How do you make tartrazine

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Nutritional Neuroscience. Methods for the analysis of azo dyes employed in food industry—A review. Food Chemistry. Tattersall I, Reddy B. Fixed drug eruption due to achiote dye. Case Reports in Dermatology. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellHealth. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data.

We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. This soda, which packed a caffeine wallop half again as potent as Coke or Pepsi, was bubbly, fruity, and most importantly, neon yellow. The rumor that swirled round Mountain Dew came in different shapes and sizes, but the upshot was always the same: Yellow No.

Some claimed it shrunk or shriveled masculine body parts, but for the most part it was said that tartrazine laid waste to a man's sperm count. At the time, there was no scientific evidence to support the urban legend, nor was there any reason the myth focused so exclusively on Mountain Dew —tartrazine could be found in comparable concentrations in foods and drinks ranging from pickles to marshmallow Peeps to macaroni and cheese.

But some people cut back on their consumption of the soda anyway, worried about its effect on their reproductive health. But others banked on the rumors being true: they doubled down on the Dew, thinking it would function as a contraceptive.

It's impossible to say how many, if any, couples relied solely on Mountain Dew for birth control. But it was enough of an issue that the Wall Street Journal ran an article about it, as did a number of city and university newspapers.

Dear Abby even warned her readers not to rely on the soft drink to prevent pregnancy. Even today, queries about Mountain Dew's purported spermicidal effects can be found in Internet health forums. But prophylactic properties aren't the only side effects that have been attributed to tartrazine.

More famously, at least two studies have suggested that tartrazine and a number of other additives may contribute to hyperactivity in children. There are problems with these studies, and there have been contradictory results in what is inevitably a very subjective field.

How do you systematically and objectively measure hyperactivity and isolate its cause? Tartrazine hasn't been shown to cause problems in isolation, but where studies have detected problems it has tended to be as a result of a cocktail of additives that included azo-based food colouring like tartrazine. However, despite the small number of studies, the reaction has been, quite naturally, to avoid the use of tartrazine where possible, particularly in food and drink.

The legitimate concern about tartrazine should not mean that we forget the importance of the azo dyes, though. For millennia, natural dyes were the only options available. Although some of these are excellent, many are expensive, involve some rather dubious ingredients such as cochineal's famous sourcing from crushed insects , or are rather difficult to get hold of. Others don't bind particularly well to cloth, or are unsuitable for human consumption.

The overthrow of the natural dye began with William Perkin's accidental discovery of mauveine, or aniline purple.

Perkin was trying to produce an artificial anti-malarial drug, but instead came up with a dye that could be substituted for one of the rarest and most expensive of the natural colours, Tyrian purple, a substance produced from sea snails and historically used by kings and emperors.

Now, though, the most common type of dyes are azo dyes like tartrazine, accounting for over 60 per cent of dye manufacture. There seem to be two big selling points that account for their popularity - they are cheap to make, and they produce strikingly bright colours, significantly brighter than the next most popular type of dye, the anthraquinones.

In principle, azo dyes could be produced in every colour of the rainbow, and there have been some developments of blue dyes, but they are particularly easy to make in colours like red, orange and yellow.

The popularity of azo dyes probably also reflects their flexible nature. The component molecules are widely available and cheap, making a kind of dyestuff construction kit that can produce a wide range of dyes. The chemical reaction is also easy to scale up to industrial production and takes place in water, rather than more expensive and hazardous solvents. It's easy to have a knee-jerk reaction if you have children and see that worrying E number in the contents.

But we shouldn't forget that the azo dyes are a major contributor to the colourful world we enjoy. So, good to look at, but maybe not consume.

That was science writer Brian Clegg with the colourful but hyperactive chemistry of tartrazine. Now, next week, a compound aiding the invasion of our natural enemies. Just as the immune system uses the recognition system to try to identify invaders, bacteria and viruses also use this system to locate their host cells or tissues.