A Story about Bees

My little family traveled to be with our extended families for Christmas, which meant a 650-mile drive to Illinois. We've done this drive for years (decades!) and I don't mind it at all. I appreciate the subtle beauty of the Midwestern landscape, and the drive is somewhat meditative. This year, once we arrived at our destination, there were some things I needed to take care of, one of which was to stock up on honey.

I know that seems sort of strange, to travel so far in order to get honey. But I like honey and I like knowing where it came from, especially after the news about fake and possibly dangerous honey on our grocery shelves (here's a list of the brands that were found to have no pollen, which allows the source, and therefore the quality, of the honey to be determined). My sister used to keep bees, and she gave her hives to friends, Carolyn and Fred, who are fellow members of the Illinois Beekeepers' Association, when she got out of the beekeeping business. So we stopped at those friends' house one day during our visit and I sat at their kitchen table and watched Carolyn decant the different types of honey into various sizes of honey bears, ranging from the tiniest 2-ounce gift bears to the hefty 8 ouncers. She gave me a taste of the dark and earthy buckwheat honey while I admired the light coming through the pale gold wildflower and amber clover honeys.

As I was tasting the honey and deciding on what to purchase, Carolyn told me about the fields and field lanes where the bees got their pollen.  She recounted that she and Fred kept a hive in a neighbor's yard for years because of the proximity to certain flowering trees - even though that neighbor is allergic to bees. There had been no wayward incidents and the hive industriously kept doing its thing and coexisted peacefully with the neighbor. Recently, though, the neighbor called and asked Carolyn to remove her hive ASAP. The bees had become unpredictable and aggressive, and the neighbor was worried that they would sting her.

For a hive to change behaviors so drastically was strange, so Carolyn and Fred did a little investigating and found that a farmer had planted a field of buckwheat nearby. The bees were traveling to the field, feasting on the nectar from the buckwheat flowers, and returning to their hive all buzzy and aggressive. Apparently buckwheat, even though it is an attractive source of nectar for honeybees, makes  bees more than a little cranky, which makes them difficult to be around.

It was a good story about the provenance of the food I was purchasing, but it got me thinking about how we seem to know more about how food affects the behaviors of animals and insects - or at least we're more respectful of it - than we know about how food affects the behaviors of people.

Of course, no one ever suggested giving buckwheat-crazed bees a stimulant to reduce their hyperactivity and irritability. No, the solution was to move the hive away from the buckwheat. Horses and alfalfa have the same type of bad synergy. Some horses become hyperactive and willful if they eat too much of the protein-laden alfalfa, and a 1,200-pound animal is not something you want to be willful. So people with horses know to limit the amount of alfalfa their horses eat. No one thinks it's a good idea to give the horse strong medicines to reduce the negative behaviors. Just remove the offending food and get on with it.

Years ago, when I realized that artificial colors and flavors amped up my kids (and gave me headaches), I thought for certain my newfound knowledge would be embraced by fellow parents as well as the administration of the progressive preschool my kids attended. I envisioned the word would spread like a winter cold through a roomful of three-year-olds and that soon, the entire school would have guidelines for clean and healthy snacks. Oh, what a wonderful world that would be!

Obviously, I was pretty idealistic, but I really thought this group of super-educated parents would want to know what those petroleum products were capable of doing to their kids' health and behavior. But few parents wanted to hear about the positive changes we were all feeling from a better diet and even fewer parents went out of their way to learn more or support us by bringing in safe snacks. As the years rolled on and some of my kids' friends received diagnoses of ADD or ADHD or anxiety or whatever, I would offer some resources to the parents then let it go. Because to a person, they thought either that nutrition could not affect behavior or even if it did, it would be more difficult to change their diets than to allow their kids to take medications whose long-term effects are still not known.*

So why do we know more about how diet affects the behaviors of animals than we do of children? Perhaps we value animals more? Preposterous, you might say. But actions speak louder than words. I've never heard of bees being medicated for their buckwheat buzz, or horses given stimulants so that they can continue to eat alfalfa. But I've seen plenty of kids prescribed medications without their foods, cosmetics, or household chemicals being evaluated to see if they are contributing to the problem. I just find that so strange.

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Want to learn more about diet/behavior links? Here are some good sources:

• The Feingold Association of the United States. Probably the oldest organization focusing on the link between what we eat and our behaviors, the Feingold Association maintains a website with loads of information and supporting research. 
• Kelly Dorfman, MS, LND, aka the Nutrition Detective, and her book, "What's Eating Your Child?" Dorfman uses her clinical skills and years of experience to help families figure out the connection between what the kids are eating and their mystifying symptoms. 
• The Center for Science in the Public Interest maintains a food additive database and the research behind those additives. 
• This previous HealthTwisty post that contains links to research and highlights the discrepancy between the foods we have in the United States and the cleaner foods available in other countries.

* This is not to say that there are not true cases of ADD or ADHD that reflect a brain chemistry issue. For those individuals, medication can allow them to focus and attend and realize their potential, and can be a wonderful thing. But many cases of food intolerances or allergies masquerade as inattention, anxiety, or hyperactivity, especially in young children.

Snack Attack

Real fruit at the outdoor market, Belem, Brazil

When my kids were in preschool, it was routine to be assigned certain weeks of the school year to be "snack parent," which meant you were in  charge of purchasing snacks for the entire class for those weeks. Most parents, no matter how overworked and undernourished ourselves, tried diligently to be creative with snacks. Maybe not as creative as these bento-packin' mamas, but most of us tried to find interesting and nourishing foods for our kids to carry to school in the class-assigned snack basket.

We recognized that the purpose of the mid-morning snack was to refuel the kids by providing nourishment that would allow them to focus, follow directions, and play for a few more hours. Some protein, some fruit, a carbohydrate or a vegetable if you could swing it. Just a midmorning snack.

But there were always those parents who thought daily snacks should be like a party. You know those parents...the ones who would bring one huge muffin from a wholesale warehouse for each child, even though those muffins could feed four preschoolers and are just cake in disguise. But the worst offenders were those who brought Fruit Roll-Ups for the fruit part of the snack.

Now, the parents at this preschool were an educated bunch, and I'm fairly certain no one really thought there was any fruit at all in a Fruit Roll-Up. But they would say things like, "But the kids like them!" (Translation: "I want the kids to like me!") I could always tell when one of my kids had a Fruit Roll Up because of the tell-tale blue or green or red lips and tongue and the equally colorful irritation that would be following him around like a cloud.

The folks over at Fooducate, one of my favorite food blogs, have deconstructed another type of "fruit" snack. Check it out. The labels on these are especially mis-informative, tricking the unaware into thinking these snacks are much healthier than they really are. The masterful marketing ties into a well-known juice brand and tries for the halo effect by associating this completely manufactured food with the family farmer, thus implying natural and healthy. Because parents need a PhD in label reading to get past the slick marketing, I bet these snacks make regular appearances in the snack baskets at preschools across the country. What do you think?

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Don't eat the oil

Sorting through my kids' candy bounty after the recent national holiday of Halloween got me to thinking about how slowly change comes to the food industry. It's been fairly well accepted for years now that some food dyes cause adverse reactions, especially in children. After all, children may weigh a fraction of what an adult weighs, but still consume the same level of artificial chemicals in a bag of Skittles. Way before  the EU mandated that foodstuffs carry warning labels if they contain certain artificial colors, the Feingold Association has been publicizing the sensitivities some kids have to artificial colors, flavorings, and preservatives - sensitivities that have been misdiagnosed as conditions as severe as ADHD, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. More recently, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has adopted artificial colors as a project, and is lobbying the US Congress to remove some of them from our food supply.

But still, here I sit at my kitchen table, sifting through the Nerds, Skittles, and Starbust Chews for some good old chocolate that hasn't been too adulterated with artificial flavorings (synthetic vanillin is cheaper than vanilla) or colorings. The rub is that having travelled overseas many times in the past few years, I've eaten Starbusts and M&Ms made with natural colors so I know that we don't have to settle for foods that are colored with dyes made from petroleum products.

It bewilders me why the United Kingdom is way ahead of us on this issue. Mars, the company that makes M&Ms, was so sensitive to the public's concerns over red dye #2's possible link to cancer that it removed red M&Ms in 1976, despite the fact that its candies did not contain that specific dye.  However, the company seems resolute in in its use of red #40, the synthetic chemical that has colored its red candies since the late 1980s, even though red #40, is not recommended for consumption by children in Europe and is outright banned in Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, and Norway.

And it's not just candies that are affected by the regulations in Europe. The syrup in a strawberry sundae from McDonald's in London is colored with real strawberries, whereas a strawberry sundae in Atlanta carries a hefty dose of red #40. Nutri-Grain bars, a snack food many parents consider healthy, are vastly different here and abroad, as the illustration below shows.

                                                    Illustration: Center for Science in the Public Interest                                                       

The issue isn't just one for little kids. Research is showing that you don't outgrow these sensitivities. Teens may act aggressively. Adults may get headaches. The list goes on and on. One of the most compelling real-life examples of the link between poor food and negative behaviors comes from Appleton, Wisconsin. By replacing typical cafeteria fare, sodas, and processed foods in its high school lunchroom and vending machines, this school - which serves troubled youths - has experienced drops in truancy and aggression, as well as increases in attention and learning. Foodie Alice Waters wrote about this school in The Nation, and it has received coverage on Good Morning America as well as numerous other places.


There really is a lot of research out there showing that some people are sensitive to artificial flavorings, colors, and preservatives, and that those sensitivities can be so extreme that they interfere with normal functioning. That's why it is upsetting that the pace of change in this industry is so glacial.   My point is that we don't have to accept impurities in our foods - our European counterparts don't. I encourage everyone to read the labels on their foods and evaluate what is in them. The Center for Science in the Public Interest maintains an excellent food coloring database that lists the synthetic colorings found in common foods. Bagels, cake mixes, cereals, you name it. Most foods that are prepackaged have been tarted up with a rainbow of colors intended to fool us into thinking the foods are purer, freshers, and healthier than they are. Then let your Congressional representatives know that you would rather have the more natural alternative that our friends across the pond enjoy.