You are what you eat, as the saying goes. But do you know what you eat?

If someone handed you a bag containing a mixture of five to 10 chemicals with unfamiliar names, you probably wouldn’t think to eat from it — unless that bag was a bag of Doritos. As it were, I have looked at the ingredients list of such a bag. Besides the innocuous whole corn, corn oil, and salt, the list includes such esoteric items as disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate.

What do these things do when you ingest them? That is the question that many people no longer ask, having grown accustomed to strawberry-flavored foods always being bright red in color.

Most people, I suspect, are resigned to the fact that sundry additives routinely sneak into almost all of the food we eat. After all, who can keep track of the countless combinations of Latin roots that fill the space under “Ingredients”? Despite being suspicious of artificial ingredients as a matter of conventional wisdom, I nonetheless must succumb to their overwhelming prevalence.

But all that might be starting to change. A recent study, featured in an article in The New York Times, links the consumption of artificial additives to hyperactivity in children. The researchers gave test subjects sodium benzoate, a commonly used preservative, and artificial colors, which seemed to cause increased hyperactivity and shorter attention spans.

I was pleased to see that a scientific study finally validated conventional wisdom and elated to see that a high-profile newspaper took heed. While there remain uncertainties about the severity of the impact of consuming additives, the findings are sufficient reason to consider measures to limit the use of artificial ingredients.

While preservatives may serve an important function in the storage of food, I suspect that most artificial ingredients are cost-saving replacements for their more expensive natural counterparts. Most preposterous are the artificial colors, which serve no purpose except perhaps to appeal to the naïve attraction to bright colors that young children have.

Hopefully, there will be many more studies to examine closely the effects of the myriad mysterious chemicals that make their way into packaged food. Maybe these substances are in part responsible for the nation’s modern health problems, like heart disease or the so-called obesity epidemic. Until we scrutinize this aspect of our eating more carefully, we won’t know. If the study on hyperactivity is any indication, it's time to start finding out.