Posted on behalf of Elie Dolgin

Here’s one way in which candy might be good for you. A chemical dye similar to the compound that gives a blue hue to some types of Jell-O and M&Ms could protect injured spinal cords from further damage. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center in upstate New York found that rats injected with a dye called Brilliant Blue G (BBG) recovered from spinal injury and regained the ability to walk, albeit with a limp, whereas control rats remained paralyzed. The only side effect: the rats turned blue.

The finding came five years after the research team first reported in Nature Medicine that adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a vital energy metabolite, surges at the site of spinal injury to overstimulate and stress nerve cells. The Rochester researchers targeted an ATP receptor, which mitigated the spinal damage, but the ATP blocker was too large to cross the blood-brain barrier and had to be injected directly into the site of the wound — a less-than-desirable treatment for spinal cord patients. So the researchers went on the hunt for compounds with a similar structure, and they happened upon BBG. Publishing online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Maiken Nedergaard and her colleagues show that the blue dye can be given intravenously to reduce the size of spinal lesions and to improve motor skills.

This could be a boon for a new field of culinary neuroscience, hinted Nedergaard. “One of the reasons no one had done this before is that food science is very separate from neuroscience. Those two fields don’t interact at all.” (Wired) Nedergaard noted that the average American ingests about a teaspoon of blue dye each year, so the compound is likely safe for consumption. Even so, while humans might eat enough dye to turn their tongues blue, “the levels ingested in food stuffs don’t make us go blue,” said Mark Bacon, head of research at the British charity Spinal Research. (BBC) “What is safe at one dose may not be safe at higher doses,” he cautioned. No need to run to the sweetshop quite yet, it seems.