Dyes, Sugar, Air and Screens: A Practical Conversation About Protecting Children's Health
Bryan Johnson
Bryan Johnson says children's health has been on his mind for the 22 years since his first child was born. He remembers reading an ingredient label in a store, not recognizing what was listed, and then reading up on those ingredients and deciding "this is a bad situation." The same products were stocked in his pantry and in the homes of his children's friends. Keeping them out has been, in his words, a battle he has fought for two decades, made harder because his kids naturally wanted those foods and their friends had them.
In this episode Johnson is joined by his Blueprint co-founder Kate Tolo and Dr. Mike Mallin, an emergency medicine physician who is also Johnson's doctor. Johnson describes the topic as sensitive and frightening because children are helpless and can be disadvantaged early by the food they eat, the air they breathe, and the water they drink. The show usually covers the science of a danger first and the protocols second. This time the hosts reverse that order. They start with manageable steps parents can take at home and talk openly about how hard it is to apply them. Their central question is what narrow, focused actions adults can take to keep children safe and healthy. They admit they are not sure where the right balance lies between strict control and teaching children to choose for themselves.
Synthetic Dyes: What They Are and Where They Hide
Tolo opens with what she calls the good news: these harms are "entirely preventable," because they are things in the environment that people often choose without knowing it. Education is the main lever, and synthetic dyes are the first example.
Mallin describes synthetic dyes as colorings added to many food products, and added disproportionately to children's products. The ones people usually mean are the red and yellow dyes, which he says have been linked directly to inattention and hyperactivity disorders. He thinks the effect probably applies to all synthetic dyes, and he notes a movement to reduce synthetic dye exposure across the board, especially in children's food. He adds that most of the research has focused on Red 40 and Yellow 5.
Tolo cites figures she believes are correct. About 19% of foods in general contain synthetic dyes, compared with about 28% of foods marketed to children. Her conclusion is that parents should not assume a product marketed to kids is healthy. If anything, they should assume the opposite and check the back of the package, where a dye like Red 40 is usually listed plainly. Mallin suggests organic-labeled foods typically avoid synthetic dyes, but says the best approach is to read the ingredients. He names sports drinks, Kool-Aid and cereals as major offenders, and says brilliantly colored food is a good sign that synthetic dyes are present. Tolo adds that dyes have been linked to behavioral effects such as ADHD, as well as gut issues, higher cancer risk and cellular damage.
Johnson then reads a list he got by asking GPT for the ten foods with the highest synthetic dye levels:
- Target mini green cupcakes: 55.3 mg (Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1 and Red 40)
- Kool-Aid Burst Cherry: 52 mg
- Sunny D orange strawberry: 45 mg
- Cap'n Crunch Oops! All Berries: 41 mg
- Pillsbury Funfetti frosting: 41 mg
- Trix: 36 mg
- Crush orange soda: 33 mg
- Skittles: 33 mg
- Fruity Cheerios: 31 mg
- Milk chocolate M&M's: 29 mg
Johnson jokes that the list describes his whole childhood menu and asks whether this is "why I'm so messed up." Mallin says his own childhood diet was the same.
Tolo points out that the obvious culprits are brightly colored, but some foods contain dyes people would not expect. Her examples are plain hot dog buns, where the light brown crust often contains Yellow 5 and 6; blueberry bagels, whose berries get extra color from Red 40 and Blue 1; wasabi-coated peas colored with Blue 1 and Yellow 5; dill pickles; and berry-flavored yogurts. In her view these marketing tactics often hide in plain sight.
Teaching Kids Through the Things They Care About
Tolo asks whether sitting children down to explain these issues actually works. Mallin says his son seems to show behavioral changes with synthetic dyes. The family taught him very young to avoid certain colors of food, and he now pays attention on his own, telling people, "Oh, I don't eat blue foods."
Johnson describes his own method: connect ingredients to something the child already values. When a parent brought Capri Suns after a soccer game, drinks Johnson guessed contain 20 to 30 grams of sugar, he told his kids that drinking one would make them run slower, pass worse and shoot worse. His son Talmage, who was the fastest kid on the team and did not want to lose that edge, responded right away.
Johnson compares this to building a "sleep culture" in a family, which the show has covered before. A family can declare itself "a family of sleep" and set clear rules: screens off 60 minutes before bed, no eating within a set time before bed, nobody gets out of bed at night except in an emergency, and nobody wakes anyone else. Progress can be tracked with a star chart. He suggests treating sugar, dyes and other ingredients the same way, as part of the family culture.
He acknowledges the social cost. At birthday parties with pizza, cupcakes and sugary drinks, he packed his son a lunchbox of food he could eat. Johnson calls this "really awkward": everyone else has pizza and a sugary drink while his child eats something different. He says it puts the child in a challenging position and asks them to be comfortable being "that kid."
The 25-Gram Sugar Limit
Mallin says children's sugar intake should be limited to 25 grams a day, and he doesn't think most people realize how low that is. In his estimate, most products marketed to children contain 25 grams in a single serving. A Capri Sun or a cupcake alone goes past the limit, so meeting it would require "a complete overhaul" of what children are usually fed. Tolo adds that the average American child eats 68 grams of added sugar a day. Mallin says that could be reached with just a Capri Sun and some cereal, "not even a wild day." When they recap, Tolo and Mallin clarify that the 25-gram target covers total sugars, including natural sugars in fruit.
Johnson lays out a rough ladder of difficulty. The easy category is foods that are obviously bad, like M&M's, sugary cereals and the dye list. Next are foods framed as healthy, such as a Capri Sun presented as fruit juice that still carries a lot of added sugar. Hardest are foods like hot dog buns or certain bagels, which seem like ordinary whole foods and don't look "ultra-processed."
The Easy Path, the Hard Path, and an Honest "I Don't Know"
Johnson asks Mallin how a parent should handle this, given limited knowledge, limited time, and children who may simply refuse. Mallin splits the question along two axes.
On what to eliminate, the easy approach is to cut sugar and check labels for Red 40 and Yellow 5. The hard approach adds cutting ultra-processed foods and buying only organic. On behavior, the easy approach is to stock the best foods at home and not police what children eat at birthday parties or elsewhere. The hard approach is to try to control everything that goes into the child's mouth. The "easy-easy" path is buying the best food you reasonably can for the home without getting extreme. The "hard-hard" path is scrutinizing every ingredient, making sure everything is real food, and making sure that is all the child ever gets.
Mallin does not pick one. He says every parent has to wrestle with the choice, find where they are comfortable, and make the best decision they can, and he adds, "I'm not sure that we have the right answer."
Restriction Versus Education: Kate's Skittles Story
Tolo tells a story from the other side. Her mother worked hard to raise her on healthy food. When she flew to the US alone at 19, she was too nervous to leave her New York hotel room for food, and her first meal in the country was a packet of Skittles.
Mallin sees this as the core dilemma. Should parents restrict access the way Tolo's mother did, or teach children in the expectation that they will leave home and choose for themselves? He wonders whether children who are completely kept away from these foods might choose all of them once they are free to. He says he thinks about this all the time.
Tolo says she doesn't know the right answer either, but leans toward the stricter path. Even her Skittles dinner was a conscious choice: she knew she was rebelling and that she was deciding as an adult with the information she had. She considers that a better starting point than not knowing at all. She describes her mother's approach as not especially restrictive outside the home. Her mother did not punish her for eating what friends ate, and instead made sure the home environment was "safe, period." Tolo believes this genuinely worked.
She also credits simple rules of thumb that were "probably not perfect, but did the job." Her mother often used the word "chemicals," which Tolo admits wasn't scientifically precise, but it ruled out most bad products. Her reasoning is that even if a particular dye weren't toxic, a product using dyes is probably also full of added sugar, because companies using those tactics aren't worried about much else. Mallin says his household uses "eat real food." He admits "real" is subjective, but says the point is that people are trying to sell you fake things and you should watch for that.
Johnson adds some figures on engineered addictiveness: biscuits and cookies carry a 4.1 times risk of addiction and sausages an 11 times risk, according to the numbers he cites. He asks Tolo whether framing foods as addictive would have worked on her. She says she doesn't know what would have worked, but still thinks her mother's approach was the right one.
Giving Children Measurement Tools
Johnson suggests giving children the tools to see effects for themselves. On a trip to India he gave Talmage an air quality monitor. Talmage measured every room, café, indoor and outdoor space, and car they were in. In one car he asked the driver to turn on the BMW's internal air filtration and wanted to know what filter it used for PM2.5 and VOCs.
Johnson asks whether children can use a continuous glucose monitor. Mallin says there's no reason they couldn't, since diabetic children already do. Johnson thinks it could help kids build intuition about what fruit juice or sugary cereal does to their blood glucose. He describes an idea from last Halloween: set up a station in front of his house with sugary treats and finger-prick tests to show kids their blood glucose rising. He estimates the rise takes 15 to 20 minutes, then realizes he could just test kids when they arrive, since they would already have been eating candy. Mallin calls it "a whole new level of vampire." Johnson says he thinks they will actually do it this Halloween.
Air Quality, School Performance and Allergies
Johnson then turns to the home environment, which the show has covered in other episodes. His recommendations are to use a MERV 13 filter, or the highest rating possible, in the HVAC system, and to vacuum twice a week with a HEPA-filter vacuum. He points out that children spend a lot of time on the floor crawling, walking and putting things in their mouths.
He also brings up lead. According to Johnson, removing lead from gasoline in the 1980s was correlated with an average IQ increase of 2 to 5 points. He values that at $8 trillion, based on a 1.8% to 2.4% increase in lifetime earning potential per IQ point. He argues that raising a population's IQ is one of the fastest ways for a nation to thrive, and that harmful ingredients and toxins can lower it. He finds it backwards that in the current US budget debate nobody suggests reducing the toxin and bad-ingredient load. Instead, he says, the discussion focuses on cutting Medicare or Medicaid, the services that deal with the "catastrophic harm" of the toxic food system.
Mallin connects this to air quality. He cites a study in 18 Los Angeles schools that installed HEPA and activated carbon units in classrooms. Particulate matter fell by 60% to 100%, which was associated with a 0.2 standard deviation improvement in math and English scores. His conclusion is that cleaner air is good for both a child's health and their brain.
Tolo adds a study suggesting that early exposure to air pollution may double the risk of a peanut allergy persisting to age 10. She says she has seen a statistic putting peanut allergy treatment costs at $300 million by 2030, and remarks that much of that could be preventable.
Movement and Sleep
When the group recaps, they list avoiding artificial dyes, keeping total sugar at or below 25 grams a day, and measuring and filtering air. Mallin adds at least an hour a day of unstructured play, outdoor activity or other movement. He thinks this is often forgotten. With school recess sometimes down to 15 minutes, he says the responsibility falls on parents, who have to pull kids away from video games and screens and send them outside. Physical activity used to happen on its own, he says, and now it has to be planned.
Tolo covers sleep, noting that children need more sleep for cognitive development. The ranges she gives are:
- Ages 3–5: 10 to 13 hours
- Ages 6–12: 9 to 12 hours
- Ages 13–18: 8 to 10 hours
She says all three hosts would have benefited from learning early to keep a consistent bedtime and treat it as sacred.
Screens, Social Media and Emotional Health
Mallin wonders whether screens and mental health deserve a separate episode, but Johnson says they matter just as much and should be included. Mallin sees screens and social media as the most obvious recent change affecting children. He stresses limiting screen exposure for young children, which means not simply putting them in front of an iPad, and delaying social media. He notes that recommendations vary: some studies suggest not before 8th grade, others 13 or 16, and "ideally never." To him it feels like every new study pushes the age later.
He calls COVID a major challenge. With children at home and parents working from home, many kids spent a lot of time in front of TVs, and he says the long-term effects are still unknown. Looking back, he believes more unstructured play and less screen time are better.
He also stresses teaching children about emotions: what they feel like and what they are. Children should be allowed to feel them rather than being told not to cry or not to be angry. Mallin calls this a much bigger topic and predicts that children's mental health will become an increasingly central part of parenting.
Why US Children Fare So Badly
Johnson asks Mallin, as a physician, to assess data Johnson found frightening: child mortality rates in the US and increases in obesity and blood glucose problems that Johnson describes as ranging from 20% to 80%. Mallin says US culture, which he believes spreads into other developed countries, "is making terrible decisions for our children." He acknowledges the benefits of capitalism but sees serious downsides in advertising to children, and he blames poor choices by both corporations and parents about toxins, food, air quality, social media and screens. He calls the statistic that US infants have a 78% higher risk of death than babies in other wealthy countries "freaky." Given childhood obesity, screen time and declining physical activity, though, he says the number becomes "more and more believable," which he finds a scary thing to say.
Johnson turns to regulation. As he describes it, Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1977, which assumes chemicals are safe until proven harmful. He says the number of chemicals and plastics in circulation has grown 50-fold since the 1950s. He cites a US study of 201 children aged 2 to 4 in which dozens of chemicals were detected in urine samples, with 34 present in more than 90% of them.
He gives a personal example. During the Los Angeles fires, which he says burned around 20,000 homes, his team could see toxins from burning homes and cars show up in his own body, and could match chemicals to sources: "that's PVC pipe," "that's a floor," "that's a car." A fire is an acute event, he notes, but everyday exposure is a slower version of the same thing: chemicals manufactured throughout society end up in human bodies, and some can be linked to hormone disruption or effects on cognition. He emphasizes that these chemicals were not made as toxins. They were usually well-intentioned and designed to be useful, like the PFAS in non-stick pans discussed in an earlier episode.
He contrasts this with drug regulation. The FDA does not allow drugs on the market until they are proven safe, so people trying to do good with medicine face very high evidence requirements, while chemical makers can produce what they want until harm is proven. Johnson calls this "a twisted, backwards approach" and says the two standards should be swapped.
Small Steps, and Who Is Looking Out for You
Johnson encourages viewers to change their habits a little at a time. The first stage is what the family eats at home and keeping the home environment clean. The next is how to handle birthday parties. The last is how children behave once they grow up and leave home, when the family rules no longer apply. He argues that parents have to be proactive because "society is not doing it for you," and that until that changes, rejecting these practices will take a grassroots effort.
Mallin asks whether Johnson sees himself as the one looking out for people. Johnson says that is probably the role he tries to fill. He explains that his parents "said yes to the system," doing what everyone else did without much scrutiny. He stresses that this isn't a criticism, but he considers himself a product of it and did not want the same for his children, so he tried to find the system's weaknesses and fight them.
Mallin admits it is hard for a parent not to feel powerless when culture and society seem to be working against you: social media, friends, and other parents who pay no attention to the dyes in the green cupcakes at a birthday party. His comfort is that he pays attention when he can and does his best at home, teaching his children why what they eat matters, which his own parents, who trusted that corporations wouldn't sell harmful chemicals to children, did not do. He sees it as progress that people now recognize these issues at all. He recommends acting where it makes sense, in a rational way, with some grace toward yourself, and says that makes the problem feel less ominous.
Tolo points to signs of change driven by public pressure. Kraft Heinz has pledged to remove all synthetic dyes by 2027. She would like it to happen sooner but understands that product changes take time, and she finds the commitment encouraging. Johnson adds air fresheners, scented cans, candles and aerosols to the list of things parents should think about.
Talmage as Evidence That Environment Shapes Children
Mallin reflects that Talmage shows what happens when a child lives with a parent who cares about these issues: Talmage adopted his environment. Johnson says this seemed to happen willingly and became clear when he took Talmage to college. Seeing classmates eat all kinds of bad food, Talmage said something like "that is crazy, why are they doing that?" Johnson says hearing that "felt so good as a father," because the conviction came from Talmage himself.
Asked how they feel after the conversation, Mallin says he feels more empowered than frightened as a parent. Tolo says it motivates her to treat "every molecule that enters my body" as something that affects her ability to be healthy, smart, capable and strong over the long term.
Giving Children a Voice
The conversation ends with a thought experiment from Johnson. He wishes there were a social mechanism that made children powerful, such as a voting bloc, so they would not have to wait until adulthood to have a voice. When Mallin jokes that children would just vote for free Skittles, Johnson clarifies that he means representing what science says is good for children, not what they want. He compares it to an idea he has played with: if he were president, one third of Congress would represent planet Earth and two thirds humans. He suggests AI models might play a similar role as they improve. Tolo extends the idea to adults: if people's biological data could vote for them and showed that sugar makes people obese and kills them, there would probably be some regulation of sugar. Johnson says that is what Blueprint is for him: it gave his body the decision-making power and took his mind, with its "I feel like this," out of the equation.
Johnson calls the conversation "sobering" and "somber." He says all three hosts have experienced things that were not ideal for their own potential, not because the people around them didn't love them, but because society's systems "just were not smart enough." He hopes viewers leave with practical tips for protecting the most vulnerable members of society, the people who will define the future. The question Mallin raised earlier, how far to restrict children and how much to trust them to choose, remains unanswered by all three.
My kids, we would go to these parties and I would pack them like a lunch pail with stuff that they would eat. Now, of course, that's really awkward because everybody else has pizza and a sugary drink and there's my child with their lunchbox eating their non-sugar-based stuff. It puts them in a challenging position and asks them to be okay to be that kid.
So, there's the easy and the hard way when it comes to choosing the right foods. I think that this is a challenge every parent has to go through and has to fight with and find where they're most comfortable and make the best decision they can for their family, but I'm not sure that we have the right answer.
Hi everyone, welcome to the Bryan Johnson podcast. I'm here with my Blueprint co-founder Kate Tolo and Dr. Mike Mallin, who is an emergency medicine doctor and also my physician. Today we're talking about something near and dear to my heart, which is children's health and wellness. And so this has been something on my mind for the past 22 years of my life, since I had my first child. I remember going to the store and looking at the ingredients label and saying, what is this? And then I started reading about the ingredients and I thought, this is a bad situation. But they were in our pantry stocked, and when we went to their friends' house they were there as well. It was this common thing that all the kids ate these foods with high sugar and ingredients which didn't sound great.
So, I have been fighting that battle for 22 years. It has been very challenging because my kids naturally want to eat those things and their friends have those things. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There's other things as well that are very problematic for our kids, including toxins in food and the environment. And so, this one is a sensitive and scary topic because children are helpless. And you know, it just breaks my heart and all of our hearts to see that when they're growing up and they have everything before them, they can become disadvantaged by the foods they eat, the air they breathe, the water they drink.
So, we want to acknowledge in entering this topic that typically we've approached this podcast where we speak about the perils and the science of danger and then we go through the protocols. Today we're going to flip it and we're going to do the protocols that you can focus on, and we're going to try to make it manageable, like things you can actually do, and talk through the nuance of being a parent bringing these practices inside your home. So with that, Dr. Mallin, Kate, let's get started. What can we tell adults of the narrow and focused things they can do to keep their children safe and healthy?
I think the first thing to note here is that the good news is that this is all entirely preventable. These are actually things that are in our environment that oftentimes we're unknowingly opting for. So the biggest thing is education. So there are a couple things we can start with. One is synthetic dyes. Mike, what are synthetic dyes?
Synthetic dyes are colorings that are additive, added to many food products, but disproportionately added to children's products. The ones that we're thinking of typically are the red and yellow dyes, and those have been linked directly to inattention and to hyperactivity disorders. It probably happens with all of the synthetic dyes. So there's actually been a movement to try to reduce all synthetic dye exposure, especially in children's foods, across the board. But the research has been predominantly on Red 40 and Yellow No. 5.
In typical, I think this is the right stats, across food generally it's around 19% contain synthetic dyes, whereas in children's food, again, this is companies marketing toward kids, it's a high percentage, it's around 28%. It's a note for us all to not assume when we look at a product that it's healthy for our kids if it's marketed toward our kids. Actually, maybe it's best to have the opposite assumption and turn it over and look at the back of the packaging. Fortunately, oftentimes it'll say loud and clear Red 40 or some sort of other synthetic dye. And so you can know that's not for my kids.
Generally, you can look for those foods that are sort of quote-unquote organic. Those typically don't have the synthetic dyes in them. But really the best thing to do is just look at the actual ingredients themselves and look for those specific dyes. But think about like sports drinks, Kool-Aid are big offenders, cereals are big offenders. Anytime when you see really brilliant and colorful colors in your child's food, that's probably a synthetic dye.
And these things have been linked to things like behavioral effects in children. So ADHD, gut issues, higher risk of cancer, cellular damage. So not to freak you guys out, but it is a serious thing that is worth paying attention to. You both have kids. Have you found that sitting them down and trying to educate them on these topics actually works?
Yes. So, interestingly, my son does seem to have some behavioral changes with the synthetic dyes, and we taught him very young to avoid certain color foods. And he actually pays attention to it. It's kind of interesting, you know, because he learned so young. He's like, "Oh, I don't eat blue foods."
Like, really? As it relates to the potential harm of ingredients, I think we're still learning the effects of these synthetic dyes and then other ingredients in food. Looking back, though, the removal of lead from gasoline in the 1980s was correlated with an average IQ increase of 2 to 5 points. And looking at this from an economic perspective, that would be worth $8 trillion, because there's a 1.88 to 2.4% increase of lifelong earning potential per additional IQ point. And so one of the fastest ways to become a thriving nation is to increase the IQ of your population. And these harmful ingredients and toxins can potentially lessen IQ.
We are currently having a pretty big and loud debate in the United States about our budget deficit. But never does anyone make the argument that a way to solve the budget is to actually lessen the toxin and bad ingredient load in the United States. It's mostly about cutting Medicare or Medicaid. The insanity is cutting the services that are trying to deal with the catastrophic harm of our toxin and bad food system. So, it's really kind of backwards.
You can also use this as a vector. When I was explaining this to my kids, I would explain to them the harm that these ingredients were doing to their body. When they were in soccer, I would explain after the game, when a parent shows up with these Capri Suns, so these little packages that have 20, 30 grams, I'm guessing, I said, "If you drink that, you run slower on the field." And they're like, "Oh, okay. I see that." Or you're not going to be able to pass as well or shoot your goals as well. So I tried to connect it to very tangible things that
mattered to them.
Yeah. Exactly. And so I remember Talmage was really responsive. When I told him that, he was like, "I got it." Because he was the fastest kid on his team and he did not want to lose that edge. So like Mike, I sat my kids down and I tried to use various tactics to explain how bad ingredients negatively affected the things they cared about.
This is also very similar to the idea of sleep culture in a family. So as we go through these things today, and we talked about the synthetic dyes and how Mike spoke to his son about this, you know, the same you could do with sleep and say, we are a family of sleep. This is our rule for screen time. We turn screens off 60 minutes before bed. We don't eat this amount of time before bed. Nobody gets out of their bed during the night unless there's an emergency. Nobody wakes anyone up ever. And you have a star chart where you're giving these assessments. We've talked about this on a previous podcast. So you could actually follow the same protocol that we're going to talk about today in terms of sugars, dyes, and other ingredients, that you just establish a family culture.
Now, of course, there's secondary challenges: when they go to a friend's birthday party, and that party has pizza, cupcakes, and sugary drinks, what do they do? And so I remember that with my son, we would go to these parties, and I would pack them like a lunch pail with stuff that they would eat. Now, of course, that's really awkward because they are in that moment now doing this really weird thing. Everybody else has pizza and a sugary drink and there's my child with their lunchbox eating their non-sugar-based stuff. It puts them in a challenging position and asks them to be okay to be that kid. But these are the kinds of things we should probably talk about, practical things that parents can do to try to counteract these otherwise damaging things in the kids' bodies.
Yeah. And one of the things you were just talking about there, Bryan, the attempt to reduce sugar intake. Really we should be trying to limit sugar to 25 g a day for kids. And I don't think that registers for most people how low that is. When you think about what kids typically eat, the majority of things marketed to children have 25 g of sugar in them, just one serving of one of those items. The idea of trying to limit to 25 means a complete overhaul of what is typically fed to the children in our society. I mean, we're talking about a Capri Sun, more than 25 g, right? A cupcake, more than 25 g. Any of these things that are standard, typical daily foods that children eat get you past that threshold of 25 g of sugar. It's a complete switch.
And to jump back, you guys, on the synthetic dyes, sorry I'm going back on this, I just looked up on GPT the top 10 foods that have the highest level of synthetic dyes. I'll run through a few. Target mini green cupcakes, 55.3 mg. That's Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, and Red 40. Kool-Aid Burst Cherry, 52 mg. Sunny D orange strawberry, 45 milligrams. Cap'n Crunch Oops! All Berries, 41 milligrams. Can we please make a meme of Cap'n Crunch Oops and cross out All Berries and put in All Synthetic Dyes. Pillsbury Funfetti confetti frosting, 41 milligrams. Trix, 36 milligrams. Crush orange soda, 33. Skittles, 33. Fruity Cheerios, 31. M&M's milk chocolate, 29.
Reading this list, I am chock-full of synthetic dyes. I mean, this was what I ate as a kid. My entire childhood was this menu of foods.
Same, same.
Is this why I'm so messed up?
I'm 12% synthetic dyes. Yeah,
I have the opposite response, where my mom worked so hard. I got in a plane to the US as an uncontaminated being, and then I landed, and you know what the first thing I ate was in the US? I got into New York, in my hotel room.
I'm bracing myself.
I'm too scared to go outside and get food because I'm, you know, 19, alone in the country, and I got a packet of Skittles and that's what I have for dinner.
Yeah. So that's interesting to me, Kate, despite your childhood of being raised on all these healthy things and focusing on food quality, the first thing you ate was Skittles. That is something that I think is a delicate nuance about what we're talking about. Do you do more like Kate's mother did, where you just make sure you prevent the access to any of these foods, or like Bryan's done with his children? Or do you try to teach them the way, expecting that someday they're going to leave home, they're going to make decisions for themselves, and if you've completely excluded those foods they're just going to choose all of those foods? Do you know what I mean? I wonder about this all the time.
Yeah, I don't know what the right answer would be. I will say that I think if you're going to have to choose a path, definitely go on the more extreme, because it at least educates them that you're making a decision every time. So I was 19. I was consciously making decisions with that information at least in my arsenal. And so I knew I was rebelling. I knew that it was a decision I got to make because I was an adult and I could eat whatever I wanted. I think that's still a better starting point than not knowing it at all.
And Mike, to your point on the 25 g of sugar per day for the child, in the US the average added sugar is 68 g per day.
Wild.
Sounds about right.
Just added sugars as well.
I mean, that's just a Capri Sun and some cereal. That's not even a wild day.
You guys, I also want to mention, Bryan, you went through all the obvious ones, right? Like Skittles. You can see the color. But here are some things that might have unexpected dyes. So, plain hot dog buns. Oftentimes that light brown crust has Yellow 5 and 6. Blueberry bagels, the berries get extra coloring from Red 40 and Blue 1. This isn't all, but these are in some. Wasabi-covered peas, so the bright green, Blue 1, Yellow 5. Dill pickles, same situation. Berry-flavored yogurts. So, it's definitely worth noting that these marketing tactics are often hiding in plain sight.
If we go down from easy to hard, then we could start with, we sit the family down and we say, okay, there are some things that are clearly not a good idea, like M&M's and sugar cereals, like the list we just went down for synthetic dyes. That's a pretty good category. And then we get into more nuanced things where you get like a Capri Sun, where they frame it as fruit juice. You're like, "It's fruit, it must be good." But then it's got 25 extra grams of sugar. And so anytime you have high concentrations of sugar, that's also bad. Kate just went through a few of the nuanced ones, where a hot dog bun or a certain kind of bagel, those are more nuanced, where you're thinking this is a whole food, it's fine, and it's not, you know, quote-unquote ultra-processed.
Therefore, and so Mike, how do we think about, as a parent, how do you tackle this complicated problem, knowing you can't do it all, but you want to try to knock out the biggest ones, because you're battling this in your own knowledge, you're battling this in your own time, and also with your kids? What would your kids actually do? Because there's this discussion of what's good for the kids, then there's the reality of kids being like, uh-uh, I'm not eating that, not doing it. So how would you take this? Because we have quite a few suggested protocols here that we've done research on, but how would you do it as a parent?
So there's two different categories. There's the easy and the hard way when it comes to choosing the right foods, right? So the easy way is probably just eliminating sugar and looking for Red 40 and Yellow 5 on the ingredient labels. The hard way being, you know, eliminating sugar, eliminating quote-unquote ultra-processed foods, buying only organic. And then there's also the behavioral side of things, where it's like, I'm just going to buy these foods for my house and stop there and just expose my child to the best foods possible at home, and I'm not going to say you can or cannot eat things when you're out at a birthday party or doing other things. And then the hard way on the behavioral side would be, I'm going to try to control everything that goes into my child's mouth or everything that they get exposed to.
Right? So it just depends on how far you're willing to go on both fronts. I think the easy easy path is buy the best foods that you can without getting crazy about it for your home. That's the easy easy path. And then the hard hard path is be meticulous about every single ingredient in your child's food, make sure it's all real food, and then make sure that that's all that they get all of the time. I don't know what the right
answer is. I mean, to be honest with you, I think that this is a challenge every parent has to go through and has to fight with and find where they're most comfortable in terms of the easy-easy or hard-hard path and make the best decision they can for their family. But I'm not sure that we have the right answer.
So Kate, your mother was very thoughtful about what you guys consumed, and there's now a lot of research out there. For example, we know that certain foods have certain addictive powers. For example, consumption of biscuits and cookies have a 4.1 times risk of being addicted. Sausages have an 11 times risk of creating addiction. And so, some of these foods really are engineered for addiction. That's their entire game, is doing that. If your parents would have framed this to you in terms of, hey Kate, eating this is going to create some kind of addiction pathway, would you have been responsive to that, or did the approach that she took, do you think, prep you to generally now have good intuitions on what you want to put into your body?
Yeah, I think I don't know what would have worked, but I will say even though I had that packet of Skittles, I think that the path that my mother took was the right path for educating us. It wasn't super restrictive, Mike, outside of the household, in terms of like she wasn't going to punish us if we, you know, had some of our friends' XYZ. She just tried to create an environment where we stepped into the environment and the environment was safe, period. I would say that actually genuinely worked.
There were also all of these just basic axioms that probably were not perfect, but did the job. So, if you say, you know, avoid dyes because they're toxic, and you look in the back, and even if a dye isn't toxic, it's probably going to be alongside other things that aren't so good for you, like added sugars. The companies that are using these tactics are not going to be worrying about other things as well. And so, it kind of creates this, like, I would avoid these things. I feel like my mom used the word chemicals a lot, and even though that wasn't necessarily perfectly scientific, it did knock out the majority of the bad things.
Yeah, we try to use "eat real food," I think, as one of the axioms that we use around our house. And I mean, I don't know, is "real" a good enough descriptor? It's sort of subjective, but it's just trying to get at this concept of the fact that people are trying to sell you fake things and you should be on the lookout for the realness of what you're putting in your body.
The other thing you can do is, I remember when we were in India and I gave Talmage the air measurement device so he could go from room to room and cafe to cafe, indoors, outdoors, in our various cars, and he measured the air quality in every single environment we were in. We got into a car and there he was like, "Okay, can you please turn on, you know, the internal air filtration system in this BMW, and can you see what kind of filter this car has for PM2.5 and VOCs?" And so if you give children the tools, whether it be an air quality monitor or a wearable, and you just say, you know, or even like a CGM, can kids use a blood glucose monitor?
There's no reason they couldn't. Yeah, diabetic children do.
Cool. So even helping them build intuition that if you drink this fruit juice or if you eat this sugar cereal, look what happens to your blood glucose. In fact, last Halloween I wanted to set up a little station in front of my house and have sugar treats there, and then they do a finger prick blood draw to look at blood glucose rise. Like have the kids come down the street, eat the candy, and then show them blood glucose rise or something like that. I mean, I guess how long would you have to wait? The blood glucose rise would be like 15 to 20 minutes, right?
Yeah, it's around 105 minutes.
Actually, you know, I could probably just measure their blood glucose as they arrive, because presumably they've been snacking on the food they've already gotten.
Oh, true.
It's like a whole new level of vampire, Bryan.
You know, honestly, I think we're going to do it for Halloween. We should definitely do that.
Okay, so one way to approach this is we've tried to isolate this into some easy categories where you and children can be educated to know there are certain things that are bad. So artificial dyes, we've identified, we've given 10 examples of foods that have them. We've talked about 25 grams of sugar per day is what you want to target, which is extremely low. So that means you really want to avoid anything with added sugar outside of that budget. We should also talk about that the environment matters a lot. We've discussed this in other podcasts, where the air and the environment matter a lot for a child's exposure to toxins. And so this is a reminder to have a MERV 13 filter, or as high as you can, in your HVAC system. That'll help generate clean air. That's also the truth. You can have a HEPA filter on your vacuum and vacuum two times per week to lessen the number of toxins, because kids spend a lot of time on the floor crawling, walking, and putting things in their mouth.
Just along the same lines, when you were talking about the lead exposure and increase in IQ, there's actually been some interesting studies with air quality and performance in school. So, there was a study in 18 LA schools that got HEPA activated carbon units put into the classrooms. There was a 60 to 100% reduction in particulate matter, which was associated with a 0.2 standard deviation improvement in mathematics and English scores. So just like we see toxins altering our ability to perform intellectually, the same is true for air quality. So improving your child's air quality is not only better for their health, but it's also better for their brain.
Yeah. And even things like what allergy they may end up developing. So there's a study that shows that early exposure to air pollution may double the risk of a peanut allergy becoming persistent by age 10. That's absolutely wild. Especially because I think I saw a stat: peanut allergy treatment costs are expected to hit 300 million by 2030. So wild that half of that could be preventable.
Now we've covered these protocols. Should we jump quickly into the evidence around the problems? I guess the severity of the challenges for children in this country, in case some people are interested in the data of how severe of a situation it is with obesity and toxin exposure and child death. Or do you guys think we covered the protocols up until this point?
I think we covered the protocol. So to recap, it would be avoid artificial dyes, limit your total sugar intake to, you said, 25 g per day
or less. Yeah, or less, and that's inclusive total sugars. So if you're having fruit that has a lot of natural sugars, it's total. Then you also want to improve air quality, toxins, so measure, get a filter if you need.
I mean, I'd probably say unstructured play and outdoor activity or movement, some sort of physical activity of at least an hour a day, is a good rule of thumb. I think that can be missed and forgotten a lot in our society. I mean, it seems like kids now have like 15-minute recess at school. So it's falling back on the parent to make sure that they're getting their physical activity in, where traditionally this is just something that just happened. Now we actually have to think about it. You have to pull them away from the video games, pull them away from the screens, make sure you kick them outside. Something that's often forgotten.
Yep. And then the other thing we should cover is sleep. We talk about the importance of it. We all know how incredibly important it is, but kids need more sleep for their cognitive development. So, if they're between the ages of 3 and 5, it's somewhere between 10 to 13 hours. Around age 6 to 12, you're looking at 9 to 12 hours per night. And then 13 to 18, in that teenage range, you're looking at 8 to 10 hours per night. So, I think that's definitely something that all of us could have benefited from, like these early life habits around sleep and being taught to have a consistent bedtime and make it sacred in your home.
Do we dare talk about screens and social media and mental health, or is that a whole different podcast?
I mean, let's do it. We're talking about things that negatively affect health, and we've focused on food inputs and then toxins. Yeah, let's do it, because it is equally consequential.
There's a lot of different ways to approach mental health and childhood. I think the most obvious things that we've seen recently are the introduction of social media and screens to at least our older children, well, screens to younger children. But really limiting screen exposure with the younger kids is extremely important. Making sure you're not just popping them down in front of an iPad, and then trying to limit social media exposure at least until later in childhood. There's, you know, some studies that suggest it should be not until 8th grade, some even 13, 16, never, you know, I think like
Ideally.
Yeah, ideally never. It feels like every year there's a new study that comes out that suggests it should be later and later in life. And this was a big challenge, I think, for everybody around COVID too, right? All of a sudden all these kids are home, and parents don't know what to do, they're trying to work from home, and ultimately kids just got plopped in front of TVs a lot, and we'll see what the side effects are from that long term. But I think now that we're looking back on this, realizing that, you know, more unstructured play, less screen time in general is better.
Talking about emotions is something that I think is also new and important when it comes to mental health. Just so you're educating children about what emotions feel like and what emotions are, letting their emotions actually be present and play out, as opposed to trying to squash them, like you shouldn't cry or don't be angry. No, they've got to feel those feelings. So, I feel like this is a much, much bigger and more in-depth topic, but just starting to paint the picture a little bit: focusing on childhood mental health is extremely important, and I think will become more and more a prevalent aspect of parenting in the near future.
Mike, as a doctor, when you look through the data, I mean, in reading over this, this was pretty terrifying: the mortality rates in the US, the dangers of being a child, of being born into the US, the increase of obesity and of blood glucose challenges, and the increases are alarming, between 20 and 80%. What is your assessment? What's happening?
Our culture, specifically in the US, and more so throughout the rest of the world, as US culture seems to sort of percolate into other developed countries, is making terrible decisions for our children. You know, there are many benefits to a capitalistic society, and there are many downsides when it comes to advertising to children. And I think a lot of this has to do with poor choices on the side of corporations and parents about what is okay to expose our children to. From everything from toxins to foods to air quality to social media and screens, we're just making lots of bad decisions.
And it's scary, but also not super surprising to me when you look at the rates of obesity. So the fact that US infants have had a 78% higher risk of death compared to babies in other wealthy countries, that is a freaky statistic. I mean, that's scary. But at the same time, when you look at the levels of obesity in our children, when you look at the amount of screen time exposure, the decrease in physical activity, that number becomes less and less unrealistic and more and more believable, which is a pretty scary thing to say.
So the one thing that we can see also behind the scenes is that in 1977, Congress passed a Toxic Substances Control Act, which basically assumed that chemicals are safe until proven harmful. And we've had a 50x increase in the chemicals and plastics now in circulation since the 1950s. And so a US study showed that 201 children aged 2 to 4 years old had at least 96 different chemicals in 5% of the urine samples, and 34 were present in over 90%.
When we had the LA fires and we saw, you know, 20,000 homes get lit up, we saw those toxins transfer from the fires, like the burning of the homes and cars, to my body. And we could go down and list out every chemical and say, "Yep, that's PVC pipe. Yep, that's a floor. Yep, that's a car." So, you can see these chemicals transferred in real time. And of course, a fire is an acute event, whereas otherwise we have these slow-burn events that aren't as dramatic. But you can basically see the parallel of toxins that are manufactured in all of society end up in our bodies, which is no surprise. And then you can take those chemicals and say, "Yep, that one causes disruption of hormones, that one causes disruption of, you know, cognition, etc., etc."
So the chemicals we've produced in the world. Now, these are not produced as toxins. They're produced as clever chemicals to do various things, manufacturing. They're usually well-intentioned. You know, non-stick pans, for example, like we talked about with PFAS. Also those end up in our bodies and become very complicated.
And so again, back on the podcast, hopefully those of you who hang out with us week to week see the throughline on everything we're doing and what the team has successfully done with me, in that we have tried to systematically reduce the exposure to these toxins in the world and then also try to eliminate them from my body. And so I hope that all of you take hope that you can, day to day, week to week, make very small changes. So whether it be the sleep hygiene, to say, hey family, we're doing this, and now you're saying, family, also we're not doing this, and then slowly step into these additional patterns, where first it's what do we eat inside our home, and how do we maintain a clean environment? Then it's what do you do when you go to a birthday party, and then it's, you know, what do you do when you become an adult and leave the family, where you no longer have these kinds of rules in place.
So if you do this together, you will slowly start changing your habits as well, and that will have this cumulative effect. But really, you do need to take a very proactive role in all of these, because society is not doing it for you. There's no one in society really looking after you. And so hopefully that will turn, but until then, it really needs to be a ground-up swell by all of us that we're going to reject the things that people have done.
Now I will say, the contrast of this, of the fact that we had this congressional law passed: the FDA will not let drugs on the market until proven safe. So, it's the exact opposite, that people trying to do good things with medicines are blocked until they have incredibly high rigor of evidence to show they actually do things. Whereas in the chemical sphere, you can produce whatever you want, and then it has to be proven bad over time. So, it's really a twisted, backwards approach where the two things should be swapped.
Bryan, do you think that you're looking after people? You said nobody's looking after you in society. Is that your role?
Yeah, that's a good point. I suppose by default it's the one I try to step into, maybe because as a child, I think my parents basically said yes to the system. What people did, they did, and they didn't scrutinize it very much, and this is not a criticism of them. It's just like, and therefore I'm a product of that, and so I definitely did not want my children to be in a similar
situation. I wanted to find the weaknesses of the system and correct for it and then battle against it. But it's pretty tough and I guess, yeah. So yeah, Mike, I think I do probably try to put that role in people's lives.
This is a tough one. I think as a parent thinking about all of these things, it's hard not to feel a little powerless, you know, like you're in this situation where it feels like the culture and society is working against you and you're battling against everything. You're battling against social media. You're battling against friends. You're battling against the fact that no one else is paying attention to what color dyes and the green cupcakes that they're giving to their children at the birthday party.
And I guess I just try to take some solace in the fact that I'm paying attention when I can and doing the best that I can, at least in my home, and establishing some sort of understanding and insight into the importance of what my children put into their body, which is not necessarily something that my parents did. I think in a similar way, Bryan, my parents just sort of trusted the system and trusted that corporations wouldn't sell bad chemicals to children.
And I guess that's pretty awesome that we've even come that far, you know, that we're even in a place now where we can recognize that, hey, we got to pay attention to this stuff, you know. And if you just think about it as, I'm just doing the best I can with what I got, and have a little grace towards ourselves, it doesn't feel quite as big and as ominous, you know? So I guess I just try to think about it that way. You know, act where I can, where it makes sense, in a rational manner.
And good news, companies are, through all of our voices, forced to reconcile with these realities. Kraft Heinz have pledged to remove all synthetic dyes by 2027. Ideally, that would happen sooner. I also understand how hard it is to make product changes on a quick time scale. The fact that they're saying all synthetic dyes in 2 years is exciting, because I do think that we will be able to push our environment to actually change.
So you guys let us know how this went. I mean, hopefully you're walking away with some feeling of camaraderie, that you can build systems inside your family and your homes and that you can make conscientious decisions with your children and teach them the dangers of synthetic dyes, of added sugars. Even things like air fresheners, which we consider to be nice, or scented cans or candles or aerosols.
I was just going to say that I'm just realizing now that Talmage is the example of what having a parent who cares about this overnight has impact on him. Like, who was Talmage before he was living in your household, not being exposed to these things? He has adopted his environment.
Yes, he has.
And he seems to be doing that willingly. I think he now fully sees the... I think this was crystallized in his mind when we went to college and there were all of his, not friends, but new classmates who were eating all sorts of, you know, bad food, and he's like, that is crazy, why are they doing that? And I was like, oh man, that felt so good as a father. He had that
To have it come from him. Yes, that inside.
Yeah, just that this is crazy, you guys. Okay, Mike, how do you feel after this conversation?
I feel more empowered than freaked out as a parent, I guess.
Yeah. Yeah. Kate, how are you feeling?
It motivates me to treat every molecule that enters my body with the reality that it has an impact on my ability to do what I want in the world, to be healthy in the long term, to be smart, to be capable, to be strong. So, it's definitely motivating. I wish there was a way that we could make children powerful in society, because they really are powerless, and then they have to grow up and acquire power and then compete against other, you know, other generations. I wish there was a societal mechanism which inherently made them powerful, like a voting block in society that gave them voice and power, that they didn't need to wait until they were mature and adults and with their own resources and capabilities.
What if they were like, we want free Skittles for all kids? No, I'm saying that not to ask them what they want, because, you know, they're not of course developed in a way where they can make these wise choices, but just like what science says is good for them. This is the idea that when I was playing around, if I were president, you know, I was playing around the idea that a third of Congress would be planet Earth, you know, and two-thirds would be human, but Earth would be a voting block in Congress. And you could say the same as AI models improve. It's just a thought experiment of, if you just reimagine who has power and in what ways to do what, and children are powerless, but it'd be cool if there was some kind of way to represent their well-being in society, where they just get run over right now.
Or even, I mean, I extend that to adults too. Like if our biological data could vote on our behalf in Congress, if we're seeing that sugar makes us obese and it kills us, probably shouldn't have sugar. Probably should have some regulation around it.
That's true. I guess that's what Blueprint is. Blueprint gave my body all the power of decision-making and removed my mind from the equation of, like, I feel like this. Okay guys, I think that was very sobering and actually kind of somber. Mike, I felt you in this, that you take your role as a father very seriously. You care deeply about your children. And Kate, I think you feel the same. I think you feel very empathetic towards the situation that others are in, and I think you appreciate your mother's efforts in your life to give you a very strong start. And so I hope that this emotionally resonates with others, that, you know, it really is a powerful thing to stand up for our children's potential in life, that when they become disadvantaged because of the decisions that we adults make in society, it just stinks. And of course all three of us are on the receiving end of that, where we have had things in our life where it's not always been the best for our potential. And that's not because the people around us didn't love us. It's because the systems in society just were not smart enough.
Hopefully everyone, you've walked away with a few good tips to be better members of society and to protect the most vulnerable and the people who will define the future of our existence. All right, let's wrap. Good to see you all, and go to bed on time. This is the Bryan Johnson podcast. Special thanks to my co-hosts Kate Tolo and Dr. Mike Mallin. For more science breakdowns and protocols, subscribe to my YouTube channel. Follow the podcast on your favorite platform or follow me on Instagram or X at Bryan
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