This isn't backlash to anything. "Food giant Kraft Heinz vows to stop using artificial dyes" is the title.
Wonder if we will see an uptick in allergic reactions.
https://news.umich.edu/food-dye-can-cause-severe-allergic-re...
That said Kraft is just positioning itself to provide what it thinks the market will want. They haven't suddenly found some ethics and decided they are going to produce good healthy food for its own sake.
People blame science when a company does something they don't like and then credit the free market when it does something they do, forgetting that a huge public company doesn't do anything because it is the right thing, they do it because they think they will make money by doing it.
We can either change the incentives that exist to sell people hyper processed food, or we can regulate everything to death, or we can figure out how to make people not want to eat it. I'm not sure which answer is the best one, but I think that making scientists the boogeymen for a human incentive problem is the wrong way to find it.
AIUI, there's ample evidence that (certain) artificial food dyes can cause various problems. I know that I have anecdotal evidence that they can—even in "blind" situations, where we didn't realize they were in the food until after having problems—cause things like headaches, lightheadedness, and other vague but unpleasant reactions.
I find it frustrating that, as another commenter said, it took an absolute nutter like RFK Jr to make this happen, and also that I have to give him credit for anything positive—but it's pretty clear that this specific thing is, indeed, positive.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvvshpw4FxM
Check at 6 minutes into the video.
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:
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!
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. 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.
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.
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?
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.
The number of things I thought should be true at that age that finally are is baffling. Even accounting for recent regressions.
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.
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.
Instead, every Republican and Fox News called her a Communist (and worse) and that it was un-American to have the government tell people what to eat.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/06/house-gop-wants-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michelle-obamas-scho...
The FDA has executive agency to make changes without any other politician getting involved. Obama could have easily made the same changes being made now.
The truth is they didn’t think it was important enough.
https://apnews.com/article/health-healthy-eating-a9f5cd19e17...
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.
bookofjoe•4h ago