A public safety campaign from the publishers of The Food Magazine
Action On Additives

Write to your MP

Whether you voted for your local MP or not, they will listen to what you think. Let them know you do not want unnecessary additives in children’s food and explain how additives can affect children’s health. Visit this website http://www.writetothem.com/ to see who your local MP is.

You can write a letter to your MP using the text below or you can use the http://www.writetothem.com/ website to send an electronic message (just copy the text below and and paste it into your message).

(Name of MP)
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA 
Date

Dear (Name of MP)

Artificial colourings have no place in children’s food, drink and medicine.

I wish to express my concern that artificial colourings such as tartrazine and allura red are still routinely added to children’s food, drink and medicine. Mixtures of these colourings, when consumed with the preservative sodium benzoate, have been shown to have a small, but significant, effect on activity and attention in some children selected from the general population.

Where is the public interest in keeping these additives in our food? Artificial food colourings are completely unnecessary ingredients and have no nutritional value. The Action on Additives campaign (www.actiononadditives.com) has now found over 1,000 products containing these food additives, many of them clearly aimed at children.
Rather than ban these unnecessary food additives The Food Standards Agency is advising consumers to examine the ingredients of every food and drink they purchase. This is simply not possible for many people, and ignores the fact that lots of products are purchased directly by children, or are sold without ingredients information.

Further testing of these additives would cost millions and take many years. The Associate Parliamentary Food and Health Forum recommended in January 2008 that, "regulations should be introduced to prohibit all artificial colours and non-essential preservatives in food products and soft drinks."

It is time to make our food and drink safe, and to give artificial colourings the red card.

Yours sincerely,

(Your name)

For more information see www.actiononadditives.com

Write to companies

All food, drink and medicine manufacturers should provide an address to which you can write if you are unhappy with a product you have purchased. They may also give a telephone number.

If you or your children have purchased a product without realising it contains one or more of the suspect additives let the manufacturer know you are unhappy about it. Companies do take note of what their customers think – which is why we have already seen some manufacturers removing the unnecessary food additives.

Use the power of your pen to make manufacturers take action!

Write to your local newspaper, or your favourite magazine

Tell them what you think about artificial colourings and encourage readers to visit the Action on Additives website. The more people we tell about the problem, the faster we can get it fixed.

Print more cards

If you would like to print more copies of our 'Seven suspect food additives' cards, please click on the link below to open a pdf document which you can print from home.

Print more cards

If you cannot open this document you many need to download the free Adobe Reader software (22MB). Click on the logo below to visit the Adobe website and download Adobe Reader.

 

Sign up for more information

If you want to be kept informed about food additives, please enter your email address below and press 'add email'. Your email address will not be passed to any third parties or marketing agencies and will only be used by the Action on Additives campaign.

Email

Name

Seven suspect additives card

If you would like a handy Action on Additives plastic card, listing the seven suspect additives, please send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to the Action on Additives campaign, 94 White Lion Street, London N1 9PF. We can supply up to three free cards to any one address, so you can share the cards with your friends.

If you would like to purchase a larger number of the cards, please email Anna at anna@actiononadditives.com for details of cost.

You can also print a sheet of ten cards by clicking on the link below.
Print more cards

Do you work in the hospitality sector?

The Action on Additives campaign welcomes information from people working in restaurants, hotels or contract catering. If you can tell us more about the use of any of these additives in the hospitality sector, where such additives usually go unlabelled, please click here.

 
text size  
©2008 ActionOnAdditives.com