And the strangest thing about that story is that she was maybe 4 years old when Mars pulled the red M&Ms due to a cancer scare with a different red food coloring. Though my recollection was that it was a few years more recent than that, given how shelf life and supply chains work, I may have been getting back stock. I think I eventually proved to her that there were no red M&Ms anymore. I guess her parents hadn’t bothered to check for years. Not the first injustice I had tried to right but the easiest one.
Five years later they added Red back and I would think of her every time I ate M&Ms for a long time after.
My Mom was pretty salty about the red M&Ms going missing, and refused to eat blue M&Ms for quite some time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvvshpw4FxM
Check at 6 minutes into the video.
edit: it looks like that vid had some steelhead (trout) mixed in? This is more like what I have seen, but the color is even more "dulled" in person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e09UmeqAd4g
warabi-mochi, nata-de-coco, aiyu jelly, kokum, annindofu, kanten, blancmange, to name just a few
If anything I'd say my take is less insulting to these other dishes than you are by comparing them to jell-o
You have really good eyes. I can't tell the difference
Pandan Jelly
https://asianinspirations.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/...
Lime Jell-o
https://centslessdeals.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Lime-J...
Lemon Jell-o
https://www.shekeepsalovelyhome.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/...
Aiyu-Jelly
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/aiyu-jelly-46238794...
Raspberry Blancmange
https://themoderngelatina.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/img...
Strawberry Jell-o
https://thefoodcharlatan.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/IMG_...
Turmeric can go both ways, but the ground turmeric that's historically common for preservation reasons is much less flavorful than the fresh root. It's mostly a color thing.
Of course, we can also just open up a medieval cookbook to see what they say. The Forme of Cury is a nice 14th century example that's available from Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8102
As to colours, which perhaps would chiefly take place in suttleties, blood boiled and fried was used for dying black. saffron for yellow, and sanders for red. Alkenet is also used for colouring, and mulberries; amydon makes white; and turnesole [for yellow]
There are legendary varieties that are lost to time. Occasionally we rediscover them, and we get to compare. Usually the modern industrial varieties are pale imitations.
Have you ever cooked? Most stews use spices for colouring. A paella looks ill without saffron in it.
Why do we need these dyes in food?
Why are so many people so unhealthy? Could it be the food we are consuming?
Are we tracking the health and safety data from these policy changes to know if there is a change?
Because being unhealthy is the natural state of things, and keeping a handle on that fact, at scale, is difficult and complicated. We used to do a much worse job of it, though. Humans living in developed economies where everyone eats all these oft-maligned foods live much longer than their ancestors did a few centuries ago. And those who live into old age tend to remain healthier longer than those who did a few centuries ago.
That's to say that there isn't room for improvement, or that there aren't things in our food supply that don't belong there. But a sense of perspective is important. "Is this food coloring increasing people's lifetime risk of a specific cancer from 0.005% to 0.01%?" is still a pretty tidy improvement over, "Ugh, yet another outbreak of ergotism. Well, why don't we try burning witches to see if that puts it to a stop."
Go look at how native or indigenous people live vs people in cities.
In wealthy countries these would-be-dead people walk amongst us.
The ones that don't achieve it through access to very unnatural artifacts such as vaccines that are quite likely to have been made using ultramodern technologies such as genetic modification.
Or, I've got quite a few friends who have various congenital conditions that mean that they absolutely would not have survived in a society with a more "natural" foodway. With the modern food supply chain, though, they're doing just fine. Unnatural things you get in some ultraprocessed foods, such as vitamin fortification, mean they can even do it without having to worry about developing comorbid chronic ailments due to malnutrition.
The gist of the paper was that they observed that Inuit communities have really low rates of heart disease, and hypothesized that it could be because their traditional diet is very high in omega-3 fatty acids. The problem is, they don't actually have low rates of heart disease. They just have low rates of heart disease diagnosis, because they also have limited access to health care.
There's no doubt about this. High sugar, low fiber is the biggest culprit.
That’s also to say that “trust the science“ can be a dangerous way to shut down discussion when people are actually grasping for words to understand whether a scientific method is being improperly used.
95% of people wouldn't realize that's code for "insect juice," and they might prefer the artificial color.
Naturally colored candies use beet extracts for red.
I've been working on some improved labeling for certain grocery products:
The number of things I thought should be true at that age that finally are is baffling. Even accounting for recent regressions.
My parent's shepherds stand by the door at bedtime asking to be let out to their dog house.
People say all sorts of things about what they do and do not want to buy, but actions speak louder than words.
What people say they want and what people choose to buy are very different things.
If you ask people "Do you want ____" in isolation, they'll always say "No" if they thing you're asking about has any negative connotation.
If you put two different products on the shelf next to each other that differ by that same thing and even advertise it prominently (e.g. one says "No artifical dyes or coloring") most people would probably choose the brighter one because, at time of purchase, their reveleaed preferences are actually different. Now add an extra $0.10 to the retail price for sourcing more expensive natural colorings and even more people will choose the artificial coloring version.
This pattern plays out prominently in all things food related. If you ask people "Do you wish the food supply was healthier?" everyone is going to tell you "Yes". Then when they're deciding where to go for lunch or what to order, they'll skip right past the healthy items and choose what tastes the best.
These hypothetical free-lunch questions are useless because consumers will always claim they don't want the thing they don't understand. If you ask people if they want their food to be "preservative free" they'll tell you yes, until they see their food going bad immediately and their options dry up. Ask if they want "anti caking agents" removed from food and they'll emphatically agree, until their shredded cheese is sticking together. Food science and popular opinion are two different worlds.
As the mac & cheese box featuring Super Mario in the article hints, a big chunk of these people are children. Is it any surprise they don't make the most rational of choices?
On the other hand, this is like asking an alcoholic if he wishes to quit drinking. He'll say yes, but then go into a bar on his way home from work... People claim to want to be healthy, yet their discipline isn't perfect and their will is not iron - what hypocrites!
On the third hand - people do vote and lobby for what they say they want (in this case banning artificial dyes). Why should we give preference to their decisions in the market, vs. their decisions in the voting booth? Or in other words - why do purchasing decisions reveal preference, but voting decisions do not?
Labels like "natural flavors" exist to cover up what's actually in the food. "natural vanilla flavoring" sounds much nicer than "vanillin and acetovanillone extracted from waste sawdust".
In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them. I remember because my father was an organic chemist by training, and he would look at most labels and explain what was in them, and why we weren't buying them. (My family ended up shopping for most of our groceries at organic food stores.)
It turns out that a lot of people didn't want those ingredients either, and it was impacting sales, so companies successfully lobbied to get the disclosure requirements watered down. These days labels in the US basically tell you nothing.
I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food.
We should be entitled by law to know what we're consuming, so that we can actually make informed decisions, and industrial food manufacturers don't want us to know, and have spent vast sums of money to ensure that we can't easily find out.
Ironically, this is what the legislation is moving toward: Anything "natural" is good, while anything "chemical" is bad to a lot of the world.
This is not true, and for some reason this seems to be a common urban myth.
The distinction between natural and artificial flavors goes back to 1906, and in 1938 there was a stronger law requiring the disclosure of artificial flavoring, color, or preservatives. I don't know if you're referring to the 1958 Food Additives and Amendment Act, but that didn't really affect ingredient listings either -- it was about food safety, not disclosure. But there was nothing substantially different about ingredient listings between the 1970s and today. I honestly don't know where you got this information, or what kind of ingredients you were under the impression that your father was able to analyze. The 1960s and 1970s was definitely the era when awareness around these things began to grow among consumers, so it definitely helps explain your father's attention to these things. But the idea that disclosure requirements have been watered down, or that this is due to corporate lobbying, is something like an urban legend. There are certainly issues around trade regulation and naming, like which species of fish are or are not allowed to be labeled as catfish, similar to how champagne can only come from a particular region of France. So there is definitely massive lobbying around geographical disclosures and naming. But the idea that there has been some kind of massive shift of disclosure in terms of chemicals is just not true. If you look up the ingredients on actual historical processed snack labels from the 1970s, they're not any different from today.
The downside of course is that once you get where you're going you're practically retarded for the next 12 hours or so and can't get any work done.
a) Make claims that are not as extraordinary.
b) Back your claims up with evidence.
Making absolutely wild claims without evidence just makes you sound like a quack.
What isn't reasonable is to also expect large numbers of people to take them seriously without evidence (see above for evidence of people questioning unsupported claims).
I actually thought that particular red dye was banned where I'm from some time back, though I don't recall why. Allergies perhaps? But that's just a guess.
I'm sure you can grasp how ridiculous that statement is, and reflect on your own.
I don't think this was because people were putting pressure, otherwise the sheer numbers of those communities would have done something by now. It only required one person in power to say enough, fix this.
During the Obama administration, cherry picking some example:
* Food safety regulatory improvement bill: https://www.fda.gov/food/guidance-regulation-food-and-dietar... * Improved labelling rules: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/21/health/fda-nutrition-labe... * EPA water safety rules made stricter, then rolled back by Trump: https://www.sgrlaw.com/epa-announces-plans-to-revoke-obama-w....
It isn't correct to see these changes a singular improvement. These rules are constantly being fought over, sometimes becoming stricter, sometimes looser.
Another example, NYC has fought to reduce sugary drink serving sizes and to require labels on high sugar foods. (https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/cdp/added-sugar...)
My personal bugaboos are added sugar and generous use of weird preservatives. If your supermarket has 20 aisles, 16 of them are loaded with sugary sulfite-preserved stuff, removing choice and visibility to consumers. And breads fortified with folic acid.
https://www.delmonte.com/products/fruits/pears/sliced-pears-...
They all went stale before the day was out. She compared the ingredients between what she had made and what came out of the box at the grocery store, and the ones that she didn't use? They were all preservatives.
Choose your battles wisely.
I will concede that the use of sweeteners in everything in the US is unhinged. It's hard to really understand until you've spent enough time out of the country to where you're buying groceries and looking at the ingredients. You come back to the states and everything tastes weirdly sweet. It was a real "fish don't know they're wet" moment for me, which mostly came about from marrying an Australian.
The problem is when the whole supermarket is full of highly preserved food, then this is normalized and health consequences are obscured. The deeper issue is that for perhaps 80% of people this is fine and profitable, but for let's say 20% it introduces weird, hard to trace health problems, which don't appear to come from the supermarket because all the normal foods are like this.
This also reminded me of a great post from a few years ago about why salt is fortified with iodine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782954
I don't hope to resolve the debate, only to point out it should be possible to eat bread that is not fortified with folic acid, if for no reason than I'm not in the high risk group targeted by the FDA and there are potential benefits from reducing folic acid intake in the context of robust intake of folate from other sources.
Or, even simpler: why can't I buy bread without folic acid?
It would not surprise me that there are some places in the US that only have easy access to packaged industrial sandwich bread. It would surprise me very much if that was the norm for Americans.
After Mexico Implemented a Tax, Purchases of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Decreased and Water Increased: Difference by Place of Residence, Household Composition, and Income Level - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5525113/ | https://doi.org/10.3945/jn.117.251892
Building upon the sugar beverage tax in Mexico: a modelling study of tax alternatives to increase benefits - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10649495/ | https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2023-012227
USA Facts: Federal farm subsidies: What the data says - https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...
(~40 million acres of corn is used for inefficient ethanol biofuels as well, but I will reserve that rant for another thread)
We tax alcohol and cigarettes similarly, and I don’t think it’s wild to consider processed sugars close to that same category from a health and reward center perspective.
Like there is probably some argument to be made about satiety, but I assure you, it is quite possible to consume excess calories in the form of pasta.
And then corn subsidies mostly benefit livestock and ethanol producers, processed food products are a small portion of the end use of field corn.
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-chemical-safety/list-select-ch...
For example carmine is crushed up cactus parasite insects which a very small number of people are vulnerable to extreme allergic reactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal
>much more restrictive on the ingredients that goes into our food
How much human testing of every agricultural product do you want?
They had replaced a lot of them already. Kraft's most iconic product (Mac & Cheese) replaced the artificial dyes years ago and this is only the last 10% of their products.
Are artificial dyes actually bad for you?
People act like taking the food dye out of gushers is suddenly going to fix their problems. You need to avoid this food in the first place.
The fact that this is a legitimate question is very concerning. Some of these dyes are/were ubiquitous and there is very little research about them. IIRC a few have evidence of harm. Nothing should be this widely deployed without understanding them more.
If you were more questioning "Is natural actually better for people or just a nice sounding word" which could also be implied by your question, I agree with that, with the caveat that artificial stuff has more potential for surprises since it doesn't have the history of being used safely "natural" stuff does, and should have a higher bar of research.
You are correct, but I find it alarming that anyone would deem this necessary to say out loud. These companies would happily watch us suffer an die from chronic illnesses en masse if it inched up their share value, as would any for-profit enterprise. The phrase "duh" comes to mind. The only thing stopping them is government regulation, though that approach is under perpetual attack by anti-government zealots, the most recent of which being Musk and his child assistants.
Not defending microbeads—those products were truly shit, both for your skin and for the environment—I just want to illustrate that it might not be so straightforward.
EU and US supply chains are vastly different, plus shifting the production lines from one to another doesn't happen overnight. This means that it could well take two years to fully move all their production facilities off synthetic food dyes.
Similar to why the USAID closure was gradual and gave aid recipients plenty of time to find new donors, because we wouldn't want hundreds of thousands of women and children to die of starvation and disease just to save a few bucks or wring out more viral memes [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/politics/usaid-cuts-do... / https://archive.is/5BIAF
I agree with RFK for pushing for change in this industry but I give him no credit, instead I blame previous administrations on both sides for not taking a better stance on regulating food like every other developed country in the world.
Banning artificial colors because “chemicals are bad” isn’t logical. Banning artificial dyes because one random paper maybe found a cancer link isn’t rational (generally if studies are all over the place the effect is so small you’re seeing noise).
If you want to avoid artificial dyes, cool, avoid them! But blanket bans of dyes where the data is questionable about harm isn’t logical.
You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color
Easy for you to say while writing a HN comment, but people would certainly be turned off by gray yolks[1] for instance, even if theoretically they were safe to eat.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/07/12/201501977/he...
Just because people don’t like grey yolk doesn’t mean we should put an untested color in it.
The "natural" colors HAVE NOT been tested so extensively.
So do you want to put "Natural" but utterly untested chemicals in our food or "unnatural" but extensively tested chemicals?
Because unless you ban food coloring outright, companies are going to color your food. They have the data that in the American market, (fake) bright yellow yolks sell more and for more profit than natural yolk colors.
Your assumption of "artificial dye" == "Untested" is currently wrong. The US requires almost no testing for pretty much anything put in our food right now, due to "Generally recognized as safe" bullshit. There are hundreds of chemical additives that have not really been tested that you can just put in food legally.
US food law does not distinguish between "artificial" chemicals and "natural" chemicals except in labeling. You can source a chemical from oranges, turn it into a completely different chemical, put that in your food product, and call it "natural". The only difference from a chemistry standpoint is that you sourced your chemical feedstock from some sort of plant or animal instead of taking simple hydrocarbons and building up your chemical.
Salicylic acid does the exact same thing in your body whether you process it from willow bark or build it up from Phenol, and both versions are simultaneously a horrible birth defect inducing toxin, as well as an utterly essential and safe modern medicine.
This change does nothing to make us safer.
The subject was artificial dyes and parent found it illogical banning them without proper proof of harm.
My point is, at least for food, there should be proof of no harm.
I said nothing about natural dyes. Why do so many people read A is bad as not-A is good?
And if all is tested so well why was red 3 banned so late?
They aren't super aware and taking advantage of us, they are actually that utterly stupid. They are the epitome of that software dev you worked with who only just learned about <thing> yesterday, read a few articles and wikipedia pages, and assume they must know enough about <thing> to have better takes than people who have been working knee deep in <thing> for 30 years. They love to say they are "reasoning from first principles" because they have no actual expert experience to how those "first principles" haven't been useful or relevant in that field for centuries.
It's the classic "I know just enough to be dangerous" problem we are all familiar with of Users of our software products, the kind that uninstall System32 to "speed up their machine" like the internet told them, but 100 million people gave them the power of the US government. They vastly overestimate how much of the space they have so far learned, and don't even know how much they don't know.
We have extremely pervasive health problems across the west, and many theories (you can surely think of 20), but all of them are weak under scrutiny, specifically because the phenomena are effectively impossible to isolate and pin down. You can't actually achieve a strong signal.
So if multiple studies link a low-value and/or easily replaceable additive to problems, we can remove it as a precaution.
Food colorants in particular serve _primarily_ an advertising role. In general, advertising junk food to children is often restricted and highly contested. The difference here is the child is expected to physically consume the artefact.
We should adopt a "default deny" stance and contested ingredients at least should show some kind of value. You can make a case for many preservatives. Paint is not like that.
Science doesn’t ban things with questionable data from poorly designed studies when other studies say the opposite.
Science doesn’t ban things because of some other problem where a causal link hasn’t been proven.
We already have a “default deny” system in place. Unless you have data saying it’s safe (according to regulations), a chemical can’t be used as a food additive.
Edited to add:
GRAS definition....."the use of a food substance may be GRAS either through scientific procedures or, for a substance used in food before 1958, through experience based on common use in food Under 21 CFR 170.30(b), general recognition of safety through scientific procedures requires the same quantity and quality of scientific evidence as is required to obtain approval of the substance as a food additive."
GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe) defies this reasonable expectation.
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/generall...
GRAS approvals include some rather novel food additives. Here is a list of recent notifications.
https://www.fda.gov/food/gras-notice-inventory/recently-publ...
It literally says “GRAS must meet the same standards as new additives”.
The only reason GRAS exists is that FDA regulations have changed over time.
Unless you wanted all food additives immediately banned until years of tests could be conducted, the FDA created GRAS based on the evidence at the time but also required additional studies to bring existing additives up to the same safety standards as new additives.
Feel free to click on any of the GRAS decisions to read all about the studies done.
Science doesn’t ban anything. That is simply put not the role of science.
Science can inform decision making, but it is not the only valid way to make decisions.
You can have a policy of waiting for overwhelming proof of harm before banning anything. But there are an awful lot of chemicals added to our food and environment, with precious few studies competently and honestly tracking their effects. I want a much more careful policy - don’t put unknown chemicals in my body without convincing me the benefit.
If you apply the "precautionary principle" this broadly, there's nothing left. It's basically the same reason that everything is labeled as "linked to cancer" by CA prop 65 (e.g. coffee, or...trees [1]).
Is using annatto in cheddar cheese a dye? It doesn't affect the flavor and isn't essential to the product.
But notably, nothing about this action takes any steps or effort towards enforcing "Prove it is safe BEFORE you sell it" and "natural" does not make any impact there. Ricin is plenty natural, so is methanol, and this change would not stop you from selling people literal poison as long as it wasn't already banned.
If Bayer makes a new derivative of carminic acid ("Natural" red #4) tomorrow that is easier for production lines to handle but also gives you cancer if you eat it for 20 years, there's no legal requirement that they demonstrate it doesn't give you cancer before they can sell it. It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY as a consumer to do that science for them! It being "Natural" is utterly meaningless marketing bullshit.
None of this bullshit safety theater makes any of us more safe.
As I note elsewhere, this isn't exactly damaging though. Most other countries already encouraged manufacturers to develop formulas without artificial dyes, primarily due to differences in consumer opinion (which is usually similarly not fact based), so companies are going to make a big hubub about how this will be so hard for them and then they just shut down the "this is American specific" production line and retool it for the international formula and then insist that they made such a huge change to help everyone.
But "natural colors only" has zero relation to "more healthy", and that goes double when you are talking about processed food. If you actually wanted people to eat healthier, you would be better off banning all food coloring additives, all food texture additives, and anything that lets you modify how food presents itself after processing. People would buy less processed food if it all looked like what it actually was.
Other countries have better food than the US because 1) They often force food additives to be PROVEN safe before any use and much more importantly 2) consumers are way more discerning about food. European bread doesn't have a spoonful of sugar or sugar syrup because Europeans don't want their bread to be addictively sweet, while Americans objectively buy more bread that's been sweetened than "normal" bread. I'm not a fan of treating "revealed preferences" as too meaningful, but it's hard to sell bread to people who wont buy it because they would rather eat the cake in bread form. So it's important to ask why Europeans want their cakes cakey, and their bread not.
You can read the statement from the FDA where they banned red dye 3, it's very short. [1] Here's a relevant quote:
>claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-revoke-...
- you can’t prove a negative (“this dye isn’t harmful”), all you can do is run a panel of tests and interpret the data
- food additives are tested in animal models at levels that are several orders of magnitude higher than what any human might consume. Animals are then autopsied to see if there are *any abnormalities in any organ system. This is done with several species.
- Cell models are also used to test things like carcinogeniticity, cell-specific toxicity, toxicity of chemicals formed when the additive breaks down, toxicity of trace impurities, etc. It’s quite extensive.
- Data is rarely 100% clear. You may get a signal in some animal model at 1000x expected exposure. What does it mean? Plenty of animals exhibit toxicity not seen in humans and slight abnormalities may or may not translate to humans. But the FDA tends to err on the side of caution, especially with food additives as there is little benefit to offset any risk.
- It’s not unusual to run 10 studies, find 9 are negative, 1 shows a signal but it’s not statistically significant. What RFK tends to do is cherry pick the 1 study and say “there is data to prove it’s harmful!” That’s not how science works. You look at the totality and quality of the data and make the best conclusion you can. Is it 100% foolproof? Of course not, but it’s pretty solid evidence that likely no harm will result.
- The one risk is the “unknown unknowns”. If you don’t know what to look for, you’ll never find it. But that’s true with everything we ingest - drugs, natural foods (peanuts and aflatoxin!), synthetic chemicals, water purification chemicals, etc, etc. We can only do the best with the knowledge we have.
- If you see 10 studies and 5 are positive (barely) and 5 are negative, either the effect is really small (I.e. you should worry more about other things) or it’s just noise.
Also it's often hard to figure out...for example, is caramel color artificial or natural?
Except in many cases it is hard to avoid them. Or very expensive.
Also coloring cheese should be banned. I always choose cheese without dyes but many people might be not aware that many types of cheese are artificially colored.
To some degree we do need to experiment and try new things. However for something like food dyes it likely isn't really worth the risk. Or at least they are far overused. Many of the foods with dyes aren't that healthy anyways, so maybe it is is best to have them less attractive to avoid ingesting more chemicals which we don't have strong long-term evidence that it is safe.
We see a very similar cycle with plastics, refrigerants and many other things. We use something for a long time before realizing that it actually has harmful effects, then industry just creates a new very similar chemical that isn't known to be bad yet (or at least isn't bad in the same way the last one is). In some cases it is probably worth it (refrigeration is a valuable technology) but in the cases where it isn't as valuable to society we should be much more conservative with what we allow.
That being said, the proposed regulation isn't scientific and doesn't play with this nuance. A more reasonable approach would be raising the standards for introducing new chemicals (natural or artificial) to food. Not just banning anything "artificial" (whatever that means).
It wouldn't surprise me at this point if the Trump administration started rolling back regulations on lead pipes and enforcing minimum cadmium concentrations in tobacco.
My point is that the longer we have used and consumed something the better we understand it. We are more likely to know and understand the risks. So we should be extra cautious with new materials. Something that we have been eating for hundreds of years with no known negative effects is wildly different than something that a company discovered (naturally or artificially) last year and didn't find any negative effects with some short-term tests.
This is not true. Food additives need to go through an approval process. It’s right on the FDA website.
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-and-gras-ingredients...
They still aren't regulating it, they just held a press conference announcing, literally "we don’t have an agreement; we have an understanding" (and, as covered in this article, no one in the food industry seems to know who exactly the "understanding" is with).
Meanwhile they're firing anyone at the FDA or HHS that can do anything, and the EPA is trying to not regulate coal plants while the Trump administration uses emergency powers to keep coal plants running even over the economic objections of the power companies running them. And of course the EPA is delaying and relaxing the new limits on PFAS in drinking water from last year.
So...no, not really any sensible regulations here.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/hhs-fda-...
Seems more like some number of food companies are happy to go along with something that costs them basically nothing, while anything meaningful won't actually be done or is actually in the process of being reversed.
Meanwhile, all this hubbub over "artificial" vs "natural" colors is fucking nonsensical. Very very few of the "artificial" colors have some evidence of maybe causing some harm from chronic exposure. Not that you should have chronic exposure to any of these foods in the first place since the sugar and fat and salt content alone is unhealthy and will cause you significant chronic health problems unless you exercise for a couple hours a day.
But it doesn't matter whether a chemical is produced by some process in nature or some process in a lab. What matters is how the human body reacts to it. Do we have tomes of evidence that eating "natural" colors is actually safe? No, we do not. Most of them are just GRAS (Generally recognized as safe, which is an outright misnomer) and therefore have no evidence of any safety other than "We used in the 50s so whatever".
Nevermind that "natural" food dyes aren't even! To make "natural red #4" involves taking large amounts of carminic acid from some bugs and reacting that with aluminum or calcium salts. In fact in the US, you can do pretty much whatever you want to a naturally sourced chemical and still call the product of that chemistry "natural".
Replacing well studied, simple, dyes with less studied dyes just because a core part of their chemistry was able to be sourced from """Nature""" is utterly stupid and pointless and meaningless. What actually matters is replacing ingredients that show some toxicity to chronic exposure with ingredients that have significant data to show they are not chronically toxic. There's no structural system in "natural" dyes to actually do that.
This push will not stop Dupont from extracting curcumin from turmeric, massively modifying it to make it easier for an industrial process to use without fouling up their equipment, accidentally make it cancerous after you eat it for 20 years, and poison us all with a "natural" chemical for decades.
"Natural" has no structural overlap with "Isn't unhealthy". Organic Ricin will kill you just as dead.
On that note, I wish that food companies were forced to disclose which "flavours" they added to their products. Some of the artificial flavourings are the exact same compounds as natural ones (vanilla, cherry, and cinnamon are I'm pretty sure, they're just one isolated compound of many), and some of them absolutely are not. It would be really nice to know what I'm actually putting into my body, especially since so many flavourings are added to "natural" products like tea.
Does that kind of labeling exist in any country? I've never seen it on imported goods I don't think.
In 2016, Mars pledged to remove artificial dyes from their products by 2021 [2]; they didn't do it [3], but they pledged to.
[1] https://text.npr.org/2023/10/10/1204839281/california-ban-fo...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190902043853/https://www.mars....
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210204131124/https://www.cspin...
I think the mark of political insanity is labeling someone "insane" simply because you apparently partially disagree with them.
> but I give him no credit
So you're not interested in solving the actual problem in favor of ensuring your preconceived ideas are never changed?
> instead I blame previous administrations
Yea I can't imagine the type of person they would have been pandering to. :|
RFK believes "For decades, the CDC has kept a tight grip on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, concealing vital vaccine safety information from the public," - IE that CDC has conspired to conceal harmful effects of vaccines. If he finds that database, I'll gladly sit up and listen. But until he finds it I'll consider this a conspiracy theory and, according to Psychology Today, belief in conspiracy theories is not necessarily associated with mental disorders.
I disagree with a lot of people in the Trump administration, but I only use the word insane (in the subjective sense, not in the literally diagnosed sense) to describe RFKJr.
I don't give him credit because he comes to his view from a lot of dangerous mistrust of science and medicine. I know a lot of people at CDC who work on flu vaccines and AIDs research, and my step-father was on the team that eradicated smallpox. RFKJr has done unimaginable harm to public health and is pushing us backwards. The people at CDC genuinely want to help people. You can say they've done things wrong, overstepped in some way, or have too much research money from private industry, and that could be a good discussion. No group is perfect, but the answer isn't to destroy it all, or think the CDC is part of a conspiracy.
I think food dyes need more research and better understanding before deploying to millions of people, that is not the same as his anti-science stance. While breaking a lot of things, he also happened to do something good, I don't think that counts as "solving the actual problem".
And, as far as your last point about previous administrations I meant both democrat and republican, but it's been obvious a long time that Democrats pandering would cause a backlash.
At any rate, I don't discount peoples ideas as brainwashing or preconceived ideas, even people I disagree with. I want America to succeed. Trump even did a few things in his first term I agreed with. You seem to have a filter to think people who don't buy into this "new golden age" are brainwashed or tribal. This isn't true. Spend some time considering other view points.
Show me the evidence this is true. I believe there's a term for people who believe things that haven't been proven. Could you ask google AI for me?
Anecdotally, I know people who track flu to create the vaccine for next year, basically tracking trends in other countries that have leading indicators. People have been fired/rehired/fired from these positions across multiple rounds. Imagine not knowing if you'll be somewhere next week. The instability has caused a lot of people to look at other jobs. The smart people have options will leave when they think there's a better chance, the dumb ones will stay. Public health, which are like the roads - it's easy to forget how much work is involved to keep up - is going through a brain drain. These are people who are doing real work, for everyone, not just people who can't afford healthcare.
Since anecdotal stories probably don't sway you, check out reddit for public health and see how the actual workers: https://www.reddit.com/r/publichealth/
I'm sure none of this will affect your opinion, so can you provide hard data that what he is doing is good?
So whereas a normal candidate may be concerned about upsetting the corporations that fund their election, Trump has built a little bit of insulation against that. He can (and does frequently) take on big corporations other politicians would feel the need to not alienate.
No other Republican would dare cross agribusiness.
He also, for the same reasons, is able to make Republican politicians adopt his positions. So if he wants to do something that democrats already want to do (and that’s not as uncommon as you might think; he was a Democrat for decades) it gets done easily.
RFK Jr is the worst person, but he deserves credit when he’s right.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
There's plenty of good discussion possible about which additives in food should be regulated more. But making this kind of unscientific push is harmful in the end.
"Some consumer advocacy groups argue the dyes aren’t worth the potential risk because they lack nutritional value."
It's the precautionary principle in action. Is it scientific? Not really. But does it make rational sense? Possibly.
It's not as though food dyes are being used to make healthy foods more palatable. It's quite the opposite, that food colorings are used to make processed foods more stimulating, which in turn makes non-processed foods less attractive.
I support this in the same way that I'd support an outright ban on processed food advertising (especially to children). There is a health crisis in the US (and much of the western world), with one factor being the prevalence and poor nutrition provided by processed foods.
bookofjoe•7mo ago