I’m tired of the constant “no evidence” bs. I have children and their behavior changes dramatically when they eat food with artificial coloring. I’m honestly tired of being told I’m crazy. You can take my kids and try it yourself.
If you're going to feed kids candy that is colored with agent A you need to make identical candy colored with agent B so the kids can't tell them apart. You can test A vs B but not A vs no color. (Though maybe you can have the kids eat the candy while blindfolded)
If you're going to test the influence of sugar you could use sugar for candy A and some combination of Sucralose, Ace-K, aspartame and some strange carbohydrate like mannitol or xylitol in candy B and get pretty close in terms of taste and mouthfeel but in A/B tests people will notice the difference.
Then people will wonder if those other substances cause problems and none of these address the possibility that the sensory pleasure of junk food makes kids squee and lose self control.
