Research

So we’re told again that food additives are bad for our children.
This we knew.
If not from previous studies, then from our own experience.

When my son was 2, my mother gave him an entire tube of Smarties to eat.
Within ten minutes of scoffing the lot as quickly as he could, he was like a demented puppy, leaping onto walls, running about in front of other shoppers, and completely uncontrollable.

This lasted for about an hour.

He’d never had that many sweets all at once before, and this was before Smarties took out the particularly obnoxious blue ones.

And then, to put the tin lid on it, my mother tutted about his behaviour, muttering darkly about the need for “a good hiding”.

I haven’t noticed such a dramatic response to Horrible Haribo (compulsory fodder at school discos) in my daughter, but there are differences in how both adults and children react to substances.

Surely in the face of so much evidence from so many studies over so many years, these additives should be outlawed, like many of them are in other countries.

And just the other day we were told, rock stars die young.

As my son would say,
“Well du-uh!”

Mind you, neither of these stories lives up to the following piece of fictitious but delicious research, courtesy of Deadbrain -

4 Sep 2001

There was disturbing news for opinion pollsters today as the results of a new survey were published.

The research, conducted by market research agency MORI-OR-LESSI, found that only 23% of people questioned would participate in surveys.

This is a huge reduction from last year’s result of 43%.

Sounds so plausible, doesn’t it?