Tartrazine

Tartrazine is a synthetic yellow. It colours soft drinks, sweets, sauces, desserts and a long tail of processed food, and it appears in some medicines and cosmetics too.

It is one of six colours that carry something almost nothing else on a European label carries: a mandatory warning aimed at parents.

The sentence on the package

Under Regulation 1333/2008, a food containing any of six colours must be labelled with the colour’s name or E number followed by: “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children”.

The six, usually called the Southampton colours, are tartrazine (E102), quinoline yellow (E104), sunset yellow (E110), carmoisine (E122), ponceau 4R (E124) and allura red (E129). The requirement has applied to products on the EU market since July 2010.

If you have seen that phrasing on a packet of sweets and wondered who decided it, this is the answer.

Where the warning comes from

Research commissioned by the UK Food Standards Agency and published in 2007, known as the Southampton study, tested mixtures of these six colours together with the preservative sodium benzoate in children drawn from the general population rather than only children already diagnosed with attention problems. It reported increased hyperactive behaviour associated with the mixtures.

Three details matter for reading that fairly, and they usually get lost.

It tested mixtures, not tartrazine alone. The finding is about combinations of colours plus a preservative, which is not the same as a claim about any single one of them.

The effect was at a population level. That does not tell you what any individual child will do.

Regulators disagreed about what to do with it. The EU responded with a labelling requirement rather than a ban, which is a middle position: not “this is dangerous”, not “this is nothing”, but “you should be told”. Authorities elsewhere read the same evidence and did not require the same warning, which is why you will not see that sentence on a US package.

How to hold it

The warning is a real legal requirement based on real research, and it is not scaremongering. It is also narrower than “this colour makes children hyperactive”, which is how it usually gets repeated.

If you are a parent who wants to avoid these colours, the label makes that unusually easy, because the law obliges the package to tell you. That is a rare kindness in food labelling, and it is worth using.

If a specific child has behaviour you are trying to understand, that is a conversation with a clinician and not a labelling question. The wider context is on the page for parents.

Names to know

Tartrazine, E102, FD&C Yellow No. 5, Yellow 5, CI 19140. The US name is the one that catches people, because “Yellow 5” on an American label and “E102” on a European one are the same dye.

All the alternative names we index are on the names page.