530: To Dye For: The Documentary, Exposes Hidden Poison Harming Children

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What if a common ingredient in your food was secretly harming your health? In this episode of the Learn True Health podcast, Whitney and Brandon Cawood, creators of To Dye For: The Documentary, expose the shocking truth about synthetic dyes. After witnessing dramatic behavioral changes in their son, they uncovered the hidden dangers of these artificial additives—linked to hyperactivity, aggression, and even misdiagnosed mental health issues.

Join us as we dive into the science, the industry cover-ups, and what you can do to protect yourself and your family. This eye-opening conversation will make you think twice before your next grocery trip!

Highlights:

• Whitney and Brandon Cawood share how removing synthetic dyes transformed their son's behavior.
• Artificial dyes are linked to hyperactivity, aggression, and misdiagnosed mental health issues.
• U.S. companies remove dyes for Europe but keep them in American products.
• Synthetic dyes serve no purpose beyond cosmetic appeal yet contain harmful chemicals.
• California is moving to ban Red 3 and other dyes from school foods.
• Dyes are hidden in unexpected foods, medications, and personal care products.
• Many ADHD and epilepsy medications contain dyes that may worsen symptoms.

Intro:

Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today is one of the more relevant episodes I've done, especially if you have children, but really this applies to everyone. There is a hidden poison that serves no good whatsoever that is in our food. Through listening to this episode today, you will start to learn how to avoid this easily. You can easily avoid it when you know about it. Stay tuned.

You'll want to be sharing this episode with your friends, your family, especially those who have children, especially for those who have children that have learning issues, behavioral. This actually affects the brain, and it's night and day. When we stop feeding this to kids, they become happy, calmer, able to handle their emotions, able to process emotions, able to learn, sit still, just be happier, more peaceful, and healthier in their body.

Really, there have even been people misdiagnosed with mental issues, mental illness, and with things like bipolar, who actually had a sensitivity to this chemical additive in food. Can you imagine feeling like you're losing your mind and being misdiagnosed, all the while you've been poisoned by food that we trusted our government to tell us was safe? We go into that today. We go into talking about why this was approved in the first place, what we can do about it, and how we can easily, easily get rid of it.

I graduated from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and became an integrative health coach, and it was a wonderful program, really transformative, life-changing program. About half the people that take this online course end up doing it just for their own personal transformation. So if you're someone who loves learning or you're sick of being sick and you want to learn about how to create holistic health in your life and you want to go deeper, especially with a community, you definitely want to check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition right now.

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So be sure to go to learntruehealth.com/coach, check out the free sample class, and remember to use my coupon code, LTH. Thank you for sharing this podcast with those you care about. It's going to make a huge difference, and I look forward to seeing how this ripple turns into a tidal wave and how, in the coming months and years, we actually will change the food industry. We will share this information, we will vote with our fork, and we will vote with our wallet. By doing so, we will force the food industry to make changes.

Enjoy today's interview.

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James, this is episode 530. 

Ashley James (0:07:04.994)

I am so excited for today's guests. We have Whitney and Brandon Cawood on the show. They are the creators of To Dye For: The Documentary. This is going to be so important for everyone to listen to, especially Americans, because we're one of the countries that has the worst artificial dye in our food. It's ubiquitous. It is crazy.

I'm a label reader, and I'm surprised that there aren't more of us—food detectives out there. It drives my husband nuts. When we grocery shop, it takes me 90 minutes because if I go down the aisles to buy packaged food, I'm very picky. I read every single label, and I cannot tell you how amazing it is just how much absolute garbage—absolute garbage—people are feeding their children.

People are feeding themselves, and we think it's a treat. “Why don't you just treat the kids?” I hear this from other people, other moms and grandmas. “Come on, you're hurting them. They're not having a normal childhood experience because they're not allowed to have the same food that the other kids have.” I look at disease rates. If you want to be like an average American—one in three diabetes, one in three obesity, morbidly obese, one in three have cancer—and it's growing.

Look at what we die of. Look at what our children suffer from. Look at the health statistics. If you want to be like that, and if you want your children to be like that, then eat how everyone else is eating. But if you want your kids to have better health than the average child, if you want your kids to bounce back quickly from colds, if you want them to be able to pay attention in class and their brain not to be on fire from artificial chemicals in food, if you want them to be able to focus and enjoy learning and enjoy spending time with their friends and not be disruptive in class because their brain is on fire, then you need to read labels and be more discerning.

You have to go upstream. You have to be the black sheep. You cannot have your grocery cart look like everyone else's grocery cart. This is where Whitney and Brandon Cawood come in. I'm so excited for your documentary. It's coming out in the next few months.

Listeners, I want you to make sure that you go to todyeforthedocumentary.com. The links to everything the Cawoods do are going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. Listeners can sign up for their mailing list. Definitely check them out on Instagram. We're going to make sure your Instagram information is in the show notes as well because your Instagram is insane. It's so relevant, so informative, and so educational.

The visuals show, “I didn't know that—I feed that food to my kids, or my mom fed that to me—and look what's in it. Look what it's doing. It's harming us.” You're bringing light to something that so many of us are not aware of.

I have a friend who would die if she ate yellow dye. She has an anaphylactic allergy to yellow dye. What is going on with artificial dyes that someone could actually die from eating them?

I've spoken enough. Whitney, Brandon, it's wonderful to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (0:10:38.832)

Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. We're excited.

Ashley James (0:10:41.908)

Absolutely. Yes, so take us back to the beginning. A young couple in Georgia all of a sudden becomes producers of a documentary? What happened in your lives that made you become aware of synthetic dyes and how dangerous they are for our children, for our brain, and for our health? 

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (0:11:04.314)

Yes, we have two children. We have a six-year-old and a three-year-old. But when our oldest was around ages two and three, he was really having a lot of trouble with impulse control, aggression, hitting, meltdowns, just could not cope with anything that doesn't go his way basically.

A lot of that sounds normal to parents that are listening. They're like, yes, I've had a kid that's that age, and that happens, but it wasn't normal in that, at the frequency that it was happening and the amount of issues that we were having. He was going to a Mother's Morning Out program, which is a half-day program from 9 to 11:30, and he was just going two or three days a week. I was having to pick him up every day. We were having notes home every single day.

Every time we went to church, every time we went on a playdate, it was an issue that was really, really affecting our lives. It was really affecting him and his relationships with children and teachers. It was just really heartbreaking to watch. I'm a former teacher, so I was just mortified that I had a child that was struggling so much and that we didn't know how to help him.

We were eventually asked to leave his half-day daycare, and around that same time, we were trying to figure out what can we do to help him? We had him in behavior therapy. We were doing everything that we could at that point, and finally, I decided to go on the internet and just try to find out if our diet could be affecting our mental health.

I have several food allergies, so I have done an elimination diet before, and I've known how powerful that can be to your health. I found an article that suggested eliminating wheat, dairy, and synthetic dyes, and so I took those out of his diet, and just 48 hours later, the hitting and the tantrums almost completely stopped.

I mean, it took care of 98% of our issues, and the other 2%, it was, okay, we could slow down, and we could talk through it, and learning happened, and things just started happening so quickly. We reintroduced wheat, and it had no effect. We reintroduced dairy, and it had no effect. We reintroduced dyes, and within 15 minutes, that child that we would occasionally see glimpses of whenever he was on the dyes, we would have days where it was really, really bad, and most of the days were really bad, but then we'd have days that were really good.

So anyway, when we reintroduced the dyes, that child that we had that was really good on those days, we had that child for 30 days straight. So when we eliminated the dyes, yes.

Anyway, the craziest part about that is the only place that he was regularly getting synthetic dyes daily was his daily allergy medicine. He also had chronic ear infections, so he was on kind of an amoxicillin red loop. But he was already doing mostly organic snacks and the good stuff, so we were really shocked that something that we were giving him could affect his behavior and his well-being so dramatically and so fast.

Fast forward, he's done public school pre-K and kindergarten. Now he's in first grade, and quite literally, he has not had a time where he's hit anyone, where he has been upset. He's never cried at school. I mean, he is just the picture-perfect child. I mean, he's not perfect, of course, he's a little boy, but we don't have behavior problems. We don't have an RTI. He's just a normal, very, very smart, very successful, very, very kind and compassionate child.

To go from a child that was having so many issues to a child that is doing so well and is so successful, we were shocked. First of all, we didn't know why. Why would something that we were eating affect your mind so much? So I went down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out what's going on, and I was looking into the research and digging in, and I was really confused. I have a degree in education, so I could not decode the jargon in these scientific research articles. I really wanted to go to researchers and ask the questions to try to figure out what was going on.

My husband has a background in film. Well, not documentaries, but in short-form film commercials. So I asked him if he would be willing to document our journey and to go with me to interview these researchers and families, and reluctantly, he agreed.

Also, I think I threw you off. She was in the middle of saying after the elimination diet, it was 30 days long, and she reintroduced wheat, and nothing changed, and reintroduced dairy, and nothing changed. But when we did reintroduce the dye, within 15 minutes, the bad behavior started back up again. So we knew pretty quickly that that was the cause. I think I threw you off when we were saying, when you were telling that part of the story.

Ashley James (0:16:13.697)

No, you did. You actually did say it was 15 minutes. That's something that I have heard. There was this doctor back in the nineties. There's this clip. It was one of those, the Donahue show or one of those daytime talk shows. This doctor came on.

This clip I've found on YouTube, and if I find it again, I'll put it in the show notes. It's this doctor—I think she might be German. I think I seem to remember an accent. She took children and gave them something they're allergic to. Then within 15 minutes, they were biting, kicking, pulling hair, and screaming. It looked like they were possessed, and they went from super sweet to their brains on fire.

We have to recognize that there are chemicals in our food that cross the blood-brain barrier, that excitotoxins that inflame the nerves. Then we just take the kid to the doctor, and the doctor puts them on meds to make them docile and behave themselves. We're just medicating this huge population of children that we're poisoning and then poisoning further by trying to suppress this behavior, these symptoms, when it's the food that's doing it. That is just so sad.

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (0:17:36.842) 

I think whenever we first kind of realized that he was having this kind of reaction, we thought it was probably kind of rare, and we thought that we were kind of on this island. When he didn't even think that people would believe her if she told this story. So around the same time that we started kicking around the idea of doing this documentary, we also started a Facebook group that we run.

It's more broad-based about synthetic dyes in general. It's not necessarily about the film, but we started it, brought to you by our film page. We started that page, and within the two years that we've been working on the film, that page has grown from zero to five hundred and eighty thousand people.

So as we're building this film and deciding how we're going to do it, we're getting all this affirmation that there are people out there who are going through similar things. This isn't as rare as we thought it is. We've just heard story after story after story, similar to ours or worse than ours. Some of them aren't as extreme, but just to see that there's so many people being affected really kind of fueled our fire.

We have to get this information out there because if this many people are being affected, that's probably just a small fraction of the people that truly is being affected because they're the people who have figured it out. So how many people don't know this is affecting their child? That really kind of gave us some fuel to keep going through the tough times and the challenging times of creating a documentary with two people, but it all made it worth it.

Ashley James (0:19:12.252)

What you guys are also showing, especially through your social media, hey, if you want to feed your kids junk food, if you want to feed your kids processed crap, you can still feed them processed, you can still feed them sugar, you can still feed them artificial treats. There are a whole bunch of dye-free or natural dye alternatives. One of my son's favorites, he gets them once a year, is the No-Nos.

They're little candies that have no dairy, no gluten, no dye. That's why they're called No-Nos, but they're these little chocolate-covered candies, kind of like M&Ms, a little bit like M&Ms. He loves them. I'm big at really limiting processed food and sugar.

When you go down this rabbit hole, you start to wake up to, wow, maybe I shouldn't be filling my kids' lunchbox with foods that wouldn't expire in the next 25 years. If you just leave the foods out of their package, mold won't even eat it. If mold won't even eat the food that you're feeding your kid, their gut microbiome can't eat it for sure. You're not giving your children living food to feed their cells.

There's that catch too. When you start to go down the rabbit hole of eliminating dye, you might also start limiting processed foods in general, which then has additional health benefits because what are you going to replace it with? Whole foods. Maybe just give your kid more fruit, something alive, something full of vitamins and fiber.

There are over a thousand chemical compounds in fruit that fight cancer and help the body's immune system. That's nature's candy. So forget about dye. Let's feed our kids real food. But not everyone is willing to take that step, or they're just waking people up to it. Hey, how about instead of these Oreos, you buy these alternative Oreo cookies that don't have dye?

It actually really surprised me when I saw that there's blue dye in Oreos. I'm like, what the crap? What are we feeding our kids? Start reading the labels of stuff, and it will surprise you. There's only one cereal I will give my child because there's nothing in it. It's just rice. There's nothing else in it. It's really hard to find, and it's organic, but it's really hard to find a good healthy cereal with no sugar, with no artificial crap in it.

Then you start going down that rabbit hole of, wow, what have I been eating? What have I been feeding my kids? So I'm sure you've been diving down this rabbit hole.

I do have a few more questions. Your second child, have you done this experiment? Have you run the experiment and fed your second child dye to see if they react in a similar fashion?

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (0:22:13.022)

We have actually, and she does not seem to react, at least not to the extent that he does. I mean, we've only tested, what, twice maybe, and she's three, but she doesn't seem to have the same reaction. But we know now, knowing what we know now, we don't avoid dyes just because of the neurologic impacts. They have dramatic impacts on our health in general. No one should be consuming synthetic dyes. Just the fact that some of them are linked to cancer, some of them, Red 40, can increase your susceptibility to colitis. Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 may contain carcinogenic components. Many people have allergic reactions to Yellow 5, Yellow 6, and red 40. Red 3 and Yellow 5 are genotoxic or can be genotoxic. Red 3 we know causes cancer in animals. Even the FDA says that. On the FDA's website, it says that Red 3 causes cancer in animals. It’s banned in cosmetics and externally applied drugs, but not in food.

There are so many reasons to avoid synthetic dyes, and to your point that you were making earlier, in our group we do, we just only talk about synthetic dyes, and the reason why is because that's that first step, as you said, can be really intimidating for people. 

Someone that has never read a label, this is a really good first step to looking at ingredients. Once synthetic dyes are a chemical, that chemicals can affect you in so many negative ways, you really do go down that rabbit hole. We've seen it time and time again, synthetic dyes are kind of a gateway drug in that you start really reading ingredients, and you become concerned about your health. Then you're eating more whole foods, and then you're looking at products that are applied thermally. Your eyes are really open to how the way we conduct our life and the things that we eat can really impact our health long term. So we think that it's a really great place to start, and although our film focuses on synthetic dyes, we do touch on the fact that there are thousands of chemicals in our food that have not been tested or have been tested by these companies.

Although we know that there's more issues than synthetic dyes, we just really think that it's a great place to start and just a really good first step. Well, then also, synthetic dyes are a huge part of our story. So eliminating dyes changed our family's dynamic so much, and then kind of say how we feel. It kind of changes the trajectory of our son's life. But then also, you start looking at synthetic dyes. The crazy thing about synthetic dyes is they're completely cosmetic.

There's no preservative value. There's no flavor. It doesn't add any shelf life. It doesn't do anything except make the food look different. It's hard to even think of any other additive that has no purpose other than something cosmetic.

Aside from the issues and the dangers and all the problems they can cause, it's completely unnecessary. There's no reason for it other than just to use it for marketing and attract people, especially kids, and things like that. Then on top of that, dyes are often used to make unhealthy foods visually appealing so that we, as consumers, want to eat it. So if you use a natural flavor, that natural flavor is colorless. So then they use a synthetic dye to make it look like it's colored with real fruits or artificial flavor. Yes. I mean, it just goes on and on.

The fact that dyes are in so many children's foods, and that it’s really pervasive, you can’t really just look at a food and tell that it has synthetic dyes. There are foods—marshmallows have blue 1, and Spinet traps. We had an incident with our son, and this was before I went down all of my little rabbit holes, but we had a Spinet trap, it was Mission brand, Our son was normally eating a wheat tortilla, but he ran out, so I was giving him mine, which I had never looked at the ingredients at that point, and it had Yellow 5 and Blue 1. So, we had such a rough week that week, and this was after six months of just really great behavior. Then it was just the same behaviors we were having before, and we were like, “What is going on?” It was the spinach wrap. So it really has permeated, you know, so many foods that you wouldn't expect.

We had assumed it was green because of spinach, not because of synthetic food dyes, which, if you've ever used spinach to color something, it really colors really well. So that tells you how they're using very little spinach to color it if they're having to use synthetic dyes.

Ashley James (0:27:08.319)

That is so sad. That brings up another point that it's not just in children's food. They often will dye fish to make the farmed fish look more appealing. Even in seaweed salad, they use green dye. These are more adult foods. Not all kids eat seaweed salad, but just looking at going to the aisles of the grocery aisles of Costco and how many foods, adult foods, have dye in them as well to make them look more appealing.

My mom was addicted to red jujubes, and she was very health conscious, very strict with her diet, but her weakness was red jujubes. She'd go to the bulk bin and pick out only the jujubes. For people who don't know what jujubes are, they're disgusting. I don't know what my mom saw in these things, but they're kind of like if gummy bears were just a larger blob.

She would pick out the red jujubes, and she'd have this plastic bag of jujubes in her drawer, but she could only eat them at night because, and this is the wildest thing, she was highly allergic to red dye. When she ate red dye, she could not do math. She could not tell you what one plus one is after she ate a red jujube. She needed to do math because she owned her own business, ran a company, was very successful.

Her brain would become inebriated. She could only eat them at night because by the time she woke up, the effects would have worn off, and she could go to work. She didn't binge or overeat them. This was her few times a month indulgence, but she was so allergic to red dye, she couldn't do math afterwards. I told my husband this years ago, 16 years ago, and he ended up eating some kind of artificial food and had this experience. He was trying to read blueprints at his job, and he started not being able to do math. It was artificial dye. There was something he ate with artificial dye, and he had the same experience. He came home and said, “I had to leave work early because I couldn't read the blueprints. I've read blueprints for 20 years, and I couldn't even read them.”

Sometimes we get poisoned by dye that's in our beverages. Think about monster energy drinks. That's in our food or some kind of fast food or just a wrap. You might not have put that together. It might go like, “Yes, my brain, you'd just go, brain fog. Maybe I need a coffee, or I didn't drink enough, or I didn't drink enough water, or I didn't sleep well enough.” But if you start to trace the instance of, “I couldn't do math,” or, “My brain could not function after lunch every day,” what's going on? You start to trace back, and it might be those artificial chemicals, those dyes that they're putting in your food.

My mom's experience as a child really woke me up to what is this weird stuff that they're putting in our food. Then, recently, at Children's Hospital here in Seattle—a great, great hospital, kids are flown in from all around because of how good this hospital is—they serve horrible dye in their food and in their popsicles. The nurses give free popsicles out, and I asked, “Please, please give me the list of ingredients before you give that cherry popsicle to my son.” It turns out there's red dye in it. They said, “That's weird because we stopped giving kids red jello because we thought they were bleeding to death.” So, we give them green and yellow. I'm like, “Why are you giving them dye at all? Why are we giving them a carcinogen in a Children’s Hospital?”

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (0:31:05.336)

I, for so many people, don't think they know. I think many people may have heard, “Okay, Red 40 may cause or may be bad for kids that have ADHD,” but it's been our experience. Even when we were going through so much with our son, we would go to the doctor and ask for help, and we would go to a therapist and ask for help. No one even suggested a diet change. We just had referrals to a children's hospital. I truly believe that we are witnessing a shift. We're witnessing a shift in our community. People are learning about it, and they're eager to learn. I really hope that our film will be a good talking point for a lot of people because, I mean, really, you obviously have done so much research and you are very health conscious and have a lot of motivation to learn about what's in your food.

But for many people, they're just going to their job. If they haven't learned it in med school, they haven't learned it whenever they were going to school. This might not be something that they're researching when they go home. I really do believe that we can see a shift here. I think that if everyone in their own cities, if we wrote emails, if we talked about it every time we went to the hospital, we requested it. I'm a really big advocate of sending emails to make your request known because if they get enough emails, they will make the switch. I think that's a really good point to make.

I also think the math comment you made is really important to note. The OEHA report, which is the most authoritative report on synthetic dyes, has 27 clinical trials and looks at animalistic evidence and vitro evidence. They've concluded that synthetic dyes cause hyperactivity, inattentiveness, restlessness, sleeplessness, irritability, and aggression. But just because that's what's on the report doesn't mean those are the only issues it causes. There are a lot of families that we've heard from, so many stories and so many emails, and so many people reaching out. They've noticed that synthetic dyes seem to make epilepsy worse or my child had rashes, and then we eliminated dyes and now they no longer have those little chicken rashes on their arms or my child had Tourette's and we eliminated dyes and now they don't.

There are a lot of issues in our food that can affect people differently, and although there may not be a million-dollar study that has shown that, really, what we need to do is eliminate these foods that are not real foods. We need to go back to eating real foods because honestly, there's no telling what all the impacts that these synthetic dyes are having on our health. 

The truth is, too, the dyes that we have in our food system now were approved to be in food decades ago, back in the '80s or '70s. Some of these have been approved since the '60’s. Science has come a long way, but the FDA is not required to re-evaluate. They can. They can re-evaluate any chemical anytime they want to, but they don't have to, and they just haven't.

The whole reason that Red 3 is allowed in food is because in 1969, it was permanently approved for food use. At the time, all the dyes that we have now were kind of on this provisional list where they weren't permanently approved yet, but there was this loophole where companies could request approval for certain dyes. They could petition for it. The food and ingested drug industry did that and got approval, and Red 3 became permanently approved. For some reason, whenever cosmetics and externally applied drugs petitioned, they required them to do a whole bunch of testing. A couple of decades later, they had some studies that showed that when rats ingested Red 3, they got tumors. The FDA themselves said, “Okay, these studies show that they cause cancer.” This was in 1990. So we're going to ban them in cosmetics and externally applied drugs. But for whatever reason, they had already permanently approved it. For whatever reason, they didn't think they could ban it in food. At the time, they've been saying for the past 34 years that they're going to take steps to ban it, but they obviously haven't.

We're finally starting to see some states, well, one state in particular, California, in 2023, decided on their own that they were going to ban Red 3 and three other chemicals. That bill passed and the governor signed it. Red 3, by 2027, will not be allowed in food and drinks in California. 

We've seen about 10 other states that have followed suit with their own Red 3 bills. Also, now in California, they have banned, well, it’s on the governor's desk. If he signs it, California will be the first state to ban synthetic dyes in California public schools. 

I feel it's this lack of responsibility because we also have the Delaney clause. The Delaney clause says that the FDA is not allowed, if they discover any food or chemical that causes cancer in humans or animals, that is supposed to be not allowed in food. Technically, they're legally obligated to remove this stuff from food, but for whatever reason, they just haven't done it. I think there is a public meeting coming up in September. The FDA has called a public meeting, and I think Red 3 is one of the things they'll be discussing.

We'll see how that goes. But as of right now, it's still allowed in food in every other state, other than California. I mean, it’s still technically allowed in California until 2027, but it is promising to see states making these changes. If this school ban goes through, that's going to be huge because I think other states will jump on that. Children should be our main focus. We should be protecting our youth. The kids have no choice in what they're eating. They're trusting their parents or their schools to give them food that's healthy. I think that will be really cool. This bill is the first of its kind. A state has never done this before. We're excited to see the future of how this goes.

Ashley James (0:37:48.808)

Yes, pretty interesting. I mean, I'm really grateful that California is leading the way. I don't agree with all of California's politics, but I certainly love a lot of their political choices around health. Like they're the state that has notifications on the packaged goods, whether there's a substance that could cause cancer. So heavy metals, there's a lot of heavy metals and lead in packaged food. You're just trusting. People just go, the store sells it, it must be safe. I'm sorry, but these foods are banned in the EU. They're banned in many countries around the world, but they're not banned here. We're allowed to serve people poison in packaged form. That is wild to me. This is why we have to do our own research and read the labels if we choose to eat processed food.

I love that you touched on some of the science, some of the research. You touched on a bit of the individual dyes and their health risks. Can we dive deeper into that? Tell us more about the health issues caused by each specific dye or talk more about the studies.

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (0:39:09.614)

Actually, most studies have combined the dyes. In the US, there really haven't been a whole lot of modern studies on each of these. The California report is the most comprehensive report, and what it's done is it's combined a bunch of studies to see its effect. Now in Europe, you had mentioned Europe, we were really curious about why their food standards were so different than ours and why they treated dyes so differently than we did.

So in our documentary, we flew to London and interviewed the researcher that conducted the research that resulted in the warning label in Europe. That was really interesting to pick his brain. What was really interesting about that study is that it was government-funded. The government paid millions of dollars to have this study done so that they could make sure their citizens were safe. When they caught wind that these chemicals weren't necessarily safe, they put a warning label on all the Azo dyes.

What American manufacturers and European manufacturers have done is remove the synthetic dyes, replacing them with natural dyes or real foods like turmeric, which you can use to color foods as well.

What's really crazy is that these same American manufacturers leave the synthetic dyes here for us in the US. They have reformulated for Europe and then left them here in the US. When we went to London, London is actually no longer in the EU. We just anecdotally noticed that a lot of the American companies have chosen, since London has left the EU—this study was a study done in the EU—so London left the EU, and they no longer required the warning label. But the European manufacturers we saw were still synthetic dye-free, while the American manufacturers had put the synthetic dyes back in their foods. We were really excited to find M&Ms that were dye-free or a name-brand product that we had never seen in real life that was dye-free. That was pretty shocking.

Ashley James (0:41:33.675)

I wonder if we could go to a European food store. They have a lot of them around here and see if we could get some European M&Ms or European packaged food, the dye-free version. Growing up in Canada, I did not get to have packaged food. My mom was a health nut, and I'm so grateful for that experience I had. But when I became a teenager, I ate just like all my friends.

In Canada, we have KD or Kraft Dinner. Here you call it Kraft Mac and Cheese. It looks radioactive. In the States, it's this really weird artificial yellow color, but in Canada, it's just turmeric, and it's a beautiful, natural shade of yellow.

That is just one comparison of how you cross the border and you can have a healthier version of junk food. Why? Is it to save money? Is it because they make more money? Do they get more sales because there's artificial dye? Do they significantly save more money by putting a chemical man-made dye rather than just a tiny bit of turmeric in their food?

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (0:42:55.638)

They definitely saved money. 

There are a couple of reasons. One, synthetic dyes are a lot cheaper. When you're thinking of the quantity they're using over the amount of food they're producing, they are cheaper. Most natural dyes are not temperature stable or pH stable. If you cook with a natural dye, a lot of times it will change colors or turn brown. Stuff that's naturally dyed doesn't stay as vibrant on the shelf as long.

These companies really want their food to stay consistent. In our documentary, we interview Karalynne from Just.Ingredients, and she's telling us it's really hard to get a consistent color when you're using natural strawberries because every batch can be different. It's hard to get that consistency. That's another reason they want to keep things the same color—because that's what people are used to.

General Mills ended up having this big campaign—”The Bright Colors Are Back.” They put the synthetic dyes back in. They are really driven by consumers.

That whole fiasco happened with General Mills, Kellogg's, and Mars Candy. A lot of these companies made commitments to remove synthetic dyes, but in the process of trying to get there, they ran into a bunch of difficulties. The consistency, some natural dyes might have a little bit of a taste profile because they're coming from real things. 

That really can't be an excuse because they're doing it for other countries.

Mars Candy does not have an excuse. 

Consumers control their profits. If people are buying their food, they're going to do it. Originally, when they first made the switch, I think sales for Trix actually went up a little bit. But over the course of however many months, they started seeing their sales go down and losing profits. So they decided, “Let's revert back to what was working before,” and they put the synthetic dyes in.

All these companies that made commitments portrayed it as a healthier option for people. None of them ever touched on the fact that these could be causing problems with behavior. I think the public would have been more receptive if there had been more awareness around the negative impacts of artificial dyes.

If you don't think there's anything wrong with dyes. If the government is saying they're safe to eat, why would you care? Why would the general population not want them? If there's no education around why they shouldn't be in there, then of course they're going to get upset when you change something. Americans love bright stuff. 

There's some validity to the fact that the European palate is very different from the American palate. When you go to Europe, you don't have aisles and aisles of sugary cereal. That's just not how they eat.

Manufacturers consider what Europeans and Canadians consume. But there is also a responsibility to protect consumers. If there is something harmful in the food you're feeding people, you obviously should not be using it. One of my best friends, her father-in-law was the vice president for a very large American company that uses synthetic dyes, and he genuinely had never heard of these risks. There are a lot of people who don't know.

Which is why we believe that when our documentary comes out, we need a call to action. People who have seen it and know the risks need to be writing, talking to these companies, and getting this information out there so we can make better decisions. 

But at some level, somebody knows. Big food, big drink, big candy—all these companies spend tons of money on lobbyists. Anytime anybody tries to make some sort of change, they spend a ton of money trying to keep that from happening.

I was on a panel discussion advocating not to use synthetic dyes. There were literal lobbyists. I can't remember what company they represented, but they were lobbying for the use of synthetic dyes. Their argument always is, “The FDA says it's safe. On the FDA's website, it says it's safe. On the FDA's website, it says it's safe.” Well, the FDA's website also says Red 3 causes cancer, but yet it's been in PediaSure all these years. It’s been in medication that children take daily.

The reality is we should not have to police our own food, but we have to. 

There's also an organization out there—one of the scientists we interviewed in our documentary showed us this. There's an organization called the International Association of Color Manufacturers. Their main goal is to promote and further the use of dyes. They also promote natural dyes, but their whole thing is proving that dyes are safe. There are studies that show they are safe, and studies that show they are not.

If you go to their member page, their associate members include The Coca-Cola Company, The Hershey Company, Lonza Consumer Health Incorporated (which is involved in pharmaceuticals, including making capsules for pills), Mars Incorporated, and PepsiCo. 

There is a lot of pressure there.

We interviewed the senator who supported two bills in California. He said once the second bill came up, he had people coming into his office telling him, “You're going to run us out of business. We're not going to be able to afford to make this switch.” There's a lot of industry pressure. If he had been a weaker man or given in to that pressure, we wouldn't be here talking about this. He's the reason we have the California OEHA report.

The report comes from the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which is part of the California EPA.

Ashley James (0:50:29.211)

Interesting. In terms of how these dyes were approved to begin with, now, just remember every drug that's been taken off the market for killing too many people was first approved. So we just have to remember that we need to question everything and have a healthy distrust of every organization out there. Because organizations are out for their best interests and not out for your interests. They're just having said that, just have a healthy distrust of absolutely everyone, question everything. Question me, question everyone. Don't believe what people say. Look into it for yourself.

Don't believe it just because it's on the shelf means it's safe.

Just because it was approved means it's safe. Everything that has been taken off the market by the FDA that was once first approved went through the same criteria that approved these dyes.

So tell us a bit, what did the FDA do? What was their approval process? Now you said it was quite a while ago, 60s, 70s. We definitely have more modern science than we did back then. What were the safety? Did they even perform safety studies on animals or humans before approving these? Or did they rubber stamp approve these dyes into the food chain?

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (0:52:15.683)

We just know that there was a process. We don't know what the process was. We just know there was a process where companies could petition for approval. It would be granted by the FDA. 

These are researchers who were scientists for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. So this is part of their daily job. Was just that there was a method or a process where they could petition the FDA, ask for permanent approval. I don't know off the top of my head exactly what that approval process looked like, but I'm sure we could look into that. That'd be a good answer to know for future things.

Ashley James (0:52:49.425)

Yes, that's interesting to think about. In order to approve any of these dyes, these artificial dyes in our food, did they have to go through any level of testing like drugs? Drugs require animal testing and then human trials, so there are multiple trials that take a few years.

When it comes to approving chemicals, man made artificial chemicals into our food, do they require the same amount of testing, or do they rubber stamp it? Like, you petitioned, okay, we'll let this in, we'll see what it does. If it kills too many people, we'll remove it. 

That'd be interesting to know because if the people who are pro-dye, the lobbyists, are running around going, well, the FDA said it's safe. 

Well, okay. But was it just someone with a rubber stamp back in the 70s that said, that sounds fine. Just take this petroleum-based chemical and put it in the food, and I'm sure it's fine or were there actual animal studies? And if there were, we would have seen cancer. So was it manipulated? Was it rubber stamped?

It'd be interesting to go back and scrutinize the FDA for approving these dyes that we now know without a doubt are harmful.

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (0:54:16.600)

Right. Well, you said it's interesting that the FDA is viewed as the authority on all this, but the FDA is an organization that has a history of saying, “This is safe, this is safe, this is safe,” until finally somebody proves, it isn't safe. A lot of times, they will take steps to ban it, but you said, how can you trust that this company has done their due diligence in making sure these things actually are safe?

What it seems to us is they're looking at it as, “Well, you're not proving that they're not safe, so I think we're going to allow them.” That's kind of backwards. I feel it should be proved to be safe before it's allowed to be in our food.

Dyes are one substance, so they are highly regulated. Every single batch of synthetic dye has to send a sample to the FDA to be tested to make sure they don't have too many heavy metals or that they have the allowable amount of carcinogens and heavy metals. So they know that they are a potentially dangerous substance.

Getting off topic of synthetic dyes for just a second, because dyes don't fall under this, there is a loophole called the GRAS loophole that CSPI is working really hard to try to eliminate. GRAS stands for “generally recognized as safe.” A company can introduce a new chemical, do their own studies internally, and then say that this falls under GRAS, the generally recognized as safe protocol, and that chemical never gets tested by the FDA.

No, dyes are not part of that. I think sometimes people get confused with that. Dyes have never been part of the GRAS list, but there are thousands and thousands of chemicals that the FDA has never even looked into that are allowed to be in our food. It's because of this loophole, and it's pretty crazy. You can actually go to the FDA's website, and they have a list of all the chemicals that are part of the GRAS list. 

Ashley James (0:56:25.806)

No, it's just they rubber stamp that. They will go, “Okay, you put all these chemicals together, and we've approved all these individual chemicals, but we're going to approve this concoction without any testing because individually, or these chemical compounds are so similar to what we've decided is safe—that we're going to say this is okay without any testing.” 

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (0:56:45.079)

I think the general population assumes if this is allowed in products then it's been tested to be safe and I don't think that's always the case.

Ashley James (0:56:58.411)

No. Whitney, you were about to say something.

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (0:56:59.817)

I was just going to make the point that synthetic dyes were approved based on the studies of the time. So if they were approved in the 70s, then they're based on those studies. What the studies in the 70s looked like was very different from modern studies. They were not double-blind, placebo-tested. These were very archaic studies at the time.

What the FDA doesn't do is weren’t seeing anyone going back and studying these unless a researcher or a college that has gotten a grant to study this. The government is not necessarily paying to go back and test these chemicals to make sure that they're safe.

Dyes in particular have a history of being approved and then eventually being banned. Red 2 was one that was banned in the 70s. The reasons that it was banned are very similar to the reasons that Red 3 has the issues that it does.

There was a story—I can't remember when it was, but I want to say the 50s or 60s—about some Halloween candy that made a lot of people sick. It turned out that one of the dyes they were using was the cause, and that dye ended up getting banned.

I'm not sure what the actual approval process was when these were approved, but we're talking about decades and decades ago. Obviously, science has advanced, testing has advanced, and there is no requirement for them to be reevaluated.

In modern studies, we interviewed a researcher, Dr. Joel Nigg. What's interesting is he's an ADHD expert, and he went into this expecting to debunk that synthetic dyes had an effect on neurobehavior. He was very surprised that the most sophisticated studies showed the greatest results—synthetic dyes did cause these neurobehavioral effects.

The best-conducted studies are showing a greater result. Many scientists argue that we need to be funding more studies on synthetic dyes. But the reality is, we have 27 clinical trials on humans. That's plenty. We know that it causes hyperactivity. It goes much beyond that, which we've already discussed. But that alone is enough to ask—why would we want to do this to an entire population?

For our child, it was a massive jump—from a child that needed a lot of help from teachers and a lot of patience to doing so well. He doesn't need anything extra. He's in the 99th percentile in the entire nation in terms of academics. He's doing so, so, so well.

For many children, they might be right there, showing a lot of the symptoms of ADHD, and then external factors like diet and synthetic dyes push them over into the area where they're really struggling or you have somebody who might be gifted, right there on the line where they could be identified as gifted, and then synthetic dyes take them over the threshold where they wouldn't be identified as such.

One of the researchers we spoke with connected it to lead exposure. It's similar—not exactly the same, but similar—in that lead affected the population just minutely, but nobody wants to lower IQ by even less than 1%. Nobody wants to lower IQ at all. Nobody wants to affect the entire population that dramatically.

Not everyone reacts behaviorally. Our daughter, for example, doesn't react neurologically to synthetic dyes, as far as we know. But when you are affecting so many children and even adults, you're moving an entire population.

There haven't been many formal studies on adults, but so many people, including myself, react to synthetic dyes. So many people think it's just a bad day or brain fog. There's a lot that goes on metabolically with the things that we consume, and I think some of our issues, even as adults, can be attributed to it.

Ashley James (1:01:39.127)

Yes. As you said, there's no benefit. It doesn't affect the flavor. It doesn't affect the quality of the food. If anything, the quality of food is improved by natural dye because you sprinkle a little bit of turmeric on everything. You can't taste it, but put a little bit of beetroot or whatever. I mean, this is just sprinkling a little bit of nature on things, and yes, sure, let people kick and scream a bit, but eventually things will settle down, especially if we bring up awareness.

There are going to be a few people who just want to poison their bodies and they'll be upset about it. But I don't know one single mom who would willingly feed their children poison after being awakened to this knowledge.

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Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:05:01.142)

That's what we're seeing, too. We really are seeing people who want to do the best for their children. I think we kind of grew up as a millenial—I can speak for the millennials. I grew up not reading labels at all. Luckily, I'm from Georgia, so I grew up with a garden and we knew where our meat came from.

I had less processed food than many people, but we grew up in a time where we didn't really read labels. Now we're noticing we're sick. So many people around us are sick, and we want better for our children. We are seeing a shift, and I do think that can happen. Podcasts like this are a really good start.

I think it's important—our documentary is focusing on synthetic dyes, but we feel that if you can lock in on something, get as passionate about it as we have, and really tackle one thing at a time. If somebody did something similar to what we're doing about artificial sweeteners or a lot of the other things that are harmful, it could have a real impact.

It's really hard to bring a lot of attention if you're using a broad stroke. What's been powerful for us and what we've seen is that because we have focused on this one additive, we've seen a community build around awareness for that. I hope we can inspire people to do something similar to what we’re doing in other areas.

I don't know what we're going to do after this film comes out. We don't have any plans for what's next, but we've really seen some powerful things happen by locking in and focusing on this additive and becoming advocates for taking care of this problem. I think I could see this method that we've used to do this and create this film, I can see that being done in other areas of the food industry, pharma, and all that sort of thing.

Ashley James (1:07:02.586)

I love it. Brandon, you had brought up earlier some instances in our past where children became very sick from dyes, and then they approved dyes. Dyes that were approved made children very sick, and then they took them off the market. Too Red 3 isn't just a little bit more poisonous. If it just made people a little bit sicker than it does now. It's just the perfect amount of poison that we can chalk it up to, you just have ADHD, let's put you on meds. That is so frustrating that we know these dyes cause cancer, cause hyperactivity, cause neurological issues, cause immune issues. But the ones that made people really sick, too poisonous.

They got the batch wrong. Ha ha ha, I just imagine these evil deep food demons up in their high towers in New York or something, and they're going, we put a little bit too much poison in that batch. Okay, let's start again. We have to just make it slightly poisonous to keep people sick their entire lives, but not so much poison that they revolt against us.

You have to remember, I actually interviewed a woman who was a food scientist who helped make one of the types of Doritos. She said every single packaged food on the market, all those companies have food scientists whose job is to figure out what kind of synthetic crap they need to put in to make your brain addicted to its excitotoxins.

It shocked me when I saw that MSG is in a lot of foods that we feed our children. Maybe that'll be your next documentary because MSG is an excitotoxin. I've heard that people in the Air Force, before they go flying, certain pilots have a banned list of foods they're allowed to consume. Obviously, alcohol would be one of them, but there are a lot of foods that contain these artificial ingredients.

If they're flying a jet at Mach 4, they can't have their brain hopped up on red dyes and MSG. My kid is not—I homeschooled—but our kid and everyone's kid who goes to school, you send them to school wanting them to be their best learner. Maybe we should take a page out of the Air Force or the military that doesn't let their pilots consume certain products because they know it hurts the brain.

How wild is that? The government knows, but why do we let these foods be sold? This is why having a free market is both a blessing and a curse. I see the good and the bad in capitalism.

This is the bad in capitalism. But here's the thing. We have to vote with our fork. We have to vote with our wallet. You shape individually, we shape as a collective. Millennials and everyone on social media, we can get together as a collective and actually change the food industry.

There are examples of this when there used to be hormones in our dairy. The hormones got taken out of our dairy because enough of us stopped buying it. That is what got it banned. Enough people said, no, I don't want that one. I'm going to go for the dairy that doesn't have the hormones in it.

Together, if we all stop, read the labels, go to social media—I'm going to make sure the social media links are in the show notes. But the todyeforthedocumentary.com social media.

We scan through all of your graphics where you show, hey, throw this away and get this brand instead because this is the alternative flavor or whatever that doesn't have the dye.

I'd love to know because for many people listening, they might not be aware. They may not have turned over the package and ever looked at the ingredients or looked for—does the word always say dye, or are there some caramel color or artificial something?

Can you tell us what are the most common names or the names we should be aware of besides if the word dye. Tell us about the most common foods that really shock people. You had mentioned some marshmallows, but what are some more common foods that children eat?

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:12:02.708)

So synthetic dyes are required by the FDA to be listed with their name, the color, and the number. So we call them number dyes. The ones that are, there's nine that are allowed in food, but there's only really seven that are still used in food. They are Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 3, Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6.

There are some other names for dyes—tartrazine and sunset yellow and stuff like that, but those are actual names for dyes, but those aren't allowed to be used in manufacturing in the United States. Sometimes you will see those in products that are manufactured in another country. So there might be something that's from Canada. I think some places in Canada will use tartrazine and stuff like that.

But in the United States, as long as it's manufactured here, companies are supposed to follow those guidelines according to the FDA website.

Some surprising foods that have synthetic dyes are marshmallows, fortune cookies, grain bars, some canned fruits, especially if it has cherries, obviously candies, chips, mac and cheese. Although there are a lot of dye-free options now.

One really surprising place that we found synthetic dyes is in vanilla icing and chocolate icing. At the time that we eliminated synthetic dyes from our son's diet nearly three years ago, all of the vanilla and the chocolate icings at our local stores that you could just walk into, and we don't have a Whole Foods where we live or Trader Joe's or anything like that. So we would just walk into Walmart and Kroger, and we could not find a vanilla or chocolate icing that did not have dyes in it.

Now you can, now that they're starting to diversify. Some pickles, cinnamon rolls, sadly, lots of ice cream, lots of baked goods, a lot of baked products that have berries in it. Oftentimes muffin products will not have actual berries. I mean, I don't know what they are, honestly, but they're colored with dyes. So pancake mixes, oftentimes, not all. Sadly, movie popcorn. That was a sad one.

Many antibiotics. At the movie theater, what has dye is the little salt stuff that they use—that orange salt that they use to actually make it look like it's yellow. That's what has the dye in it. Then digging even deeper, mini hand soaps—even if it's clear—they oftentimes have dyes. Lots of toothpaste, nail polish, makeup, things like that. 

Our daughter does dance, so we have to buy the super bougie makeup for her. A lot of people, why are you so worried about stuff like external exposure? We weren't at first. We didn't even think about it until we went out to eat one day with our son. This is a few months after we had realized that dyes were an issue, and he was doing great. We went out to eat at a restaurant, and they gave him a little temporary tattoo. We're like, this is cool. Let's put it on. He put it on, and then, while we were at the restaurant, he lost his mind. He got really upset because he was still little, and when he was going to take him to the bathroom, and he really didn't want to go to the girl's bathroom, he lost his mind and started hitting her. It was crazy. We're like, what is going on? So we checked his food. We were like, is there anything in this ketchup? Like, what is going on? Then it clicked—well, we put a big blob of ink on his skin.

It is important to note that there haven't been any formal studies, just anecdotally, us along with thousands of other parents have noticed that. They have done those studies where it shows that sunscreen can get into your bloodstream from dermal exposure. None on synthetic dyes specifically. I mean, it would. But we have seen it. If he comes home from school and there's just something off, and you look at his hands—he got markers all over his hands. So we've seen that it definitely affects our son. So we assume that he's not the only one out there.

Ashley James (1:16:02.922)

This is wild. Yes. You got to be careful because we think our skin is impenetrable, and it's crazy. No, you absorb things with your skin. You really need to be careful with your cosmetics. Earlier, you had mentioned a few of the ingredients. You talked about heavy metals. What are artificial dyes? Are they petroleum-based? Are there heavy metals in them? We know that they're manmade, we know they're chemicals, but what are they?

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:16:42.283)

So I think originally, they were derived from coal tar, which is a byproduct. Then that's kind of shifted to a lot of them being petroleum-based. They're made from byproducts of petroleum. I think you have the azo dyes that get a little into the science, more above what I actually understand—how the actual azo bonds and stuff work. But yes, they're either chemically made or derived from petroleum and things like that. That's not something you typically would want to be ingesting.

Ashley James (1:17:12.749)

When you traveled around and did all these interviews for the documentary, which I'm so excited to watch when it comes out with everyone, tell me one of the most shocking things from each of you. I want each of you to hopefully have a different one. What is the most, where you said no way and your jaw hit the floor? What is the most shocking thing you learned while you were conducting all these interviews?

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:17:39.555)

Part of the reason why I did that is if we were going to create a documentary, I wanted to come at it from just an everyday consumer standpoint. So I didn't want to dig so deep into the research that I was asking higher-level questions. Once we decided to make a film, I stopped looking at the research at all so that I would have just these very basic questions because our documentary is not for people who are already super crunchy and know everything about reading a label.

We really want the documentary to be for everyone, whether you have any background knowledge or not. So it was shocking to me to sit in our first interview and for the researcher to explain that synthetic dyes are a chemical. I know we just discussed that, but that was incredibly shocking to me. I had never even considered that there could be chemicals in our food.

So that was definitely eye-opening. We're talking a lot about science, but our documentary is 50% or more, probably closer to 55% story. We flew around the US and interviewed these families, and the stories we heard were shocking. The stories kept flooding in.

We had one mom whose son was seven, and he was suicidal because of synthetic dyes. I know that sounds crazy, and I'm sure I have a few people cocking their heads thinking, really? He was so sensitive to these synthetic dyes that it was wreaking havoc on him.

That story was obviously crazy. Each one was different. One of our stories was about a little girl. She was very young, so they could not formally diagnose her as having bipolar disorder, but she was having so many issues that the doctor said, we're looking at bipolar disorder, and the only thing that's going to help you is medication.

Each of the stories that we followed—to see them turn back around and say, we have a full, healthy child only because we eliminated synthetic dyes. Many of these families didn't even go deeper into eating very clean. Most of them just eliminated synthetic dyes.

It was shocking that just this one ingredient could have such a dramatic impact not only on their health but on their family. Entire families were struggling. The moms were struggling. Their marriages were struggling. It was just hard to hear.

Those were my shocking stories. The story she was talking about was Dr. Rebecca Bevins. Dr. Bevins actually has a TED Talk that is the gateway for a whole lot of people who have been part of our group.

That was one of the first videos they ever saw—this TED Talk she did specifically about her son. She figured out synthetic dyes were an issue for him when he was around six or seven. She's a neuroscientist.

You were asking earlier about what each specific dye does. There's not a lot of studies on individual dyes, but she did her own individual test with her son. If you listen to her TEDx Talk, at least for him and how he reacts, she kind of breaks down each color. So that's a good thing to listen to.

Ashley James (1:21:16.059)

I have a friend whose daughter had seizures, and they saw a neuroscientist and were prescribed a medication because seizures for children can cause brain damage. The more you have the seizures, the more you're really deteriorating. It's not one of those things where you just let them flop it out. It's fine. They'll grow out of it. No, we really need to prevent seizures. The dye was in the red dye.

I just remember her saying there's red dye in her medication. She can't take this. We need to find a dye-free alternative. At the time, I was just give her the meds. I was almost just giving her the meds. We need to stop the seizures. I just was desperate for her to have a quality of life because the seizures were so bad for her. But that was just a little part of me, just give it to her. It's such a small amount. How could that make a difference? It's a tiny, tiny bit of red dye but what you're sharing is it doesn't matter if it's a tiny bit, especially for epileptics. It increases epilepsy. 

Why would they put something in the epilepsy medication that increases epilepsy? This is how big pharma works. We're just going to say we're helping you, but we're really going to harm you at the same time. So you really need our meds.

My gosh, that is so disgusting. That's so irresponsible. It's either maniacal or it's ignorant, but either way, we're trusting our health with a giant industry that is either, and I feel it's a combination of both, ignorance and those who know but don't care. They don't want to help. There's evil, and then there's the ignorant, and it can't be anywhere in between. But these are the people we trust our health with.

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:23:07.828)

You say that about the epilepsy medicine. I'm going to let Whitney tell a very heartbreaking story about that, but then also the same sort of thing. A lot of times synthetic dyes can cause—it doesn't cause ADHD, but it can cause ADHD-type symptoms.

We do feel there's probably a lot of false diagnoses. Of course, there are people with ADHD, and dyes that can make their ADHD worse, but I do feel there are also some cases of people that maybe don't have ADHD that get prescribed ADHD medicine. A lot of the ADHD medication also has dyes in it.

Even in the OEHA report, it says that eliminating synthetic dyes is more effective for treating ADHD than other non-drug treatments for ADHD. There's a lot of evidence for that. It was crazy you even brought up epilepsy and epilepsy medication because the most heartbreaking story I was sent—

I think it was on social media. This mom was telling me that her daughter has epilepsy. If you know anything about epilepsy, it's nothing to mess with. Each seizure can dramatically impact your brain. Her daughter had an allergic reaction to Red 40. The only other medication had Red 3, which we know causes cancer.

Every single day, her daughter is taking a life-saving medication that is also laced with Red 3. We know that it can be genotoxic. We know that it causes cancer in rats. The fact that she's consuming it every day, that just throws everything out of the water.

These people that are just saying, oh, you can just take a little bit every once in a while—these poor kids are taking it every day. It can have dramatic impacts.

I have really a passion for this. I mean, I have so many passions with synthetic dyes, but first and foremost, I really don't believe it should be in schools. I don't believe that it should be in school foods. I don't believe that it should be in government-funded snacks.

I also don't believe it should be in medication. If candy can figure it out, if other industries can figure out how to naturally dye things, I think pharma has enough money and enough brain power to figure out how to do that naturally.

I really, really would urge advocacy groups. CSPI—we've been working with them. I've sent so many emails. I'm like, can we work on this now? Because I really think the pharmacy side is honestly one of the most heartbreaking parts for me because these children can't take anything else.

It is life-saving. You have to take it. Of course, I would encourage my friends, yes, your child needs this medication, but I would be sending a lot of emails. I would probably have a loop in my inbox, asking them to take it out and sending reports to them and sending research.

It's crazy. It's sad.

Ashley James (1:26:11.304)

That is so sad. What you said, Brandon, about misdiagnosis, this is what I've seen so many times with mental health issues also, ADHD, but also you mentioned bipolar. One of my mentors is a naturopathic physician who saved my life. He's an amazing man. He is the reason why I no longer have all the diseases I had, and he's the reason why I went from infertility to having our wonderful son naturally.

So I've learned a great deal from him over the last many years since I've been following him since 2011. A lot of times people come to him as the last resort. This is what happens with holistic medicine, naturopaths. People go the conventional MD route. I hate that it's called traditional because it's less than 100 years old, really. We call that conventional. Just like conventionally grown food is the pesticide-laden food, but organic is the alternative food. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Organic is what we used to do before you. Organic should be called conventional because that is how we used to grow food.

If you read any of Orwell's books, 1984, you get the whole manipulation they use. Words in a manipulative way, especially this is a political year. You're hearing it from every politician, regardless of what side you're on. Really listen through the filter of detecting the linguistic fallacies and the linguistic manipulations. A lot of people would come to my mentor, Dr. Joel Wallach, after they have been lied to and gone through the route of the drug-based medicine and come out the other end sicker.

Most often misdiagnosed, and he would help them through food and supplements to fill up their nutrient tanks where they're missing certain nutrients. Then their symptoms would go away. They would no longer be bipolar or they would no longer have ADHD. He's like, well, you weren't actually in the first place. You were misdiagnosed. You had all the same expressions that someone with that would, but you actually—this is how eating the wrong way—it's like you took a car and you gave it the wrong fuel and the wrong oil. You just gave it the wrong everything. Then you're like, my car has these symptoms. Your car must have this problem.

So it's the same. We're giving our bodies crap and expecting ourselves to be healthy with crap. Most people don't think that every single bite they put in their mouth turns into cells. Do you really want to turn that Big Mac into your cells? Do you really want to turn that Frappuccino into your cells? Because that's what you're putting in your body. If you don't give the raw building blocks to your body, if you give the wrong ones, then your body just breaks down. There's inflammation. It just breaks down.

It's like you're building a beautiful two-storey house for your family, and you've got all the crew, the workers show up. But instead of lumber, it's half the lumber you need plus a bunch of bouncy houses. It's just things that you don't need. That's what we're doing. We're feeding ourselves bouncy houses instead of the lumber it needs to grow new healthy cells.

Why are we putting artificial man-made chemicals, petroleum-based chemicals, just microdosing them in everything? They're in everything if you eat packaged food, drugs, cosmetics, and the list goes on. We're going to learn so much more about it.

I love that you came at it from a really fresh perspective as you dove into your journey. So we get to go on this journey with you. I'm so excited for your documentary. It's going to come out soon. Tell us about how this works. Listeners get to go to your website, sign up for your newsletter so they can hear about how it's coming out, where they can watch it. Do you expect that it's going to be in any theaters, or are you going to stream it online? Tell us about the process of how we'll be able to watch your movie when it comes out.

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:30:38.710)

Yes, so we are in the process. The film is done. Right now, our lawyer has the film. She's just going over it. We've kind of done a clearance check. We've gotten a little bit of feedback on it. Just a couple of little things here and there that we need to tweak. We're in the process of negotiating with a distributor, which a lot of people have no idea what that means. A distributor is basically a company that puts your film into the marketplace. You can self-distribute.

We're kind of at max capacity of what we're capable of doing and the bandwidth that we have. We've been doing this for two years, and it's just the two of us. So we feel a distributor was the best route for us. Once we get that deal worked out, we don't have an exact date set, but our goal, what we envisioned for the film, is to release it early January. A couple of reasons behind that. We thought we wanted to release it in the fall originally, but this being a political year,

We don't want to risk getting buried in all that's going on in the election and things like that. Then right after that, we have Christmas. So we're like, well, this film could really be a good New Year's resolution type thing. We feel January is going to be a sweet spot for us. I think that'll be a great time for people to watch it.

So what you can do to keep up with it is we have a special subscriber spot on our website: todyeforthedocumentary.com/podcast. That's not plural, just podcast. It’s “dye.” So todyeforthedocumentary.com/podcast. You can subscribe to our email list. That's helping us keep up with anybody who discovered us through listening to a podcast.

We can keep you updated. We have a bunch of resources that we send to you, and you can kind of keep up with where we're at with the film. We send out a newsletter. You can also follow the film on Facebook, follow the film on Instagram. We also have, like I said, that really big group on Facebook called Dye Free Family Swaps Recipes and Resources. You can also follow that.

Ashley James (1:32:55.725)

I love it. Yes. So you and I, before we hit record, we were talking about the timing. So I'm just, just launch it. Just go, just, just let us watch it now. Then you explained to me, well, political year and get buried and all that stuff. But I love that you said January health, everyone kind of has their minds on New Year's resolutions and being healthier. They have a hangover from two months of sugar from October 31st to January 1st. 

It's ridiculous. We really overindulge. Here's a little thought for you to noodle around with. Flu season happens to coincide with sugar season. I just want you to think about that because a single teaspoon of sugar actually causes—I can't remember which white blood cell, there's names for the different white blood cells, but there's one particular white blood cell that actually falls asleep and does not function.

When you eat even a single teaspoon of processed sugar and go down that rabbit hole. So maybe that's your next documentary, but go down the rabbit hole, process sugar and how it drastically negatively impacts the immune system. It just so happens that we have quote unquote flu season every year when everyone's eating the most amount of sugar possible. It ensures hidden in everything, all the holiday food.

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:34:24.886)

There's a great sugar documentary called Fed Up, I think it came out in 2014. Really good documentary.

Ashley James (1:34:30.822)

Yes. Yes, I love it. I just love health documentaries because actually it was a health documentary that really got me started on. I was sick and suffering for many years. I think it was Food Inc. back in 2008. It was something that the creator, the original founder of Whole Foods, said—shop the perimeter of the grocery store, buy organic. He said, vote with your fork.

So my husband took that challenge on, and in one month, my chronic infections went away, and I got off of the constant antibiotics I was on. That was just one of my health issues. But if I'm, wow, I just did one thing with my—just shopped the perimeter of the grocery store. Didn't even—I was still eating dairy and meat and whatever. But I shopped the perimeter of the grocery store, ate organic, and I was voting with my fork. So I'm, okay, organic is good. I want to vote with my fork, and my chronic infections went away. Thought, gee, what else could I impact if I made more changes?

That was back in 2008. That started me down that road. Here I am. That's why I'm doing this podcast, because I want to get this information out there because people are needlessly suffering. There's parents who, you said, their entire marriage, their entire lives are affected because their children are being poisoned by something that is right underneath their nose. They don't even know it. They don't even know that it's there.

In the meantime, while we're waiting for January for your documentary to come out, we can go to your Instagram. We don't have to wait to start learning now, to start making changes now. Let's all become a success story of Whitney and Brandon. Let's go to their Instagram, go to their social media, and check out the posts because I've learned a lot. I didn't know that food had dye in it. I didn't know that had food dye in it.

You'll see what you can do instead. You can trade this for that. You'll learn so much by going through their social media. Follow them. Get in their Facebook group. What's the Facebook group called?

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:36:32.466)

So it's Dye Free Family swaps, recipes, and resources.

Ashley James (1:36:36.202)

Wonderful. So we'll make sure the links are in the show notes of today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. Follow them, whatever social media you are on, but especially get on their email list, and I'll make sure the link is there—todyeforthedocumentary.com.

The thing is that even if you eat really clean or maybe even if you don't have kids, or your kids have grown up, you're going to touch people's lives. So just speaking to every single listener, with this new information that you have today, you could actually change the course of someone's life. There's a child who is not doing well in school right now or feeling suicidal, or the parents are maybe on the brink of a divorce because dyes are in their life.

If you bring this information, if you share this episode with everyone around you, especially parents with young kids, you could actually change the trajectory in a positive way for every single person that listens. The parents will have a better time being great parents. The child will feel healthy and normal again and go on to lead a healthy and productive life and not be super duper medicated because they got misdiagnosed with something like ADHD, or they have ADHD, and now their ADHD is healthfully under control because it's not exacerbated by these dyes.

So please share this with everyone. We need to, as a collective, get this crap out of our food because it is nothing but poison. It has no health benefits. It has no benefit at all. It is only a negative. Why are we accepting this as a species? Why are we accepting this as humans?

Put your foot down. Say no more. I will not support it. Never buy something with dye. Don't vote for that. Put your foot down. Say no to those fricking cookies at the Chinese restaurant—fortune cookies. 

I pop them open, I like reading the fortunes because it's fun, but I pop them open and I'm here, throw that in the trash. You don't need to eat that. But it's wild because even if people are choosing to be dye-free, it's the little things—the free cookie or the little free mint or the little cosmetic thing, or wash your hands. It's just the little things that can seep in. We have to take a stand and say no and get it out, especially for the children, because it really, really hurts them, their brain, and their immune system.

Thank you so much for dedicating your time, your energy, your life for the last few years to this project. It's very meaningful, and it is helping millions of people. So thank you for what you guys are doing.

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:39:41.189)

Thank you for that. 

Ashley James (1:39:43.265)

Yes. Absolutely. Before we wrap up today, is there anything else you want to share, anything that we didn't touch on, a story you want to leave us with? Is there anything you want to make sure you share to wrap up today's interview?

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:39:53.047)

Well, I love what you were just saying about sharing this with people because when you really get down to the core of why we're making this film, one, we're Christians. We feel God has given us abilities for a reason to use those for good. Whitney started going down this rabbit hole. She was a public school teacher at one point. She taught in a high-poverty school.

She really had a heart for those parents. She had kids in her class that multiple children shared a room or shared a bed or slept on the floor. She had parents that didn't even speak English or couldn't read. Parents like that, looking for synthetic dyes and reading labels, that's not even part of what they do. So we really feel we made this film, obviously, we want people who already know this information to get something out of it, but we really made this film to have something that's easily digestible, easy to understand, and something that you can share. Like you said, we hope for a domino effect. What's going to make this film successful is when somebody watches it and says, I know somebody that can benefit from watching this, and I'm going to pass this along. So I love how you gave everybody that call to action. I couldn't agree more.

Ashley James (1:41:16.123)

Awesome. And Whitney, do you have any parting words for us?

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:41:18.999)

Yes, that was actually the point I was going to make. The reality is the demographics of people that are really looking into this and digging into the research with synthetic dyes, they're not families that are in low income.

The higher the people that are in low income and women of childbearing age, this is according to the OEHA report, synthetic dye exposures are higher among women of childbearing age with low incomes. Additionally, non-Hispanic Black women of childbearing age and children of the same age group have significantly higher intakes compared to children of other ethnic groups. So the reality is we really need to be protecting not only our children, but all children.

Our hope is that, as a society, we kind of go back to our roots and start protecting children, especially children that have no other option. We live in a very high-poverty area.

We live in the carpet capital of the world. We have a lot of industry and a lot of people who are just making it. You work night shifts. Both parents are working two jobs, and a lot of children in our area are taking care of siblings or being raised by siblings. The reality is they're not reading labels. They're not ever going to see this research. We do need to be protecting those children. Those children matter. Those children are the most vulnerable.

That is really our heart. That was the point I was going to make. I don't know why I'm getting emotional.

Ashley James (1:42:59.405)

No, it is. It's very emotional. Like you said, these are the most vulnerable, and it is really up to us, everyone. I'm also Christian, and I believe that it is our duty. We're supposed to protect the most vulnerable. We are supposed to protect those from these atrocities. It's a poison that is so ubiquitous and is not even seen. It's just hidden, and we need to bring it. We need to shed light on it. By those who can, those who are listening now, by our actions, we can help. You said writing the letters, taking action, voting with your fork, helping spread this information, getting informed, and helping spread this information. We can get these dyes out of our food.

That would also help those children as well. The more we share this information, the better. The more we make it accessible to eat foods that are dye-free, the better. If you're donating to a food bank, donate foods that are dye-free. Call up the food bank, inform them. Call up all your local food banks.

The churches that have food banks in them and let them know that this is important. A lot of churches, especially in my area, raise money and then go buy the food. One of my churchmates used to get food for free for their food bank, and then because of political differences, the company that was giving them free food said, we're not going to give you free food because you have Christian values. I'm like, okay, well, you knew it was a church, but whatever.

These are well-meaning churches, well-meaning food banks. If you give them this information and show them and make it easy for them—okay, instead of buying this brand, buy this brand. Instead of buying this, buy this. You give them a list. Here's the list of foods that have these dyes that are hurting children. Here's the list of very similar foods, similar costs. Get this instead. It's going to make a difference in their lives.

Reach out to local schools. Talk with the superintendent. Talk with the principal. Can you get your child's school to go dye-free? Take on this mission. Pick a school, pick a food bank, pick something you care about somewhere in your community, and go after it. Share this information. If we get enough people, you said in your Facebook group, it's a half a million people.

Imagine if a half a million people went out and shared with three other people, and those people shared with three other people. It's doable. Just go share with three other people, and then charge them with the idea of sharing with three other people. It's doable. Share this episode with as many people as you can and ask them to share with as many people as they can. Even if it's just three people, that multiplication is crazy, and we could get this information out there.

If you're moved by the concept that there are children suffering, especially in lower-income areas and children raising children, we need to help them too. Getting this information out there and getting the companies to stop it, stop it, then we can hopefully make a difference. I believe we can because I've seen it happen before. I've seen the food industry turn around because enough people said no. I think you are sparking a fire, but we have to take the ignition and run with it, all of us, every single one of us.

That Horton Hears a Who? Do you remember that? This is the Horton Hears a Who. It's a wonderful children's story by Dr. Seuss. In order to save this entire civilization, every single person in Whoville or whatever they are needed to yell at Horton, the giant elephant. Their whole civilization would have died. They had to get everyone involved, every single voice.

Luckily, it doesn't take the entire population to make a change. I bet if we got 10% of America, 10%, it would be enough of a yell, a loud yell to change the industry. We do make a difference when we share and get this information out there because no mother and no father would willingly give—no sane and loving mother and father would willingly give—a poison to their child, especially one that makes their life harder.

Yes, I want my kid kicking and screaming and fighting with me and biting. Yes, here, eat this cookie. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and I can't wait to watch the documentary. It's going to be awesome.

Brandon & Whitney Cawood (1:48:01.681)

Thank you. Thank you for having us. I love that. That was great.

Outro:

I hope you enjoyed today's interview. It was so informative. Share this episode with those you care about. We've got to spread this information. It's a must. It's just a must that we know this, just like back when we learned that X-rays were not something we should just have in shoe stores. You may not know that X-ray machines used to be in shoe stores and people would just X-ray themselves all the time while they were trying on shoes.

Then we found out that we might want to limit how many X-rays we get. Then there was the lead in gasoline. Then we found out that wasn't healthy and we got to take that out. Then there was asbestos. Then there was lead paint.

So we think about it. There's DDT that we used to douse onto children, and it was so bad it mimicked polio symptoms. That's going down a whole other rabbit hole. But basically, if we look back 30, 40, 50 years or more, we will see where things were once acceptable, safe, and on the shelves, sold in stores.

Then we learned some new information, and that information had to spread to the masses. Then change happened. Coca-Cola used to contain what is now an illegal substance, and that was a fun drink you could go to the Five and Dime and get yourself a nice Coca-Cola and  get some illegal substance served to you as a fun little treat. 

We learn, we do better. Hopefully, we learn and do better, and sometimes it takes longer because we don't spread the information fast enough. Lobbyists happen, and companies fight back. Think about cigarettes. Honestly, there are substances still that we know better, and yet they're available to be sold. So we just need to spread this information so that we can save people and change lives doing it.

As you heard me share before about the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, it's an incredible opportunity to check out their free course and also check out the class that is starting soon. So if you're interested in becoming a health coach or just checking out the free training, go to learntruehealth.com/coach, and when you sign up, use coupon code LTH. You're going to get a great discount, and this cohort is starting. Classes are starting September 23rd, and even if you're super busy, you can fit it into your schedule.

If you have time to listen to my podcast, you have time to become an integrative health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and rock your world, bringing joy, clarity, and fulfillment to every area of your life. IIN is not just about what you eat. It's about examining, uplifting, and bringing joy into every single area—mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, friendships, community, and connection. It really is about living a full life and then learning how to help others do the same. So if that sounds like something you're interested in, you're going to want to check it out. Learntruehealth.com/coach, coupon code LTH.

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