In this compelling episode, Dr. Kevin Conners sits down with Brandon and Whitney Cawood to discuss their transformative experience making the film To Dye For: The Documentary. The Cawoods share how their son’s severe behavioral issues—ranging from hyperactivity to aggression—led them to investigate the effects of synthetic dyes in his diet and medications. After eliminating synthetic dyes, they witnessed a dramatic improvement in their son’s behavior, sparking a deeper investigation into the potential harms of these additives.

The episode explores the science behind synthetic dyes and their links to neurobehavioral issues such as ADHD and hyperactivity, supported both old and recent scientific research. Dr. Conners and the Cawoods also delve into the broader implications for public health, calling for increased awareness, policy changes, and practical advice for parents looking to reduce dye exposure in their children’s diets and medications.

Key Highlights

  • Impact of Synthetic Dyes on Children’s Behavior: The Cawoods observed that removing synthetic dyes from their son’s diet led to a dramatic reduction in tantrums, aggression, and hyperactivity, particularly when reintroducing dyes caused immediate behavioral regressions.
  • Synthetic Dyes and Neurobehavioral Health: The episode highlights the link between synthetic dyes and neurobehavioral issues like ADHD, as supported by recent California studies. These studies confirm that synthetic dyes can worsen hyperactivity, attentiveness, and aggression in susceptible children. Berkeley, CSPI
  • Synthetic Dyes in Everyday Products: Synthetic dyes are not only found in sugary snacks but also in unexpected places such as medications, canned foods, and even certain “healthy” products like fruit cups or marshmallows. Parents may unknowingly expose their children to dyes that exacerbate behavioral issues.
  • Documentary Journey – To Dye For: The Cawoods shared their journey of creating a documentary that explores the science and personal stories of families affected by synthetic dyes. The documentary features interviews with leading experts and scientists, providing evidence that synthetic dyes should be avoided.
  • Public Health Concerns and Advocacy: The episode touches on the broader public health implications of synthetic dyes, including the potential for them to cause long-term neurological issues, ADHD, and even cancer. The Cawoods call for more policy change, like California’s efforts to ban dyes in school lunches. ​Psychology Today​, CSPI
  • Practical Advice for Parents: Practical tips include eliminating synthetic dyes by reading labels carefully, contacting schools about lunches, and finding dye-free alternatives for medications and everyday foods.
  • Advocating for Policy Changes: The interview emphasizes the importance of grassroots advocacy. Parents are encouraged to reach out to local representatives and support efforts to regulate or ban synthetic dyes in food, especially in school meal programs.

Resources Mentioned

About Brandon and Whitney Cawood

Whitney-and-Brandon-cawood-to-dye-for-documentary-synthetic-colors

Parents-turned-filmmakers Brandon and Whitney Cawood embarked on a life-changing journey after discovering their son’s severe sensitivity to synthetic dyes, which triggered extreme behavioral issues. This led them to create their film, To Dye For: The Documentary, where they explore the hidden dangers of synthetic food dyes and their potential impacts on health.

The Cawoods document their two-and-a-half-year journey, interviewing top experts like Dr. Jim Stevenson and collaborating with organizations such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Alongside science, their film shares heartfelt stories of families across the country who have experienced similar struggles with synthetic dyes. Their work sheds light on how dyes, often found in unexpected products like medications, can negatively affect behavior, and even contribute to health issues such as ADHD and colitis.

Their mission is to raise awareness and ignite change through education, personal stories, and scientific evidence.

Listen to or Watch the Full Podcast Episode

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To Dye For: The Documentary & the Colorful Threat to Children's Health w/Brandon & Whitney Cawood

Transcript

Dr. Kevin Conners

Hello everybody, this is Dr. Kevin Conners. Welcome to another episode of Conners Clinic Live. Today, I have some special guests who just are putting out a wonderful documentary on dyes and the effect of dyes on your health, causing cancer, causing hyperactivity, causing brain issues, brain inflammation, all sorts of things. I’m going to let them do most of the talking. It’s Brandon and Whitney Cawood. I’m going to have you just jump right in, introduce yourself, tell us, why would you do a documentary on this? Tell your story.

Whitney Cawood

Hey, thank you for having us.

Brandon Cawood

Why don’t you kick it off?

Whitney Cawood

Alright, so I’m Whitney Cawood, and this is Brandon. He’s my husband. I have a background in education. And after I decided to quit teaching, I went into marketing, and we started to have children. And after we had our first son, between the ages of… Or our only son, we have a daughter. Between the ages of one and three, he was a bit of a puzzle. His behavior was erratic in that some days, most days were really rough with the tantrum and the fits and the hyper and the inability to cope just with everyday emotion, which if you’ve had a young child, you know that that can be normal. But the amount of times we were having fits and aggression and hitting a day. It was a lot. We were having trouble at daycare, we were having trouble at church. All the things. We decided to do an elimination diet. We eliminated wheat, dairy, and synthetic dyes. And once we eliminated those, we saw just a dramatic difference in our child. And so it was pretty shocking. We reintroduced wheat, and we saw no effect. We reintroduced dairy, and we saw no effect.

And when we reintroduced dyes, within 15 minutes, the fits and the hitting and the aggression, it just came flooding back. And so that sparked our curiosity about synthetic dyes. I was really curious about what was going on in the brain and if it could affect other areas of our life, if it could be causing cancer, causing colitis, or any other issues. So I decided to dig into the research, and I was really confused. Even reading the abstract was confusing to me. I really wanted to interview the experts and ask the questions that I had. I asked Brandon if he wanted to document our journey as I just tried to figure out and get to the bottom of synthetic dyes, and he agreed.

Brandon Cawood

So we embarked on that journey. I have a background, in my day to day I am a commercial photographer and videographer. I do advertising work and things like that for businesses. And so we had never taken on doing a long-form video project, so that was new. But as far as creating videos and things like that, that’s what I do every single day. So she had to convince me a little bit because I knew it was going to be a lot of work. I had no idea how much work it was going to be after two and a half years we’re finally done. But we embarked on that journey, and it started off slow. We didn’t know who we were going to get to be in the film. Luckily, door after door was opened. God opened a lot of doors for us. He introduced us to the right people. We ended up with the Center for Science in the Public Interest is a big part of our film. We went to Europe and interviewed Dr. Jim Stevenson, who is responsible for the study that is why the European Union has a warning label on dyes. We really got the best people in the world to back up this information.

Then our documentary is also about 50% story-based. So we interviewed affected families across the country, and we hear their stories, and then we have the science in the film that backs up what they’re saying, what they’re talking about. A lot of times, when you have an issue like this that’s not super well known, people think you might be a little kooky or a little crunchy. But we’ve got the researchers and the studies and the science in the film to back it all up.

Whitney Cawood

Well, and you would probably be interested in the beginning of our journey. The reason why I wanted to embark on an elimination diet is because I have a lot of autoimmune issues. I realized once I completely changed my diet, almost all of my issues went away. I knew the power that finding foods that were harmful to me and my body and that everybody’s body is different and unique. I knew that it could make a difference. It’s not a cure all for everyone, but it really significantly helped me relieve my symptoms. We were really shocked that it was dyes because we were really expecting the dairy and the wheat to have more of an effect because he was eating it so much. I think one of the most shocking parts about our journey is that synthetic dyes were not something that he was getting regularly. We weren’t doing the sugary cereals or the pop tarts or the sweet treats every day. He really was just getting it daily through an allergy medication. He had chronic ear infections, so he was on antibiotics, and he was on a daily allergy medicine, then Benadryl to clear up any fluid that was in his ears.

We were really shocked that just taking that away, and then the occasional birthday parties, we would swap out treats at birthday parties. But we were really shocked that it made that big of a difference. And fast forward now, he’s in first grade. We have a wonderful public school. He’s in a STEM school, and he’s doing German Immersion. From pre-K all the way through first grade, we haven’t had any issues. We haven’t had a single meltdown. We haven’t had the hitting or the fits. He’s just thriving. For him, it was a 180 flip. It completely took care of any issues that we were having. Before that, we had actually been asked to leave his Mother’s Morning out, which is like a half-day daycare. Things were really rough at church, at home, and at school. Then now things are just so much better, which that’s not everyone’s story, once again. He is unique in that. He reacts more strongly to synthetic dyes than most children. But there are those children. In this journey, we started a group. Right around the time we decided to start a documentary, we started a group that’s grown from zero to 580,000.

Brandon Cawood

Almost 590,000.

Whitney Cawood

Almost 590,000. We’ve heard hundreds, if not thousands of stories that have been so similar to ours, which has been really affirming in that we need more information out there. That’s our story. That’s where we’re at.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, I want to touch on one point you said of you weren’t eating a lot that had a lot of dyes in it that you could identify. But it was his daily medications. They’re putting this in medication. He was taking a Benadryl with maybe a red dye in it or something. That was to clear up the inflammation in his ears, but it was actually causing inflammation. I have a whole course on Chronic Disease and Autoimmune. One of my main points of that is to find your triggers.

Whitney Cawood

Love it.

Dr. Kevin Conners

They’re different for everybody. There could be multiple triggers. Anything that’s going to stimulate inflammation of the brain is going to be a trigger. Dyes are horrific for that, and especially with kids and I just want to make a statement that kids before age 2 to 3 have no blood-brain barrier. If you’re putting something in their body, it is crossing the blood-brain barrier that is nonexistent. The blood-brain barrier, made by the astrocytes of the brain, doesn’t form until after that time. Toxins from vaccinations, from medications, from foods, whether it be dyes that we’re talking about today or some other inflammatory toxin, is going to go into the brain and affect the brain. It can be, praise God that your son had a 180-degrees turnaround, but there’s a lot of kids that this could affect them for life. It could lodge in the neurons and it could cause demyelinating diseases and all sorts of different problems.

Brandon Cawood

One of the driving factors for us making this film is the fact that we recognized if we hadn’t figured this out, how long would he have gone?

Whitney Cawood

It was painful.

Brandon Cawood

With this behavior. He was having trouble making friends. He was having trouble getting along with his teachers and things like that. So we’re like, there’s got to be other kids out there whose parents have no idea that dyes are a contributing to what’s going on with them. And you spend a whole life consuming dyes, and it’s affecting you in this way, and you don’t know it. That’s crazy.

Whitney Cawood

And how would that lead you to feel about yourself as well? Because he was the kid. He was the kid that was an issue, and he knew that.

Brandon Cawood

Even at 3

Dr. Kevin Conners

How did that feel about you as parents, too?

Whitney Cawood

It was painful.

Dr. Kevin Conners

It was big, but as parents.

Whitney Cawood

As a mom, I’ve never been in a darker place. Never. And so my mental health was struggling. I felt like a failure. And I really like to be a prepared person. I read the books. We were eating mostly organic foods, which was ironic. We just did not think about medication. And so I really tried my very best to do all the things and to listen to all the podcasts. And we were just grasping for straws to figure out something that could just help him just a little bit, just a little bit, just a little bit. And so once we eliminated the dyes, it really was pretty dramatic in that the fits and stuff stopped right away. But then we still had those occasional slip-ups where we wouldn’t think about, we would go camping or something, and we wouldn’t think about dyes being in marshmallows, or there was a spinach wrap that I had, and I thought that it was green because of the spinach, and it had Yellow 5 and Blue 1. We had a really rough week that week because I was giving him… I was making, I call them egg tacos or egg quesadillas, a couple of times a week.

And dyes, it’s important to note that it stays in your system for a while. And I think everybody processes it at a different time. But for him, for 48 hours after consuming even one mini marshmallow, he would have just a really, really rough time. And we tested that one time, actually. I was making like, hot chocolate, like homemade hot chocolate for the teachers for Christmas time. I was putting marshmallows on the top, and he saw a marshmallow that fell on the floor and like an animal ran and grabbed it and put it in his mouth. I was like, “Oh, no.” I turned it over and I was like, “In a white marshmallow?!” So it’s really permeated a lot of foods you wouldn’t expect. We’ve seen it in canned foods, we’ve seen it in spices. We have an entire list of just really, really surprising places that you would find it. It’s not always the sugary, colorful cereals or the sugary, colorful treats. I mean, it’s even permeated like cosmetics and mouthwash.

Brandon Cawood

Pickles.

Whitney Cawood

White icing, vanilla icing, chocolate icing. You can’t really look at a product and see, does this have dyes or not? Really, the only safe bet is if it’s organic, then it is innately dye free because organic foods cannot be synthetically made, and synthetic dyes…

Dr. Kevin Conners

Even though it might say organic, not everything is organic in the product always.

Whitney Cawood

That’s a valid point.

Dr. Kevin Conners

I mean, praise God, you guys searched for this. What do the vast majority of Americans do? They run to the doctor. Is the doctor going to go, “You should look at dyes, you should look at your diet”? No, they’re saying, “We’re going to give your kid a label so that it excuses you for being a bad parent.”

Whitney Cawood

I’m glad you said that. That was our story. That was our story. We would go to the doctor and try to get help.

Brandon Cawood

We did behavior therapy. All the pediatricians never even brought up diet or food like what we were eating. It was always they wanted to get him evaluated and things like that. We tried to… We have pushed back on the evaluation because he was three years old. We knew that…

Whitney Cawood

Well, the doctors agreed with us at the time. “If this continues until he’s six,” they said, “You can go ahead and get an evaluation and can’t get started, or you can wait till he’s six because some of these behaviors are ‘normal’ until you’re six.” That really was the suggestion that we had.

Brandon Cawood

Once we figured it out on this journey, we brought this information to most of his pediatricians. They had no idea. It’s been interesting. As just a regular person, you assume that your doctors know everything. You assume that they know everything that there is to know about health. It’s been interesting to see that it’s not something that’s super-

Dr. Kevin Conners

I’m glad that enlightenment hit you. I’ve been doing this for a long time and hear from cancer patients all the time of that, “Oh, diet has nothing to do with it.” It’s insanity because it defies common sense. Any thinking person would go, “Is there a reason for this? Let’s figure that out.” Hats off to you guys for digging into that. I know you love your child, but there’s a lot of people that really love their children who don’t do this. To get this information out is crucial.

Whitney Cawood

Thank you.

Brandon Cawood

We also realized in our journey, a lot of the medications for things like ADHD and things like that, a lot of times, children or people with those, the medications to treat that, a lot of times also have dyes, and people with ADHD, and even our son, our son is on the gifted spectrum. We’ve noticed that even… We’ve noticed a lot of the neurodivergent spectrum of people. They tend to have a stronger reaction. A lot of those medications for those things have a dye in them as well. We had somebody also with epilepsy. We had a person in our group write us about their child that had epilepsy. You can’t not take your epilepsy medication. But she had actually had a physical allergic reaction to Red 40, so she couldn’t take. There was two options, one with Red 40 and the other one was Red 3. She’s having to take medication with Red 3 in it every single day because to get it compounded would cost her $1,000 a month.

Whitney Cawood

She made note that they can’t afford $1,000 medication without her getting a second job, which is, you think about that, it’s going to cost her time with her children, even more time, even though she has a full-time job.

Brandon Cawood

The scary thing about Red 3 is it’s a pretty alarming dye. Back in 1990, the FDA themselves, from a study from the ’80s, where they fed Red 3 to rats, and the rats got tumors. The FDA themselves stated that it caused cancer, and they banned it in cosmetics and externally-applied drugs. But they had already permanently approved it in 1969 for food and ingested drugs. For 34 years, the FDA has been saying they’re going to take steps to remove Red 3, and it’s still allowed in food and ingested drugs.

Dr. Kevin Conners

You have to just wonder, “Why in the world are they putting dyes in a drug that you’re swallowing? Is it getting people to buy the product more?”

Whitney Cawood

You’re exactly right. The only purpose of dyes is it’s cosmetic. They are basically make up for our food and medications. We as Americans oftentimes like very beautiful, vibrant, cohesive medications and food. So it’s used as a marketing piece. It doesn’t help food stay stable longer. It has no purpose other than to make it look beautiful. And oftentimes, dyes are used because a manufacturer has decided instead of using strawberries, a real food, they’ve decided to use a natural flavor or an artificial flavor, which is colorless. So if you have a protein powder where you have used an artificial flavor and it’s colorless, but you want it to be a strawberry, you want it to look like strawberries. To make it look like real strawberries, you add the color to make it look beautiful so that it looks like a strawberry. When they really could have used strawberries to begin with, but the reality is synthetic dyes are cheap. They are oftentimes a byproduct of petroleum, which comparing a byproduct of petroleum, the price, to a real strawberry, that’s very different. But it’s obviously the cost of consumers.

Brandon Cawood

I think with medication, the one thing is that they use it also as an identifier for certain medications. But there’s so many ways that you could do… They press pills, different shapes, and things like that. There’s ways that you could do it without coloring it. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Yeah. Well, your journey has led you to really learn a lot about this subject, not just for your son, but you have a greater purpose to share with other people. You touched on you have a Facebook group. Is that what it is?

Whitney Cawood

We do, yeah.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Let’s talk a little bit about your social media content that you have out there and how you’re trying to reach people that way, because obviously, one of the best things better ways to do that, right?

Whitney Cawood

Yeah. So around the same time we decided to do the documentary, we wanted to start a group, too, so we could go ahead and really start helping people who wanted to eliminate dyes. So we have really worked really hard to create resources and lists and just really make it easy for families who want to cut out something like synthetic dyes. And so for a lot of families, they’ve never even read an ingredients label. They’ve never looked at it. They’ve just bought food and eaten food. Just thinking about a label and reading a label and finding dyes on a label can be challenging. We’ve really created several resources. One of them that is really popular is we have a synthetic dyes list sheet, and so we’ve listed all the dyes. If anybody’s wondering, the nine approved synthetic dyes used for food, cosmetics are a little bit different, but it’s Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 3, Yellow 2, and Orange B. And so we created the list. Oh, Citrus Red 2?

Brandon Cawood

Yeah.

Whitney Cawood

And then we also say why we should avoid them. So there’s a number of reasons why you should avoid them. We also have a list of unexpected foods that you can find dyes in, and then synthetic dye-free brands. I also, each holiday, I create lists that help families enjoy Christmas, for example, dye-free or Halloween dye-free. There’s a lot of swaps that use natural dyes compared to synthetic dyes. And so we really have tried to make it easy for families. We, as humans, are aware that dyes are not the only issue in our food system. But what we’ve noticed is that by cutting out synthetic dyes and by learning about synthetic dyes, it’s almost like a gateway drug into realizing there are things in our food that we really should be avoiding. For me, as we went along this journey, one of the most shocking things, which it won’t be shocking to you, but one of the most shocking things to me to discover is that synthetic dyes are a chemical. When I heard that word chemical, I was like, “Oh, I didn’t know there were chemicals in our food.” Once you get that information out there, people are really starting to just really be critical thinkers about what they’re putting in their bodies.

Our group is Dye Free Family: Swaps, Recipes, and Resources.

Dr. Kevin Conners

We’ll have links for that, and we’ll have links for your list because I know our listeners are going to want to get that list.

Brandon Cawood

Yeah. That’s our group. But then we also have a Facebook page for the film. We’ve got about 40,000 people. We just broke 40,000. We just broke 40,000 people on our film’s Facebook page. On that one, we do some of the similar stuff. We share resources, but that’s really we post about the film, what’s going on with the film, things that we’re-

Whitney Cawood

Things that are happening in the news.

Brandon Cawood

Things that are happening in the news, things that we’re learning about every day. Whitney was saying that was her most surprising thing that she learned. My most surprising thing that I learned on this journey, even though it doesn’t necessarily involve synthetic dyes, was learning about the grass list, the generally recognized as safe list, which is nice. She said learning about dyes is a gateway to other chemicals. Once you find out that there’s thousands of chemicals that the FDA has never even looked at that are allowed to be in food because of this loophole, it’s crazy.

Dr. Kevin Conners

We need to be aware of natural and artificial flavorings. They’re all artificial. They’re all fake. The things that our government is allowing is insane. I interviewed somebody from Europe a little bit a year ago about chemicals in cosmetics. There’s over 900 things that are banned in Europe that are approved in cosmetics in the United States because they’re banned in Europe because they’re carcinogens, and yet they’re allowed to… It’s, I guess, the bad side of capitalism. It’s driven by money so strongly that there’s people in power that do not care about your son or your grandsons or grandchildren or you. They don’t care whether you live or die. Whether you get cancer or not. That’s the sad reality. Until we face that fact, we don’t take responsibility. I think that’s, to me, that’s what I always preach is that you’ve got to take responsibility for your health. Nobody else is going to. Your doctor’s not, the government’s not. You have to take responsibility, and that means educating yourself. Again, your documentary is To Dye For: The Documentary. We’re going to have a whole bunch of information on that. Tell us when it’s coming out.

Brandon Cawood

We don’t have a concrete day yet. We have a penciled-in date, but it is going to come out January 2025. The day that it comes out, we’ll announce as soon as we have that locked in, but it will be out January 2025. Right now, we’re currently in the process of an impact campaign. We have a press release that just went out last week, and it’s floating around the trades, the film trades first. We have a distributor now, and we’ll announce who that is and stuff soon, too. But in about a week, we’ll be able to send out our press release to different organizations and media outlets and stuff like that. With our impact campaign, we’re wanting to partner with organizations, influencers, things like that to do private screenings and use the film as an education piece and get the word out there, spread the word out there, try to get it in front of as many politicians as we can, senators, state representatives, things like that. Hopefully, we can go ahead and build some momentum before it releases in January.

Whitney Cawood

I do want to speak to what you said about Europe, because something I found that was really interesting is Dr. Jim Stevenson. We interviewed him. He’s the researcher responsible for the warning label in the EU. I was asking him about the study. I was like, “How did you get funding for this study?” Because all the researchers we interviewed, they want to do further research on synthetic dyes in the US, which we have enough. There’s 27 clinical trials on children in regards to hyperactivity, aggression, and things like that. So we really have enough. But they would be curious and would like to do more research, and they cannot find funding. They’ve applied and applied and applied. And so I asked Jim, I was like, “How did you receive the funding?” And he was like, “Oh, it’s government-funded.” I was like, “Oh, the government was concerned about their citizens.” And I think the reason why that is is because they have some ownership in health care in Europe. And so they carry some of the burdens of health care. And here in the US, we were paying for therapy. We were paying for doctors visits.

It was coming out of our pocket. I thought that that was interesting. I really think we should have some organizations that step up and really reevaluate the chemicals that are in our food so that we know that they’re safe and so that we, as citizens, don’t have to look for these foods and see if they’re safe or not.

Brandon Cawood

Also in Europe, the approval process is more of a, “We need to prove that it’s safe before it’s allowed,” whereas here in America, it’s more like, “Well, we’re going to allow it until we prove that it’s not safe.”

Whitney Cawood

In the case of Red 3, we’ve known since 1990, was the year before I was born, 34 years ago, that we know that it causes cancer. It’s still in… I mean, up until a few months ago, it was in PediaSure. It’s in medications. The worst part is whenever it’s in medications that children take daily. I think your audience would be interested to know that there’s a few other things… Although our film focuses on dyes and behavior, it also focuses on the cancer and how some of these dyes can be carcinogenic. We know that Red 40 can increase your susceptibility to colitis. Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 may contain carcinogenic components. We know that. We’ve had a lot of allergic reactions with Yellow 5, Yellow 6, and Red 40, so it’s causing a lot of hives, throat swellings, things like that. We know that Red 3 and Yellow 5 can be genotoxic, which can cause DNA damage that can be passed from your child to their children or from you to your child or can cause tumors. These are really dangerous chemicals. They look pretty and they look harmless, but they really are not good for us in any way.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, and I want to touch on some practical things, too. Some people might go, “Well, what am I supposed to do? I’m a single mom, and I send my kids to school, and they eat the school lunch because we get it at a discount for free.” What are some practical things that you would answer for somebody in that situation?

Brandon Cawood

The truth is that is an issue, and that’s something we touch on in the film, the free and reduced lunch program. There are a lot of products in the free and reduced lunch program that contain dyes. So we’re pushing in our film for people to contact their state senators and state representatives. We’ve just seen a week and a half ago, two weeks, maybe two weeks ago, California became the first state to ban all the synthetic dyes in public schools. By 2027 in California, synthetic dyes won’t be allowed in the free and reduced lunch program.

Dr. Kevin Conners

There are some good things coming out of California?

Brandon Cawood

Yeah. Well, California also is the only state so far that has banned Red 3. They’re a good starting point with dyes, and they’re such a big part of the population that they can cause some ripple effect. The fact that, are manufacturers going to continue to make the rest of the country with the dye in it and make a separate version for California, I don’t know. Luckily, California has done that, but we’re hoping that that will be a ripple effect. We hope that Georgia can be the second state to do it. That would be really cool, the second state to band synthetic dyes.

Dr. Kevin Conners

I think the grassroots effort is so key. I mean, you didn’t see anything in the organic space 10 years ago, and just it’s supply and demand. People have got to stop buying this stuff.

Whitney Cawood

Right. So practically, you mentioned a single mom, and we actually interview a single mom in this film, and it is a struggle. But it’s going to take a lot of time and effort for you, but you can figure it out. Our son, we normally pack his lunch, but on occasion, we’ll let him eat at school. What we do is we call. I have a really good relationship with the lunchroom, and so I call the manager and I say, “We’re eating lunch today. Can you double-check everything?” And luckily for our school, we haven’t found very many synthetic dyes, and we are a free and reduced lunch school. But I have seen letters from people in our group where the lunch staff will get back and be like, “Yeah, it’s in our pizza sauce. It’s in our fruit cups.” It’s in really places that are surprising. And so it’s really hard for children, especially if you are dependent on a school lunch, which oftentimes can be 70 to 80% of the food that a child consumes daily. They can’t avoid it because there’s not a label on their school lunch. And so they have to eat what is given to them. So that is an issue, obviously.

Brandon Cawood

And on the flip side of that, to know to avoid it at all, you got to know that it’s a thing, and it’s generally not something that most people know.

Whitney Cawood

And so for school parties have been an issue for us because parents always want to celebrate birthdays at school. So what we do logistically is we make little mini cupcakes, and I let my son pick out what kind he wants, and we just make it a really fun treat, and we keep them in the freezer. We treat it almost like a peanut allergy. We keep it in the freezer, and then whenever those surprise parties come, they just pull it out. We send swap boxes, and we just try to think ahead of each a holiday or special occasion, and we bring something that is a safer swap for us. Those are some of the logistics that you can do. It is difficult with the mom that we interviewed. What is most difficult for her is the medication issue. Her son does also have ADHD, and he does take medicine. When he went up from 1mg to 2mg, the 2mg had dyes, whereas the 1mg didn’t. It took her two weeks of back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, and advocating to try to get insurance to cover two 1mg pills so that he could take 2mg instead of 1mg.

She also has to work with a compounding pharmacy, so it is difficult. I do think that it obviously should not be in medication. That’s something we’re really passionate about, and that’s something that not a lot of advocacy groups are talking about, but it’s something that we’re really hoping that our film brings to light so that people can know that it’s an issue.

Brandon Cawood

Well, not to brush past school lunches too much. I do feel like it’s an unfortunate thing. Like she said, one, a lot of times people don’t know that they need to be avoiding it. Two, if you’re on the free and reduced, if you qualify for free and reduced lunch, that’s a big part of your nutrition, and it’s like you need to eat the food. What we’re hoping that we can inspire people to do when they’re contacting their state representatives, things like that, to really question, is it ethical to feed children something that is known to cause behavioral issues and hyperactivity?

Whitney Cawood

DNA damage, carcinogenic…

Brandon Cawood

Is it ethical to feed them these foods and then punish these kids for behavior issues in school? School is the one place you should be trying to avoid anything that could affect behavior negatively at all costs. Hopefully, and I think that’s what’s happened in California. California is also where the OEHHA Report came from, which is the leading report on synthetic dyes that we have today. It was like a big meta-analysis where they brought in all the studies.

Whitney Cawood

Most comprehensive and rigorous undertaking to date on the relationship between synthetic dyes and its effect on children’s behavior. 27 clinical trials, underwent peer review, public comment. It’s the most comprehensive report in the world. It concludes a lot. It concludes all these things that us as parents have been saying for a while. The conclusion was in some children, it can cause hyperactivity, inattentiveness, restlessness, sleeplessness, irritability, and aggression. They also found that women and children that are in higher poverty, that are in poverty, that they are consuming the most synthetic dyes, and they have the least access to dye-free foods. It also found that eliminating synthetic dyes is far more effective to treating ADHD than any other non-drug treatment for ADHD. I think that it’s pretty sound, solidly backed by science, which very often doesn’t happen whenever you’re in the crunchy world. It takes a long time for science to catch up, I feel like.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Yeah. Actually, you’re just bringing to light the science that has already been done.

Whitney Cawood

You’re right. You’re exactly right.

Dr. Kevin Conners

I do want to touch on one other thing because I think there’s a lot of people out there that are going to make the mistake and think, “Well, I ate that when I was a kid, and I’m fine.” But they have to look at the data because the same food that you ate when you were a kid, I don’t know, let’s say, cheerios or something like that. You’re giving it to your kids and giving it to your grandkids, did not contain the dyes and the artificial colors and the artificial flavors that it does today. Even though it looks the same, it tastes the same, it’s not the same product. There’s a lot of data out there on so many processed foods that have changed because they’re less expensive to make putting different artificial flavors and artificial colors in them. I think that has to be-

Whitney Cawood

You’re right.

Brandon Cawood

You also have to look at that dye and the way it affects people. It’s like the spectrum, right? Dr. Stevenson’s study pretty much show that it does affect the general populations, but it’s a spectrum. You have kids in the normal area of the spectrum, and they consume synthetic dyes, and the effect it has on them you may not be able to notice a big change. Those kids, they don’t seem like they’re being effected. But then you have kids on the low end of the spectrum who are right at the edge of behavior issues and needing medication and things like that, where synthetic dyes can push them into that, where you have kids on the higher end of the spectrum, where they’re right at the edge of being exceptional or gifted, and the synthetic dyes are pulling them back away.

Whitney Cawood

Our entire population. To your point, the use of dyes have gone up dramatically since we were children. And so the two points I would make is that the use of dyes has gone up a lot. And then also, are we okay? The amount of friends I have that, they’re tired, they’re sleepless. Are you aggravated? Are you struggling with anxiety and depression? There’s a lot out there, and there’s a lot of… I mean, Millennials are struggling.

Brandon Cawood

And there haven’t been many studies on the effects of dyes in adults. Most of the studies have been on the effects of dyes in children.

Whitney Cawood

And I can say that it affects me. And I did not know that it affected me until I went on an antibiotic that was red. And I was up the whole 10 days. I took it all night, just could not sleep for days, and I could not figure it out. Then I finished up my round of antibiotics, which I, thankfully, have not taken an antibiotic in two years now, which has been good for me. But there are adults that have claimed that they are affected by dyes. Then obviously, the cancer and the genotoxic and all of those things affect us as an adult as well.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, and I would argue, I have a video on our Autoimmune course on Neuroinflammation and Microglial Priming, that these chemicals, dyes and colorings and additives and things, are a major cause of dementia, Parkinson’s, all these neurological disorders from Autoimmune issues to early onset dementia, which is just insanely growing, the Alzheimer’s. People are saying, “Well, it’s because people are living longer.” No, actually, our life expectancy has dropped, and the incidence of Alzheimer’s is just going through the roof, and it’s because of these neurotoxins. From a neurological perspective, when your excitatory neurotransmitters, particularly glutamates in the brain, are near that excitatory threshold, anything can tip them over. You talked about that it’s a spectrum. When you’re closer to that threshold of firing, neurons are either they fire or they don’t fire. But when your neurons are closer to that threshold of excitatory neurotransmitters firing, and you have that stimulation, it doesn’t take much, like you noticed in your son, to cause behavioral issues. Well, maybe in adults, it’s not so much the behavioral issues, but it’s just things – because you can temper it down with your choices as as an adult – but it’s causing neurological damage, that constant chronic inflammation that’s causing neurological diseases.

Brandon Cawood

If you look back at when they started to remove lead, the things like that because lead was affecting the brain and affecting IQ and all that. They actually saw a drop in crime rate and stuff. So it’s a similar comparison. Like these little shifts in the IQ in the population, they may seem small, but on a global scale, shifting the population in any direction, especially in a negative direction, is not good.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, now let’s get to how we can help you, not just us in our clinic, but how anybody listening to this can help you get this information out?

Whitney Cawood

Well, there’s a few ways. We have been very fortunate that God’s given us like a little army, like a little social media army. You can join that army and you can help us spread awareness. You can share resources so that people know that there are options. We would just want to help as many people as possible. You can join our email list, and when you join our email list, we update you on what’s going on in the news. Like right now, there’s a petition that’s going on. Not us, but Food Babe, who is an influencer in the space, and she’s an activist and an influencer, and she is petitioning Kellogg’s to take out Artificial Dyes. We update our audience on how they can help and be a part of the change. We also, on our website, we just created a resources page where we have social media templates that you can post and you can share your story and just engage your audience. But we also have letters that you can write to your school board, like letter templates and letters that you can write to your state representatives to ask them to ban dyes in your state, in the schools in your state, or to ban dyes altogether, or to add a warning label, whatever your heart desires.

But yeah, we really just want you to think about, one, sharing your story, if you have a dye story, or just sharing that this can be an issue. At Taekwondo yesterday, our son takes Taekwondo, and I was talking to a mom, and they have a child that they’re adopting that’s just really struggling, and she had never heard of synthetic dyes. I was able to give her that. I’m not sure if that will be the golden ticket for him, but it could help. I just think people using their voice, using their stories to share that these dyes are harmful. I think that those are all really wonderful things.

Brandon Cawood

Well, and I think that the film, I think the success of the film is going to rely on a word of mouth type, like a grassroots word of mouth.

Whitney Cawood

I don’t think that we talked about this, and that Brandon and I, we’re two people, and we’ve created this documentary. We’ve not been paid by anybody. We have crowdfunded, but we put a large amount of our savings into this because we’re so passionate about it. Our audience knows that, and they have been fired up to get this information out. And so although we don’t necessarily need the monetary support, we really do need people to share and to spread the word, because the more people that we have on our social media, the more people that’s talking about it, the more likely we can get this in the mainstream media, which I’m that you know is incredibly difficult.

Brandon Cawood

What we’re hoping for, too, is we’re hoping that it’s very hard for us to connect to every organization that could find some use with our film. And it’s very hard for us to connect with every single influencer that might be able to use this to help their audience or a politician. So hopefully that we can have people help us with that. Just let people know that this film exists. Anybody that you think could find a use for this film and use it as a resource to educate and to help change and help move this movement forward, we invite anybody to come to our pages and take our resources and send them out and get the word out about the film.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, Brandon and Whitney, it’s been a pleasure to have you. I’d like to have you back, actually, and hear more about this, I think, to talk about this is key because it’s grassroots that’s going to grow this just like any other information. We’ll get information attached to this podcast about everything that we talked about. These lists are so important. Your website is so important. Why don’t you give that verbally again?

Brandon Cawood

Our website is ToDyeForTheDocumentary.com

Whitney Cawood

It’s a D-y-e.

Brandon Cawood

D-y-e, To Dye For, D-y-e. Then if you want to go directly to… We actually have a list set up just for podcast listeners. If you go to ToDyeForTheDocumentary.com/podcast then that’ll take you to our podcast page and you can fill out. Then we can just keep up with people that have found us through listening to a podcast or if you just go to ToDyeForTheDocumentary.com there’s another sign up that puts you in our general newsletter as well.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, thank you. We’re going to be praying for you, too, because I think you’re up against opposition that isn’t in favor of this.

Whitney Cawood

Our God is a lot bigger.

Dr. Kevin Conners

God is bigger, and God has put this on your heart to be your mission, and I’m thankful for you guys.

Brandon Cawood

Thank you so much.

Dr. Kevin Conners

We’ll have you back. Thanks again.

Whitney Cawood

We appreciate you.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Bye-bye.

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