as the ‘Dirty Six’ and go under the names sunset yellow (or E number 110), carmoisine (E122), tartrazine (E102), ponceau 4R (E124), quinoline yellow (E104) and allura red (E129).

They’re reds and yellows, and commonly found in sweets, jellies, ice lollies, fizzy drinks and many obviously coloured foods, such as icing on cakes. Three of them have been linked with asthma and other allergies. Many of them are banned in medicines, or must carry warnings.

All of them, government scientists now agree, can cause or exacerbate hyperactivity or attention disorder.

For my daughter – who’s pretty busy, not hyperactive – the worry is what’s known as the cocktail effect: these colourings combined with commonly used benzoate preservatives (which go under E numbers 210 to 219) may exacerbate other allergic conditions as well as hyperactivity.

The benzoates, according to the FSA, are thought to worsen symptoms of asthma and eczema in children who have these conditions – and they’re banned in food products for the under-threes.

Yet they appear in all sorts of soft drinks, from flavoured waters to Scottish favourite Irn-Bru and many brands of cola. Amazingly, carmoisine colouring is in the best- selling children’s pain reliever, Calpol – which we use during our daughter’s asthma attacks.

You would have thought there would be no question over getting these chemicals out of our children’s diets. After all, ponceau red, quinoline yellow and carmoisine are already banned in the U.S. and several other countries.

This summer, European Parliament members voted to overrule the EU Commission’s own food standards agency, and demanded warning labels for the Dirty Six colours (these won’t be introduced until mid-2010 at the earliest).

The FSA decided in 2007 to call for a ban on the Dirty Six, after research it commissioned from Southampton University convinced scientists of the risks. But the Government, under pressure from the food industry, vacillated.

It took until last month for ministers to agree to a much watered-down idea: a ‘voluntary phasing-out’ of the Dirty Six by the end of this year.

That’s not good enough, says additives campaigner Anna Glayzer: ‘History shows that voluntary agreements with the food industry don’t work.

‘As soon as the publicity dies down, the substances creep back into ingredient lists. And many of our sweets are now made in places such as China. How is a voluntary ban going to work there?’

Cadbury, Nestlé, Mars, Haribo, Coca-Cola and Hartley’s jams have all begun changing ingredients and boasting ‘no artificial colours’ on their labels. You may, though, question whether their use of the word ‘natural’ has much to do with your understanding of it.

Nestlé’s large tube of Smarties includes the following ‘non-artificial’ colourings: titanium dioxide, carminic acid and copper complexes of chlorophyllins. Carminic acid, for one, is made from insects and has been linked with the severe skin condition urticaria.

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