It is not often you hear anyone singing the praises of a food additives, let alone food dye. Brilliant Blue G, the dye found in blue M&Ms and Gatorade, has a lot more going on than a super-awesome, old-school gangsta name: it might help to decrease the severity of spinal cord injuries.

When the spinal cord is injured, molecular changes occur at the injury site, making the initial injury considerably worse — the body sends healing cells to the site but they go overboard and attack healthy cells as well. When Brilliant Blue G was given intravenously to rats with spinal injuries, the blue dye inhibited the cellular attack that killed healthy cells. The rats were able to walk postinjury, although they retained a bit of a limp. The control group, which received no dye, never walked again. The one side effect is that the rats treated with blue dye turned blue for a while.

Wow, kinda interesting. I’m a little weirded out by the fact that something that is added to my food could be having such a radical effect on a cellular level though. It’s great that this one may have positive affects, but it’s certainly disconcerting that others may have less-positive results in the long run.