Practices

Most claims about food and behaviour rest on weak studies. The ones worth taking seriously give each person both the real thing and a dummy at different times, with nobody knowing which is which, so that hope and expectation cannot do the work.

The food colouring trials are the standard example. Around 150 children each received drinks containing a preservative plus one of two dye mixes, or…

The same brand of sweets is often made with plant based colours in one country and artificial ones in another. If a company can make it without the dyes elsewhere, the dyes are not essential to the food.

Nine artificial colours are approved in the US, and the volume approved for use rose roughly fivefold between 1950 and 2012. One of them, Red No. 3,…

A real food allergy shows itself on the body: a rash, a swollen or inflamed throat, something you can see. Behaviour on its own does not identify one, although behaviour often improves once a genuine allergy is dealt with.

One child's attention and mood went back to her usual level once berries came out of her diet, and what made that findable was the rash and the sore…

The studies linking pesticide levels to ADHD are tangled up with income, since families least able to buy organic differ in plenty of other ways too. If organic food is affordable for you, fine. If it is not, you are not failing your child.

In one study of 1,140 children, 94% had detectable pesticide in their urine, and ADHD was about twice as common among those with higher…

Most eating advice quietly assumes a budget. Fresh food is expensive and does not keep, so a household relying on food assistance ends up buying what lasts, and what lasts comes in tins and packets.

If money is the constraint, say it out loud rather than nodding along and then failing quietly at home. The advice can be rebuilt around what is…

A second study, this time of 44 products, found only about half were authentic. Roughly six in ten were mislabelled, three in ten contained a substituted ingredient, and one in five held contaminants or fillers.

One study of this kind is a story about some bad batches. Two independent studies finding the same thing is a description of how the market works.…

Several herbal products change how fast the liver processes medication, which can leave a prescribed drug either weaker or stronger without a single change to the dose.

This is often why a supplement looks like it caused a relapse or a sudden run of side effects. Nothing about the prescription changed, so the pattern…

Two to be careful with in particular. Yohimbe reliably ramps anxiety up, so much so that it has been used in research to bring panic on, and kava is a sedative that stacks with alcohol and with sedating medication and has damaged livers at higher doses.

Kava has been restricted or banned in several countries over liver harm, which tells you how seriously that risk is taken. Yohimbe is a poor choice…

You cannot patent a plant, so there is little commercial reason to fund expensive trials of one. When you read that a herb has no evidence, that often means nobody paid to look rather than that somebody looked and found nothing.

Both halves of that need saying. No evidence is not proof of no effect, and it is also not permission to assume one. It leaves you with an open…

Herbal products are rarely covered by insurance and they add up quickly. That cost belongs in the decision, particularly when you cannot be sure the capsule holds what it says.

Money spent here is money not spent elsewhere, and often the alternative is a treatment that is covered and has been tested. Nobody is telling you…

What you feel does not stay in your head. Emotional states register in the body's immune signalling too, which is one reason a long stretch of unspoken distress can leave you physically run down.

This is not a claim that you can think yourself well or ill. It is closer to saying the body keeps a tally. If you have been carrying something heavy…

A physical symptom is not a free floating fact. Read it next to what your life has actually held, the early parts included, and it often makes more sense than it does on its own.

This works in both directions. It stops you treating a body complaint as something random that landed on you, and it stops you treating it as a…

Saying a difficulty is in the past is not the same as saying it was never real. Sometimes a picture changes because something that was making it worse got taken away, and the honest words for that are neither cured nor imagining it.

People who have been disbelieved by doctors are very sensitive to this, and with reason. The choice usually gets offered as either it was all in your…