E-numbers that don't add up for children

Just look at the food dyes tested. "Allura Red", "Sunset Yellow" and "Carmoisine" and the like are all derivatives from coal tar, all banned in sensible countries like Norway and Sweden, all completely unnecessary. They just should not be in food at all, ever.

It's not only that they appear to be toxic, triggering hyperactivity in children. They are used to dress up foods - sweets, soft drinks, sauces, "dessert toppings" - that it would be better for nobody ever to eat anyway. Any food that has to be dyed to make it seem appealing is likely to be rubbish in any case.

As for the preservative sodium benzoate, the mere fact that it can extend the shelf-life of soft drinks to two years without refrigeration might suggest that it's not a good thing for children to swallow in large quantities.

The damage dyes and preservatives can cause has been known about for years. Yet the Food Standards Agency has again decided there's no need for a ban, while the manufacturers' organisation, the Food and Drink Federation, smoothly says there is no safety issue and it is already reducing additives.

It's not as though we urgently need to trick our children into eating more sweets or swigging more soft drinks. They may be illnourished but they are not underfed. Childhood obesity in the UK is growing worse every year, as children eat ever more convenience food.

Our children consume 30 times as many fizzy drinks as a child would have done in the Fifties and eat 25 times as much confectionary. Many just scoff garbage all day. In the years to come, the health consequences are going to kill, and effectively maim, a significant proportion of our population.

There are many reasons why our children take in so much trash, from the predominance of branding and TV advertising of food products; to the way that children are increasingly allowed to determine their own diets; to the dismal belief of many parents that real cooking is too difficult and time-consuming.

Children are treated now as though they need their own special foods, heavily processed, bedecked with cartoon characters, stuffed with fats, sugars and salt, brightly coloured with dyes and full of preservatives, too. It's absolutely crazy.

It's actually easy and cheap to prepare wholesome fresh food. But it's no use pretending that it's easy to insist your children eat it and, if they protest, get nothing else. There's such huge peer pressure to withstand.

The very least the Government can do to help is ban these dyes and preservatives outright. What's the contrary argument? What good do they do? None whatsoever, save for the profits of the companies helping to ruin our children.