Twenty three years ago I walked into Dr. William Vorster's (M.B. CH.B. (Pret) M.MED (Otol) (UK/UCT) consulting rooms in South Africa with my very ill 5 year old son. Dr. Vorster changed our lives with one word TARTRAZINE, a yellow food colorant used widely in many products. (In the U.S.A. Tartrazine is called FD&C Yellow 5 in the UK and Europe E102.)
"I'm going to do blood tests on your son for the usual food and environmental allergic reactions but I want you to do an elimination test for Tartrazine. It's a yellow food colorant known as an azo dye. There's no test for it except for an elimination diet. I have found it responsible for the asthma your son is suffering."
Dr. Vorster was an ear, nose and throat specialist. He was also the third ENT that I'd been to and the 8th specialist (the others being pediatricians). None had mentioned the food colorant, Tartrazine (yellow 5 or E102). None had made one little bit of difference to the constant coughing, rhinitis and asthma that plagued my son's life and that of our family. From the time he was a toddler my husband and I had spent countless nights awake with him while he coughed and tossed and turned and battled for breath. All the specialists we had visited had merely passed off his symptoms as allergic rhinitis and prescribed antibiotics and made me feel paranoid. None had mentioned asthma.
The blood test results revealed a milk allergy as well as a grass pollen allergy. They were easy to control. The elimination diet results revealed that Tartrazine (FD&C Yellow 5 or E102) were the most severe culprit of his allergy and asthma attacks and to a lessor degree, the preservatives called sodium benzoate and sulphur dioxide. During his childhood years he drank only goat's milk and ate goat's milk cheese. Today, 23 years later, he can drink cow's milk without a problem but he still cannot have food containing yellow 5.
The elimination diet was hard to do. I had to eliminate everything that had yellow 5 in it, get him to the point of no coughing at all and then introduce the colorant into his diet. I did so in the form of Jelly Tots, one of his favorite candies. Within 24 hours his symptoms started.
I became the strictest mom in the whole world. Nothing with the yellow food colorant was allowed in my home. Trips to anywhere or to parties were always accompanied by homemade candy. We, as his parents and he himself, had suffered too dearly for too long with sleepless nights, restricted physical activity and feeling awful. Nor was I going to keep my child on cortisone or Ventolin® or nebulizers on a daily basis. Those helpers were only for critical, chronic episodes and believe me, there were many of those!
The reason there were many of those episodes was because many manufacturers in South Africa did not adhere to the laws pertaining to Tartrazine. The law required that the word Tartrazine be listed on all packaging on the ingredient label in bold letters, letters twice the size of the rest of the ingredients. Many companies violated that law without regard to the consequences. Some of them were Big Name food companies. For instance a company that made Ghost Pops (a puffed corn snack) which was usually free of Tartrazine, used white corn mixed with yellow colorant, when yellow corn was suddenly in short supply, without changing the label to reflect the new addition of Tartrazine (Yellow 5, E102) to its ingredients.
My son came down with a really bad asthma attack and it was only because I was so strict in what he ate that I could pin point that the only thing he had eaten that could possibly be causing the attack was the corn based snack. I called the company and asked them if they had decided to start using Tartrazine (Yellow 5, E102) in their products without putting it on the label. They denied this in the beginning but called me two hours later to tell me that they had replaced the yellow corn with white corn because of a shortage of yellow corn and had added Tartrazine (Yellow 5, E102) so that the product would look the same.
Another time I bought ice-cream made without cow's milk which did not have Tartrazine listed on the label and when I opened it I questioned the deep yellow color and called the company. They insisted that the color was due to the egg yokes that were used. Not having had ice-cream for a long time because of his milk allergy, my son practically ate the whole tub. The next day he was extremely ill. He had a severe asthma attack. I had to rush him to the doctor's rooms to get him injected and put him on a nebulizer every four hours right through the night. In trying to establish what had caused the attack I returned to the ice-cream tub and when I dug to the bottom of the tub with a spoon found streaks of yellow that had no resemblance to egg. I again called the company. I told them about the seriousness of the situation and that I had to be sure what had caused it. I waited twenty minutes on the phone while they checked it out and then they confessed that they had inadvertently used old labels that didn't list Tartrazine (Yellow 5, E102) as an ingredient but that it did indeed have Tartrazine in it.
From then onwards I never gave my son anything new without checking directly with the manufacturer and by telling them what the consequences could be if they didn't make a thorough check as to whether it had Tartrazine in it or not and if the labeling was correct.
One company that I can honestly say helped me tremendously was Robertson Spices and their laboratory technician. She was very knowledgeable about Tartrazine and supplied me with all manner of information and also advised me what foods (like Hellman's Light) didn't have the yellow colorant in it.
Yellow 5 (or Tartrazine) is not restricted to food either. It is in over-the-counter products and prescription medicines too. I had to be ultra careful to make sure the script I got from the doctor did not have yellow 5 in the ingredients. I have no idea why the manufacturers of medications would want to color their liquids and tablets bright green (mixture of blue and yellow) or just yellow and then on a medication's label state that it could cause asthma or urticaria - how completely dumb is that?
Yellow 5 is also seemingly harmless in everyday things like toothpaste, shampoo, perfume and aftershave. Right! I discovered the effects of green shampoo after washing my son's hair on a Saturday and by the following Monday he came down with asthma symptoms. For a while I was completely baffled because I couldn't work out what he could possibly have eaten until it struck me that it could be the shampoo colorant getting into his bloodstream. In those days the ingredients were not placed on the labels of shampoos and I had to call the manufacturer, and sure enough, the colorant used was yellow 5. The moment I stopped using it, the Monday occurrence of coughing stopped. Granted, the effects weren't as harsh as direct consumption but they were nonetheless enough to cause a child to walk instead of run and restlessly cough all night and day.
I was also very vocal in South Africa in speaking to other moms and people and the directors' of health departments about the effects of Tartrazine in causing asthma, urticaria, rash and hyperactivity. The more I spoke to other moms the more I realized that there are more people experiencing the bad effects of this colorant than is realized. When the moms I spoke to took my advice and withdrew the yellow food colorant, they were amazed at how the symptoms ascribed to Tartrazine (Yellow 5, E102) cleared up.
I must say I was disappointed when I came to the U.S. to find that yellow 5 was not banned in this country. In closing I would like to say that the selfsame Jelly Tots that I used as an elimination diet for my son 23 years ago can now be bought from Rowntrees® (Nestle) UK without the food dye, yellow 5 (E102), in fact, without any artificial colors or flavors and the manufacturer states that fact very proudly. It’s a great pity that more food manufacturers do not take their lead. If they did we might find that asthma and hyperactivity and skin rashes may become a thing of the past.
Note: In my article I have interchangeably used Tartrazine, as it is known in South Africa, FD&C Yellow 5 as it is known in the U.S.A. and E102 as it is known in the UK and Europe, but would like to reiterate that they are one and the same yellow colorant used in foods, cosmetics and medicine.