Have you had your blue food coloring today?

Posted on July 29th, 2009 by Craig Maltby, Editor

Have you had your blue food coloring today?

The white rats in the study actually took on a light blue tint. Image: Takahiro Takano, University of Rochester Medical Center.

I love it when a weird convergence happens and a surprise, yet legitimate, scientific event results. Such was the case with the immune balance ingredient EpiCor several years ago. Production employees working in a plant manufacturing an agricultural nutritional additive were observed, over the course of several years, to have experienced significantly fewer sick days than employees in similar sized facilities in other industries. The findings were so compelling that in-depth testing was done, and the results showed those employees had immune systems that performed much more efficiently and in a balanced fashion. Owing the surprising data to exposure to this natural additive, next thing you knew, a proprietary adaptation of that ingredient, formulated for human consumption, was born. Hence, EpiCor.

Now, this week we’re reading that lab rats with injured, but not severed, spinal cords, given injections of the blue colorant used in Gatorade, blue M&Ms and other “blue food,” experienced significant reduction in spinal inflammation, so much so that they could walk.

According to a story posted on the Web site of The Scientist magazine, “When a spine is crushed — but not severed — patients often gets worse two to three days after the initial injury, when inflammatory cells inundate the spinal cord. The immune cells are ‘recruited to clean up the mess, but if you get too many, they spit out reactive oxygen species,’ explained George Dubyak from Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, who was not involved in the research. The inflammation causes additional injury to the spinal tissue, he said.”

That prolonged inflammation resulting from overactive immune response, can linger for hours and cause a second wave of damage to an injured spinal column.

Now don’t go out and start downing quarts of blue Jello or piles of blue Skittles. This still needs to be tested on humans, somehow. And the rat study included several modalities of treatment application that may not be applicable to people. Still, isn’t is fascinating, as the blue-blooded Mr. Spock might say. No wait, his blood was green.