Truth in labeling?

This label on Kraft Macaroni and Cheese from the U.K. was brought to my attention by Wheat Belly Facebook follower Jennifer.

While the warning about effects on “activity and attention in children” was meant to warn parents about the potential effects of yellow food coloring, the label nonetheless rings so painfully true.

While we know that food colorings have been associated with impaired attention and learning, as well as heightened impulsiveness, in susceptible children, we also know that wheat consumption triggers similar phenomena in adults.

It’s all about the gliadin protein in wheat, degraded in the gastrointestinal tract to small polypeptides, small enough to penetrate into the brain and affect behavior. Gliadin-derived polypeptides can distort “activity and attention in children,” but also cause mania in bipolar illness, paranoia and hallucinations in paranoid schizophrenics, food obsessions in people prone to binge eating disorder and bulimia, and appetite stimulation and mind “fog” in people without these susceptibilities.

If food companies were indeed required to provide a label revealing such effects on their foods, foods that are the product of extreme and sometimes bizarre methods to introduce novel genetic changes, well, they might have to add: Consume this food at your own risk.