The Celery Experiment

This past weekend the girls and I did a fun little experiment and the results were quite shocking, so I wanted to share them all with you.

We started out with 4 glass jars, filled them with water and added a few drops of food coloring to each one. Then we placed a celery stick in each glass.

I didn't take any before pictures because I wasn't really sure this experiment was going to work. Our celery had been in the fridge for over a week and was looking pretty limp. However, the girls were pretty excited about the experiment so we tried it anyways.

Our first surprise came about an hour later when we noticed our once limp celery was now standing straight up. It was as though the celery soaked up the water and revived itself back to good health!!

We continued to observe the celery over the next several hours but saw very little change. Here is what we did see;

• The celery that was placed in the yellow water became slightly lighter in color, while the one placed in the blue water became slightly darker in color. 
• We could also see some of the red coloring running up the veins of the celery stick that was placed in the red water.
• The most noticeable change was the celery that we placed in the green water. You can't really tell much in the photo below but there are dark green spots all over the leaves.

However, these changes were so slight and not really what we hoped for. We came to the conclusion that the green celery stick was the shortest, giving the color less distance to travel. We decided to try leaving the celery in the water over night, hoping that it would soak up more color. We were shocked when we woke up the next morning to find this:

I remember reading an article a while back about red food coloring being bad for you but I just blew it off. After this experiment I think I am definitely going to do some more research on food coloring and the effect it has on our bodies. If it can do this to celery, I can only imagine what it can do to our bodies.

Here is a closer look at the red and green celery side by side.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this!

Have you tried a similar experiment? What were your results?
Have you eliminated artificial coloring from your diet? If so, have you noticed any changes?