Fun fact - this is how blue raspberry was created as a flavor. Raspberry flavored things were purple, made from a combination of red and blue dye. The red dye (red no 2) was banned. So companies making raspberry flavored stuff just left the red dye out and said "raspberry is blue now" and we all went "shit yeah it is, always has been! why would raspberry be anything other than blue?"
Common varieties of raspberries aren't purple, and I've never heard of raspberry flavor being purple.
So they didn't remove the red to leave blue, because there was never blue in the first place -- they just switched from red to blue, as this lengthy history explains:
I said "raspberry-flavored things" and I guess in the most inclusive sense raspberries are raspberry-flavored so well done there for making me put one finger in the air in outrage and then silently pull it back down while adopting a thoughtful expression. In a less-inclusive sense, raspberry-flavored things are flavored with "mostly esters of the banana, cherry, and pineapple variety" according to the article so it could be argued that there are a lot of raspberry flavored things (including a dust cloud in space, https://next.voxcreative.com/ad/20726659/space-taste-like-ra...) but funnily enough raspberries aren't one of them.
> Food products labeled as blue raspberry flavor are commonly dyed with a bright blue synthetic food coloring, such as brilliant blue FCF (also called Blue #1) having European food coloring number E133. The blue color was used to differentiate raspberry-flavored foods from cherry-, watermelon-, and strawberry-flavored foods, each of which is typically red. The use of blue dye also partially is due to the FDA's 1976 banning of amaranth-based Red Dye No. 2, which had previously been heavily used in raspberry-flavored products.
- it's usually sold as "blue raspberry", not "raspberry"; so you know that it's nothing natural here
- it's mostly used in soft-drinks or other foods that are ~~nothing~~ anything but natural
So my guess is that nobody was thinking they were buying something made of actual rasperries; they knew that they were buying something 100% artificial like "mango madness" or "knockout fruit punch"
Blue raspberry is a candy only flavor. It doesn't really taste like raspberry. Its pretty common as a flavor in the us at least, it's one of my favorite candy flavors.
I feel like you might run into it at a carnival or theme park. It's found in things like candy, Kona ice, extremely artificially flavored drinks, etc. Junk food.
> There don’t appear to be any studies establishing links between red dye No. 3 and cancer in humans, and “relevant exposure levels to FD&C Red No. 3 for humans are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats,” the FDA said in its constituent update posted Wednesday. “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.”
> But “it doesn’t matter, because the FDA mandate under the Delaney Clause says that if it shows cancer in animals or humans, they’re supposed to keep it from the food supply,” said Dr. Jennifer Pomeranz, associate professor of public health policy and management at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.
Even more confusing - the FDA still doesn't believe there's a cancer link with humans. But they are banning it anyway on a technicality.
Serious question:
If there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing color, why risk it? What is the benefit?
The problem with that premise is that almost every substance has a remote chance of causing cancer in some way or another. Just ask the state of California. So you would have to ban everything if that is really your stance.
The correct (and scientifically valid) thing to do is to only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done. Otherwise, anyone can simply say X is harmful and pass regulations to get their pet bogeyman pulled off the market, and that is basically what is happening here.
Alcohol causes cancer, should we reenact prohibition? Water is poisonous in large enough doses. Should we ban water?
Nothing in this world is truly free of all risk. We have to make judgement calls with every single substance. Yes, coloring food is a legitimate use with real benefits that we need to weigh against the risks. And we also need to consider the very real costs of enforcement and burden of compliance. Bans are an extreme option that does not come without costs for the government and society.
We (humans) don't subsist on some Matrix-like slop that provides all of our nutrients for no pleasure. Eating is a weird combination of necessity and pleasure activity. You could ask: if there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing taste, why risk it? You'd ban most spices with this line of reasoning.
At the end of the day, the safest thing (in terms of avoiding cancer) is probably to plant some potatoes in your backyard and eat them unspiced and unbuttered for the rest of your life. Most of us prefer food that is a bit more appealing than that, however. Appealing in all aspects - taste, texture, and appearance.
I don't think anyone really cares or thinks there's some benefit. The problem is (I think) that this leads to some people believing that the dye causes cancer, when there's been no direct link in humans.
The studies that show cancer in rats involve the equivalent of you eating like a pound of the substance a day or more when the dosage you’re exposed to is in milligrams for food.
Plenty of things you eat would kill you if you ate thousands of times as much per day. Most spices. 100 cups of coffee will likely kill you.
Follow-on serious question: who gets to decide what risk is too much and what reward isn't enough for me and my body? Why should that be anyone other than me?
I suppose it boils down to freedom of expression. Analog is a type of red plastic does nothing to humans, but can cause cancer if rats eat it. Do we ban it? What if we're actually trying to kill rats in our area?
The FDA does believe there's strong evidence for its carcinogenicity. Literally the very first paragraph points that out and links to the 2012 publication
It's been banned from cosmetics since the 1990s and its restricted in food in European Union, China, and the United Kingdom and limited in Australia, and New Zealand. California was also banning it starting in 2027. The FDA is behind on this
> They are banning it now so that the incoming administration can't claim credit for banning it in a few months.
The incoming administration won't be banning things from our food. It will be removing regulations and allowing corporations to put whatever they want into their products no matter what the harms are. I wouldn't be surprised if the incoming administration actually reverses the Red Dye No. 3 ban outright or just guts/weakens the FDA to the point where they can't do anything about it.
We're talking about an administration that previously pulled USDA inspectors out of slaughterhouses and allowed the corporations to police themselves. It killed a rule that forced poultry processors to dispose of chickens with lesions potentially caused by a cancer-causing virus and allowed them to just cut off the tumors (assuming they catch them, they also allowed chicken and pork processors to speed up their production lines, reducing the time workers have to spot problems). It reversed bans on harmful pesticides. It cut back regulations on foods that claim to be "organic". It waived nutrition/calorie label requirements for restaurants, and it allowed food companies to make substitutions and omissions in their products without updating ingredient labels.
I expect we'll be hearing about a lot of listeria salmonella and E. Coli illnesses/deaths in the near future, and much later on we'll be here commenting on articles talking about how deregulation of the food industry and regulatory capture by the food industry have resulted in a lot of preventable deaths from cancers and illnesses.
From AP, seems like this has been in the works for over 2 years:
> Food and Drug Administration officials granted a 2022 petition filed by two dozen food safety and health advocates, who urged the agency to revoke authorization for the substance that gives some candies, snack cakes and maraschino cherries a bright red hue.
Doesn’t that make perfect sense? First test in animals. If carcinogenic in animals then don’t move to humans. A lack of studies in human is hardly a basis for ruling it safe.
That was a sensible simplified version of the logic during my training for regulation in drugs and medical devices, at least.
EU law works a bit different. EU law bans everything that has not been shown to be safe (or grandfathered in) while US allows everything that has not been shown to be dangerous. Neither system is perfect.
For example, Chia seeds where illegal in EU before 2020 (but you could still buy them). Not because it was dangerous but because no company had paid money to fund studies to prove that Chia seeds are not dangerous.
Strictly speaking it isn't banned in the EU, it is banned in the EU _with the exception of processed cherries_. Quite why the cocktail cherry industry was considered so critical that it received a specific exception is unclear.
It's the old "better safe than sorry" routine. Very popular with politicians and managers, who are incentivized to take action on extremely minor issues and hold them up as heroic accomplishments while avoiding all the work and mess involved with fixing _actual_ systemic and cultural problems.
How about the idea that it serves absolutely zero purpose, and could cause cancer?
Maybe that is reason enough to remove it from food? “Some people here” love Europe so much, they banned it for that reason. But, during this election, conservatives pushed for the same so now it’s strange how “some people here” are “pro food dyes”.
>>>How about the idea that it serves absolutely zero purpose, and could cause cancer?
I'm not going to bat for Red Dye specifically (I'd be perfectly happy for it to never be added to food), but I generally like a society that's default-allow more than default-deny. A lot of people will argue that certain things serve "zero purpose" because it's not something they personally care about. But presumably somebody wants their food to be red, or why would anyone be adding it?
RFK Jr is basically the polar opposite of a conservative, even though he hitched his wagon to Trump after Harris refused to return his calls. Seeing the Trump base adopt RFK's positions is...super weird. Trump is extremely pro Corporation and anti-regulation. RFK is anti-corporation and super pro regulation, and believes that fast food should be banned and the government should provide every American with three organic meals a day, which isn't really a Republican platform. And there's a good chance RFK Jr has served his purpose to the MAGA group and he'll start facing opposition that leads to his elimination from the administration.
Indeed, it's normal on HN to see endless attacks on California (which had already banned both red dye #3 and 40, among others, to the extent that they can as a state) for banning potential carcinogens, making this a rather hilarious turn of events.
And FWIW, the FDA started the process for this months ago, and months earlier received a petition (from a Democrat, if it matters) to ban the dye.
I agree with you until you bring foodbabe into this. She’s notorious for hand-picking things that meet the MAHA agenda. For example, the oats argument, yes there is a ton of crap in the ultra processed Quaker oats, but that’s an old recipe. Here’s what they sell at target:
There’s not always a one-to-one comparison, and I agree shady companies in the US have free rein over what crap they add to our foods, but this has already been debunked.
The McDonald's fries are the exact same ingredients, the FDA just requires more granular specifications which look "scary". Those are the bracketed "sub"-ingredients you see versus just "Vegetable Oil" for the other side.
As to the additional anti-caking ingredient, I can't tell you. No idea if it's omitted from the UK side due to regulatory reasons or it's actually included but has no requirement to be listed, since it's included in a plethora of British foods in the same places that it's used in the US (things like powdered/confectioner's sugar):
Either way, it's not particularly nefarious (despite her scary red highlight added to it).
As an aside, saying this as someone who's tried McDonald's in probably 60+ countries. It's all the same thing (except a few countries in Asia; Korea and Japan notably), especially like for like (Double Cheeseburger for Double Cheeseburger). I have no idea where this "European McDonald's is healthier/better" idea sprang up, outside of European superiority complexes (probably due to the need to self-justify how insanely busy McDonald's are in Europe). Especially in a country who's most famous takeaway item is overgreased fried chicken/fish and fries/chips tossed together in a bag, then covered and shaken in even more salt and condiments; possibly with a handful of cheese tossed on for good measure.
Food Babe is a terrible source with an agenda. If you actually look at the safety profile of the things involved the differences are minimal. The real risk comes from all the sugar and simple carbs in both.
- The fry ingredients are exactly the same, the US just requires more granular labelling. PDMS is used in oils in Europe too. Maybe in McDonalds oil maybe not, unclear. It's authorized for use in the EU as E900, and it is inert, non-toxic and non-flammable. It's added to stop the fryer oil from spraying on the employees.
- Both Fantas are bad.
- The oats are comparing two different products. 1/4 the label in the US is mandatory breakdowns not required in the UK. 1/4 of the label is the "creaming agent" (starch, whey protein, casein protein, some oil -- nothing a bodybuilder wouldn't consume) and 1/4 is the added vitamins and minerals not present on the UK label. The only meaningful difference appears to be using strawberry-flavored apple chunks. Does it make a difference? Probably none.
- The doritos in the UK list an ingredient that's just "Cool Original Flavour" lmao that FB somehow decides not to highlight. The US requires a breakdown of the components of said "flavor." And the use of annatto vs FD&C dyes which there's really very little conclusive evidence one way or the other. But fine, I guess we can stop using Azo dyes.
The real question is: does swapping Azo dyes for anatto make Doritos measurably healthier or is the problem that you are eating Doritos.
As an oatmeal connoisseur, I'd be remiss not to point out that the two oatmeal products being compared there are not the same. The American product is specifically "Strawberries and Cream," which looks like it was deliberately picked because it adds a few extra scary-looking ingredients from the creaming agent; whereas the UK product is just "Heaps of Fruit," sans cream.
I find this particularly interesting because it is due to market conditions, not legislation, that many Canadian foods have switched to colors from natural ingredients.
These companies appear to believe that Canadians prefer fewer artificial ingredients, and that Americans don't seem to care. Very curious.
It is happening, albeit slowly, here in the USA as well. Trader Joe’s generally has no added artificial dyes, fruit by the foot now is naturally colored, Whole Foods of course, and Wegmans bakery products.
Its just that there still are so many products you don’t expect- marshmallows with blue dye to make them more “bright white”, candies/sprinkles, any children’s medicine in syrup form (although you can now get some in dye free form finally)
It's more of a commentary about how food in the US is overly colored for no other reason than it looks cool, sometimes at the detriment of the health of the consumer.
I looked into it, and from what I can tell the only link to cancer they've found so far is in male rats exposed to high levels of it, but they haven't found evidence that it causes cancer in humans or other animals.
What's odd to me is that it's still fine to sell food like bacon, where the link to cancer in humans appears to be much, much stronger.
in the US, priority #1 is fiduciary duty to shareholders. if customers are buying, and we make it more expensive to make, then shareholders will be mad!
The credibility of the food industry is so low that I think people would support bans on most additives on general principle. We look back at things like putting lead and radium in paint or using asbestos in insulation and say "they should have known better, how could they be so stupid". Well, good additives have a lengthy history of containing harmful additives and I think future generations will say the same about many of these currently in use. What's interesting is that from our current time we can see just how easily it happens, even with the amount of information available to average person.
I realized a long time ago that lack of information isn’t the problem. We’re basically living in a Brave New World now; most people are too distracted to realize they’re being poisoned and would only accept it if the very institutions doing it told them they were doing it. But IMO it’s more of an emotional thing - once you realize it it’s hard to go back to the comfy world of “actually the bureaucrats and shareholders are looking out for my well-being”.
Sometimes they just don't need to lie to us or hide some info, when it was proven and made public that cured meats cause different cancers nobody batted an eye.
> We look back at things like putting lead and radium in paint or using asbestos in insulation and say "they should have known better, how could they be so stupid"
The main thing is: they did know better. They lied to us. They spent a lot of time, money, and effort to lie to us.
And this has happened time and time again in many different industries. Just the other day there was a story on the HN front-page about the PFAS industry has been copying the tobacco playbook for in disinformation campaign.
Also on other topics. For example canned tuna with "Dolphin friendly" logos. Looks good, right? And then people look into it to see what it means, and turns out it has no value, is something the company simply invented themselves, and has done zero-effort to make anything more "dolphin friendly". The entire thing is a basically just a lie.
Many additives are probably entirely safe. Things like vitamin C and caramel are "an E number", and those are fine. But I sure don't trust things, and I don't have the resources to see what is and isn't safe myself, so best to just avoid most of it.
What gets tracked gets improved. I think we need to update the ingredient requirements for food (wtf is seasoning) but also update the fields on Nutritional Facts.
Having a drink like Oreo Coca-Cola read 0’s down the board is illustrative of my point. There’s lots of crap in our food but it’s been selected specifically for its ability to not be captured in the dozen or so categories deemed important back when legislation passed on food transparency.
Relevant news story from a few years ago in the UK, where a bakery was using US sprinkles on cakes, that aren't legal to use in the UK, due to Red #3 :
My goodness, for a website full of techincal individuals a lot of you are falling for the appeal to nature fallacy hard. Also, it looks like no one here knows how to defer to experts. I don't know much about food safety standards, chemical compositions, additives, etc. so I've talked with people who are experts instead. And from what I have gotten, most people are freaking out because they lack an understanding of what is really safe or not. People believe that since a certain scary sounding chemical was added that the food is now less safe when that's not the case.
Appeal to nature isn't a fallacy, it is a rhetorical device and can be a completely logical razor.
The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past. If we want a yellow food dye should we:
A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
Who the hell would take B? Unless we believe that our studies are infallible, all encompassing and perfectly established and executed the first will always be a better option. Time and time again we see that things previously thought safe are not but I would argue it is far far rarer to see that on the more naturally derived side of food.
>derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years
This one stands out to me because, as they say, “the dose makes the poison”. Taking some trace element from something “natural” and highly concentrating it is basically as novel as something new. Consuming a gram of something over a lifetime is different than consuming a gram of something every day.
Also, eating something for hundreds of thousands of years only means that most people will live several decades while eating it. It doesn’t mean people won’t be killed by it. It doesn’t mean people wont get cancer from it in 30-40 years. Killing 1% of the people that eat something would be a perfectly acceptable evolutionary loss, depending on the amount of nutrition and calories provided.
That’s why it is an appeal to nature fallacy. Because it says absolutely nothing about population level long term health effects.
> The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past.
Okay, where in the evolutionary past did we eat Doritos colored with annatto?
> A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
A lot of things we have historically eaten are carcinogenic. Natural flavoring for root beer is flavored with sarsaparilla root. Fun fact, it contains safrole, a known carcinogen.
Carrots, bananas, parsley, black pepper, clove, anise contain alkenylbenzene compounds which cause cancer in rodents.
Furoanocoumarins in parsnips, celery root, grapefruit, etc, can cause skin burns and prevent many drugs from working (or make them work too fast).
Cassava, sorghum, stone fruits, bamboo shoots and almonds contain cyanogenic glycosides which turn into cyanide when eaten.
Undercooked beans contain lectins, and 4-5 kidney beans are enough to cause somachache, vomiting and diarrhea.
Nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants) contain solanine which is toxic.
Various fruits like pineapples have raphides which are sharp spikes made of oxalic acid. If you eat particularly aggressive ones they can even cause bleeding.
The pawpaw fruit that has been eaten for generations contains annonacin, a neurotoxin.
People have been eating (prepared) mushrooms like gyromitra that have gyromitrin (metabolized to monomethylhydrazine, rocket fuel, a neurotoxin) for generations too. It can actually cause ALS over time.
Castor beans contain ricin.
The difference is apparently God doesn't have to publish this information on an ingredients list.
> B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
"A couple studies" is wildly disingenuous. A quick search will tell you as much.
> The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past.
Our evolutionary past is full of death and disease from what we ate. Humans have been drinking alcohol for centuries and there is strong scientific consensus that it causes cancer. Just because it's what humans have been doing doesn't mean it is safe and we should continue it.
> A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
> B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
You say "derive it from petroleum" like they pump it directly from the well into your food. Petroleum is composed of hydrocarbons, it's very useful and is used in a lot of different applications. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it is dangerous.
I think an important note is that regulatory agencies in other countries have cracked down on some of those scary-sounding chemicals, due to them being unnecessary for food with no real benefit for the person eating it, and possible evidence of negative affects.
I mentioned this in another comment, but as someone who has lived for multiple years in the US and Europe, it is a drastic difference in food quality between the two. Much easier to eat foods made of whole ingredients where I lived in Europe - even many prepackaged foods that we’d buy at the grocery store.
I came across this link yesterday[1] on a health-focused HN thread[2]. The study split a group of overweight people up into low-carb and low-fat diets, to see which produced better weight loss. The group that lost the most weight was actually neither - it was just whoever ended up eating less processed foods and more whole foods.
> other countries have cracked down on some of those scary-sounding chemicals, due to them being unnecessary for food with no real benefit for the person eating it, and possible evidence of negative affects
Just because another country bans something does not make that thing harmful. Politicians banning food products and additives with no real scientific evidence is not unusual. They bend to public will, they are politicians after all. Also, studies that show "possible evidence of negative affects" in mice ingested at higher dosages then a human would ever eat or drink does not show they are harmful in humans. Humans are not mice after all.
> as someone who has lived for multiple years in the US and Europe, it is a drastic difference in food quality between the two
This is purely subjective, I've been to Europe and the Middle East, both have great food. But food in America is no worse in quality. The main difference is when I visited those area's I mostly ate out, at nicer restaurants where food would of course feel/taste/look better then the average meal at home or from fast food. But when eating at friends homes, the food quality (vegetables, fruits, meats) was no different than what I could get here in America.
> it was just whoever ended up eating less processed foods and more whole foods
I'm not arguing that we don't eat more ultra-processed foods. We do eat too many highly refined foods with little nutritional value. My argument is against blaming food additives, dyes, GMOs, HFCS, etc... Eating more whole foods, vegetables, and fruits would make you healthier, but that's due to the nutritional value, fiber, feeling more full for longer leading to reduced caloric intake, etc... Not because you got rid of food dyes.
Have you considered that those experts might have perverse incentives? It’s not a secret that the very regulators whose job it is to make sure we don’t eat poison are the same people who sell the food. But sure feel free to “trust the experts”, I’ll be over here doing my best to not eat things made out of coal tar (even if someone in a lab coat says it’s okie dokie).
Every single thing in our society has perverse incentives. Every single person who ever sells you something has incentive to sell you as little as possible for as much money as possible. Every single employer has incentive to pay you as little as possible for as much labor as possible. But that's not how things end up happening, because other forces are at play.
People who worked their entire life in an industry and became experts on it, then become regulators for the same industry, have incentives to favor their industry, sure. But who else should be regulating the industry if not the expert in that industry? If you get someone who is not an insider, wouldn't they just fail at regulating, because they have no idea how it works? Also, the people who put someone in that position, isn't there a chain of accountability there? There are many people working side by side with the "evil person trying to enrich themselves". Bad acts come out. Incentives tend to balance each other out. It's not wrong that part of a regulator's job is to find a balance as to not destroy an industry while regulating it.
Oh come off it. The United States has the highest rate of obesity in the WORLD (excluding some small Pacific islands). The US also has some of the most overengineered food. It doesn't take much to see the connection.
We are well past the point of carefully reasoning about food. It is time to start killing off additives first and asking questions later. "Freaking out" is the reasonable stance when everything in the grocery store is poison.
You are blaming the wrong thing though. America isn't obese because of red dye 40 or food additives, it's obese because Americans eat too much ultra processed foods that are high in calories and low in nutritional value. Along with minimal exercise and walking.
Banning red dye 40 isn't going to solve anything, companies are just going to find another food dye, natural or synthetic. There needs to be major changes in the average American diet to incorporate more whole foods, fiber, vegetables, fruits, etc... Once that is done then take a harder look at the dyes and additives.
People eat maraschino cherries on ice cream sundaes in many countries where people claim the dye is banned, yet the cherries still contain the die. Maybe you should reevaluate your position.
As a benzene-handling professional for decades who never intends to cease entering environments subject to exposure, I've never considered intentionally ingesting non-food ingredients or contamination to be the least bit safe. Especially dyes and pesticides, if you study the chemistry of these you can see that very good characterization and identification of complex, unique, undesired impurities has not really been very comprehensive at all. Beside the possibility that the dye molecule itself may be the most toxic component anyway.
With industrial hazards there is at least one layer of PPE, and I can do anything I see fit to further mitigate exposure in any way.
I don't even know which dye is in things like Flamin Hot pop culture materials, but they sure look fake to me. And if the only PPE between me and the potentially-hazardous substance is the bag that the Cheetos come in, I'm always going to be highly dismayed when the integrity of the PPE is compromised for any reason :)
As non-food ingredients have proliferated over the decades, all I can say is why even bother?
Give me a break, they couldn't have used very good strawberries if they had to make them pink artificially.
I am a lifelong science dude myself, studied dyes quite a bit and even synthesized some in the lab. So on this I trust the judgment of young mothers who are avoiding junk food for their kids more so than other scientists who propose that dyes are completely harmless for some reason.
I also talked with people who are experts, and they assured me banning Red Dye 3, among other things, is necessary and it will improve population health in the long term.
Great, but I can actually back it up. That's the difference here. I can point you to experts who agree with what I am saying and who I have chatted with.
Or, maybe some of us have lived experience where artificial food dyes have detrimental effects to our children. I don't need science to tell me what my own two eyes and lived experience says. Do I really need a double blind study to tell me that when one of my kids eats food laced with these dyes, he's crazy for a week, but when he eats candy w/o these dyes, he just is a normal kid with a sugar rush?
My sibling comment goes into more detail, but claiming that anyone who has a lived experience is stupid (aka, falling for a logical fallacy) is just accelerating the distrust of "authority" at a time when we need it most.
> Do I really need a double blind study to tell me that when one of my kids eats food laced with these dyes, he's crazy for a week, but when he eats candy w/o these dyes, he just is a normal kid with a sugar rush?
TBH this sounds like exactly the kind of things double blind studies are invented for.
Someone with one (1) anecdote is not an authority and shouldn't be trusted like one. Eroding trust in authorities by equating actual experts with somebody who has a half baked opinion based on an anecdote seems like the real issue to me.
Going around and assuming every opinion is based on objective reality instead of subjective experience filtered through human perception with all it's quirks is not a good way to arrive at truth.
For anyone wondering why it takes so long to actually switch this stuff out, and the available alternatives to Red 3, I thought this piece from a food dyes company (no relation) was fascinating: https://na.sensientfoodcolors.com/confection/replacing-red-3...
You have to figure that if these guys had a drop-in replacement, they'd be offering it for sale at a high price, so this probably is the best you can do. The process changes and requalification looks like no fun at all. But it also looks pretty doable for a company in this line of business, so maybe you won't see too many color changes on the shelf with this ban.
> For anyone wondering why it takes so long to actually switch this stuff out
One counterpoint is do we really NEED to have brightly colored foods? It's a hard problem if you need a food to be bright red. But, that has to boil down to strictly to improving sales, right? Hypothetically, if all the artificial food dyes were banned, then all food companies would be on the same level playing field.
Color is definitely something that catches a person's eye, so if you have a "food product" that needs extra to convince someone to buy it, color is a way to do it. You can't taste it before purchasing. You can see and smell it, so they push those levers as much as they can.
Visuals have a pretty big impact on food. I wonder how many foods would just look disgusting without any food dyes. Reminds me of butter companies trying to pass legislation to make margerine companies unable to dye their product to look like butter
There are a bunch of no-artificial-dye candies and whatnot on the market already, and they actually look better to me - they're not absurd unnatural colors.
> The way that FD&C Red No. 3 causes cancer in male rats does not occur in humans. Relevant exposure levels to FD&C Red No. 3 for humans are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats. Studies in other animals and in humans did not show these effects; 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.
if "these sort of things" aren't actually harmful, and what we see in Europe is mostly governments reacting to unscientific panic among their citizens, then I'd say it's other countries that are wild, not the United States.
The European approach is: if it doesn't look on your plate the way it looked on the hoof or on the plant, it's probably not good to consume. This is a much better heuristic than "we haven't found any adverse effects yet, so call it GRAS". Science is great at determining the presence of specific effects. It's not so good at finding an absence of effect.
The prize to win is public health. There is absolutely no benefit in putting all this crap into food. Maybe some things are harmful and others are not but they are absolutely useless.
If they're competing to ban dangerous things in our food supply then the "prize" is a longer healthier life for everyone who lives in any nation that engages in such competition? :shrug:
Go to Italy or France, or any EU state. The food is better and often cheaper in almost every case.
Even a McDonald's hamburger is good, and not dominated by the fake chemical garlic substitute. In the US, McDonald's french fries contain: Potatoes, Vegetable Oil (canola Oil, Corn Oil, Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Natural Beef Flavor [wheat And Milk Derivatives]), Dextrose, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate (maintain Color), Salt. natural Beef Flavor Contains Hydrolyzed Wheat And Hydrolyzed Milk As Starting Ingredients.
Not sure on food dyes but my understanding is the FDA is leagues behind the EU on regulation when it comes to food.
My experience in Italy with foods that normally cause some issues (dairy/cheese) really opened my eyes to that. My sister who doesn’t eat cheese/dairy at all here in the US was able to eat it there without issue because of how they process dairy over there or something.
We already have the FDA (most foods and drugs), the USDA (produce, animal products besides milk), and TTB (alcohol). Each one sets its own safety and labeling standards, which is why, for example, mixed drinks containing alcohol don't have to list allergens(!). Another level of fragmentation would be a disaster IMO. We could split the FDA, but we'd need to merge the food regulator half into one of those other existing agencies.
Bans add a lot of overhead to both the agencies responsible for enforcing them and industry. Those agencies are only so large and are spread thin, sometimes there are 'bigger fish' they need to focus on.
I can understand waiting until there's sufficient evidence before starting that process.
Lots of other countries other than the US banned this dye years ago. So what changed in the US? Logically speaking we didn't just come to our collective senses. Did government lobbying budgets dry up? Or did the cost just increase where it wasn't worth paying anymore?
Technically it appears red dye no 3 was banned due to cancer and Delaney clause, however, keep in mind that I think the primary reason it was banned in California last year was all the studies correlating it to deleterious cognitive impacts on children
What other things does the US need to ban to catch up with Europe? Who is "right vs wrong" here? Is Europe wrong for having too many things banned, is US wrong for not having parity with what is banned in Europe?
Is Europe being overly cautious, is America being unsafe?
Admittedly to a fault, I tend to be quick to trust institutions and don't tend to be quick to believe conspiracies (not claiming that this is). With most of the additives to products that people seem to be worried about, I default to thinking it's not the most important thing I need to be concerned with in my daily life.
But the FDA making this ruling is validating for my friends who seem to go way out of their way to find product ingredients to be afraid of. I know people have been claiming for years that Red3 being allowed in the US is crazy.
I'm genuinely here to listen: how would someone who believes that the US allows far too many dangerous ingredients in consumer goods and believes the consumer needs to actively screen and research what is in their products convince me that I need to be more serious about screening the products I use for dangerous ingredients?
We don’t need to convince you of anything. If you care, you’ll look and do your own research about the ingredients. If you think you’re safe, then you’ll eat them,.
Is it not enough to know that the federal regulatory agencies are captured? Why wouldn’t they poison you if it increases their bottom line and they can get away with it?
It's specifically a type of cancer in rats with no human equivalent. But the FDA rules state they can ban an ingredient if it causes cancer in humans or animals.
For anyone that pushes back on the government currently elected, well, far from optimal imagine that so many before them allowed a cancerous substance like this to be in so many foods
Great, now ban Red 40 and the other synthetic dyes. You can't avoid them in anything marketed toward children. I have children and I know others who also have children that are highly sensitive to these dyes, causing major behavioral issues that last for 5-7 days after ingesting food/medicine/drinks that contain these dyes.
As a parent, if I notice a correlation between an action and subsequent behavior, are you saying that my lived experience is irrelevant because... nobody bothered to include me in a specific double blind study? How many things do you do every day that have not been studied through exhaustive scientific research?
From my own lived experience, when one of my my kids eats a red velvet cake or a bag of Skittles or M&Ms that he's violent and crazy for a week, but if he has a few Oreos he's fine. If one of my other kids does the same thing, she doesn't have the same reaction. If I knew the exact chemical pathway that made this happen, I'd be thrilled. I am just living my life trying to parent kids in this world, and you know what, stupid bright dyes that do nothing other than make food appear unnaturally incandescent are practically impossible to avoid. So it's just one more thing that's piled on as a parent that you have to deal with.
If you ask me, this aggressive "well, you're stupid and you shouldn't trust your own eyes because science" attitude that has triggered the strong anti-authority sentiments globally. It's why objectively crazy people like RFK Jr get huge followings- I vehemently disagree with 99% of his rhetoric, especially his anti-vax viewpoints, but I totally agree with his stance on food additives such as these synthetic dyes.
I see the effects with my own eyes. Telling me I'm stupid doesn't help science, it just serves to further diminish the trust in the very institutions we need more now than ever.
I remain sceptical about the influence RFK has in this administration anyway, in comparison with corporate interests. Why would this time be any better than the previous Trump administration?
Might as well get some credit for the one or two good ideas he has before the antivaccine rhetoric begins and measles/mumps/whooping cough kills a few tens of thousands of people and the GQP goes "oops" and fires him and puts the old policies back in place.
No libertarians feel that people will likely get sick or die from bad products, and will sue the company/quit buying the product; aka let the market and survival of the fittest decide what people put in their bodies.
I think that Trump doesn't care one way or another about food coloring or Americans getting cancer, and as such his administration will likely leave such things alone and untouched for the most part unless the food lobby asks him to cancel or defund the FDA for campaign contributions or similar.
Harris blatantly copying the No Tax on Tips was particularly funny this election season. You could see on her face that she didn’t believe in it at all.
Between all the snarkyness (is that a word? I'm not a native speaker :-D) I think there's a point here. With all the regulations the EU has put up, and the bureaucracy that came with them, I'm really happy that we got food and its ingredients pretty tightly under control and locked down. Glad to see that other countries are prioritizing consumer safety, too.
But Musk, RFK Jr. and others were precisely the kind of people that were advocating for this kind of regulation to take place. Remember the thing about replacing seed oils (eugh) with beef tallow? I really don't think they are against this kind of regulation--on the contrary.
"according to claude" makes it hard for my mind to give much credence to the post in a way very different from "according to Wikipedia" with a link. I intend this politely, but if I wanted to know what claude would output I would ask it myself, during the phase of the moon when the way I've chosen to word the prompt has the best chance of working.
FD&C Red 40 (Allura Red AC): Linked to hyperactivity in children in some studies, although evidence is mixed. Theoretical concerns regarding disruption of cell membrane integrity, potentially leading to increased permeability and toxicity.
FD&C Yellow 5 (Tartrazine): Some in vitro studies suggest potential neurotoxic effects, though human evidence is lacking. Theoretical concerns regarding modulation of neurotransmitters, potentially leading to behavioral changes.
FD&C Yellow 6 (Sunset Yellow FCF): Similar to Yellow 5, some in vitro studies raise concerns, but human evidence is limited. Theoretical concerns regarding binding to DNA, potentially leading to mutagenic effects.
FD&C Blue 1 (Brilliant Blue FCF): Theoretical concerns regarding exacerbation of respiratory conditions like asthma. Theoretical concerns regarding increased cell membrane permeability, potentially leading to toxicity.
FD&C Blue 2 (Indigo Carmine): Limited human studies, but some animal research suggests potential neurological impacts. Theoretical concerns regarding triggering or exacerbating immunological reactions.
It'd be great if people stopped just copy-pasting stuff from LLMs and then responding to that instead of other real human people.
It's not a foregone conclusion that just because people haven't ingested things before doesn't inherently mean that ingesting them is bad. Saying it is is itself a pretty obvious logical fallacy. Now I'm not saying at all that ingesting oil, even byproducts after multiple rounds of synthesis, is a good idea. But it's not impossible to synthesize something edible out of something inedible, so the fact that oil is inedible doesn't mean that all oil derivatives are as well.
Meanwhile cigarettes, which are also cancer linked, are legal with a warning and some picture on them.
And alcohol, which is also linked to cancer, is legal, with a warning on it.
And (non-self driving) automobiles, which kills tens of thousands of Americans yearly, with no warning or pictures, are legal.
Activities that reward being sedentary - a known factor in lethal cancers and disease - have no warning labels. When is my PS5 gonna warn me about playing video games?
While Americans are dying from a range of cardiovascular disease and cancers it's comforting to know that red M&Ms or red fruit punch won't be one of the causes.
Why’s there no avenue for receiving risk appropriate compensation funds for having increased personal risk of death by consuming something a reasonable expert in the industry could consider dangerous?
If I skirt the law on technicalities to cause harm to an employer for example, such as knowingly implementing trivial security encryption on critical transactions, I feel I could be liable for damages. Why is this a game of spot the problem and then get off with a warning before going to the next preplanned technicality workaround that usually also causes cancer but will buy them a few years until the process repeats?
Shouldn’t mass risk of life be considered a terror level charge? Or rather, instead of saying no to that question because it didn’t appear to meet X criteria, why aren’t we finding ways it could meet that criteria? For example if it needs a political reason, we should ask how this could be a politically motivated decision rather than saying this doesn’t appear to meet any political agenda. That’s how the laws are always completely one sided abused against normal people anyway in a more extreme stretch than my example. I think it’s reasonable to do a reasonable-amount of application back.
Because the people en masse have not successfully come together to demand this.
What makes companies more powerful than the people is not that companies actually have more power. They don't. It's that they concentrate the power they do have into the hands of a small group of decision-makers, which allows it to be deployed effectively. By comparison, the people are divided, disjointed, disorganized, and distracted, and as such typically fail to come together to demand specific changes they agree on.
Idk I think there is a ton of overlap between industry and the highest levels of government. They wouldn’t want pesky things like human well-being to get in the way of profit so they get their hands on some of the levers of power and mitigate their liability one way or the other. It’d probably take a class action lawsuit in the kind of case you describe to be brought to justice.
Most people wont like this, but the answer is because courts care about if the harm actually occurred in fact, not if there is risk that harm might occur.
You cant sue another driver because they risked crashing into your car.
Fun fact - this is how blue raspberry was created as a flavor. Raspberry flavored things were purple, made from a combination of red and blue dye. The red dye (red no 2) was banned. So companies making raspberry flavored stuff just left the red dye out and said "raspberry is blue now" and we all went "shit yeah it is, always has been! why would raspberry be anything other than blue?"
I think your story is half-right.
Common varieties of raspberries aren't purple, and I've never heard of raspberry flavor being purple.
So they didn't remove the red to leave blue, because there was never blue in the first place -- they just switched from red to blue, as this lengthy history explains:
https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/pop-culture/ar...
And it was seen as a benefit because blue stood out more from the other red flavors -- cherry, strawberry, watermelon...
I said "raspberry-flavored things" and I guess in the most inclusive sense raspberries are raspberry-flavored so well done there for making me put one finger in the air in outrage and then silently pull it back down while adopting a thoughtful expression. In a less-inclusive sense, raspberry-flavored things are flavored with "mostly esters of the banana, cherry, and pineapple variety" according to the article so it could be argued that there are a lot of raspberry flavored things (including a dust cloud in space, https://next.voxcreative.com/ad/20726659/space-taste-like-ra...) but funnily enough raspberries aren't one of them.
Mindblowing. More details and photos:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_raspberry_flavor
> Food products labeled as blue raspberry flavor are commonly dyed with a bright blue synthetic food coloring, such as brilliant blue FCF (also called Blue #1) having European food coloring number E133. The blue color was used to differentiate raspberry-flavored foods from cherry-, watermelon-, and strawberry-flavored foods, each of which is typically red. The use of blue dye also partially is due to the FDA's 1976 banning of amaranth-based Red Dye No. 2, which had previously been heavily used in raspberry-flavored products.
And we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Eurasia -> Eastasia
My heart raced for a few seconds, thank you!!!
And it all started because a harmful dye was banned
Good god that’s awful. Like really? And people go along with this? Have they not ever had and actual raspberry?
Two things:
- it's usually sold as "blue raspberry", not "raspberry"; so you know that it's nothing natural here
- it's mostly used in soft-drinks or other foods that are ~~nothing~~ anything but natural
So my guess is that nobody was thinking they were buying something made of actual rasperries; they knew that they were buying something 100% artificial like "mango madness" or "knockout fruit punch"
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Have you had blue raspberry? It's better than actual raspberry, which is why people go along with it.
Do raspberries not taste like raspberries?
What product has "blue raspberry"?
I can only think of one raspberry product I buy, and it doesn't have any dye, and is deep red colored (from the raspberries)
> "What product has "blue raspberry"?
Blue raspberry is a standard slushie colour the world over, in my experience.
https://www.7-eleven.com/products/slurpee/blue-raspberry
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Blue raspberry is a candy only flavor. It doesn't really taste like raspberry. Its pretty common as a flavor in the us at least, it's one of my favorite candy flavors.
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You're thinking of snozzberries.
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>What product has "blue raspberry"?
Berry Blue Jell-o[0].
There are a bunch of others as well, but that's the first one that came to mind.
[0] https://www.kraftheinz.com/jell-o/products/00043000200407-be...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_raspberry_flavor
I guess you're one of today's 10,000: https://xkcd.com/1053/
I feel like you might run into it at a carnival or theme park. It's found in things like candy, Kona ice, extremely artificially flavored drinks, etc. Junk food.
Jello.
Jolly rancher
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From the CNN article:
> There don’t appear to be any studies establishing links between red dye No. 3 and cancer in humans, and “relevant exposure levels to FD&C Red No. 3 for humans are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats,” the FDA said in its constituent update posted Wednesday. “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.”
> But “it doesn’t matter, because the FDA mandate under the Delaney Clause says that if it shows cancer in animals or humans, they’re supposed to keep it from the food supply,” said Dr. Jennifer Pomeranz, associate professor of public health policy and management at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.
Even more confusing - the FDA still doesn't believe there's a cancer link with humans. But they are banning it anyway on a technicality.
Serious question: If there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing color, why risk it? What is the benefit?
The problem with that premise is that almost every substance has a remote chance of causing cancer in some way or another. Just ask the state of California. So you would have to ban everything if that is really your stance.
The correct (and scientifically valid) thing to do is to only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done. Otherwise, anyone can simply say X is harmful and pass regulations to get their pet bogeyman pulled off the market, and that is basically what is happening here.
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Alcohol causes cancer, should we reenact prohibition? Water is poisonous in large enough doses. Should we ban water?
Nothing in this world is truly free of all risk. We have to make judgement calls with every single substance. Yes, coloring food is a legitimate use with real benefits that we need to weigh against the risks. And we also need to consider the very real costs of enforcement and burden of compliance. Bans are an extreme option that does not come without costs for the government and society.
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We (humans) don't subsist on some Matrix-like slop that provides all of our nutrients for no pleasure. Eating is a weird combination of necessity and pleasure activity. You could ask: if there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing taste, why risk it? You'd ban most spices with this line of reasoning.
At the end of the day, the safest thing (in terms of avoiding cancer) is probably to plant some potatoes in your backyard and eat them unspiced and unbuttered for the rest of your life. Most of us prefer food that is a bit more appealing than that, however. Appealing in all aspects - taste, texture, and appearance.
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I don't think anyone really cares or thinks there's some benefit. The problem is (I think) that this leads to some people believing that the dye causes cancer, when there's been no direct link in humans.
The studies that show cancer in rats involve the equivalent of you eating like a pound of the substance a day or more when the dosage you’re exposed to is in milligrams for food.
Plenty of things you eat would kill you if you ate thousands of times as much per day. Most spices. 100 cups of coffee will likely kill you.
Seems more like a problem with uneven application of bans.
Red dye 3 might cause cancer (maybe) but it's admittedly such a weak effect that studies aren't finding a link in humans.
Meanwhile, there are carcinogenic things like alcohol which anyone can buy (over 21).
Heck, we can't even mandate that alcohol must contain B12, which would absolutely save lives and prevent some of the serious injuries of alcoholism.
But we can ban this dye that may or may not in some very small percentage of people cause cancer.
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Follow-on serious question: who gets to decide what risk is too much and what reward isn't enough for me and my body? Why should that be anyone other than me?
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I'm surprised they're banning Red 3 instead of Red 40. Red 40 is a very common allergen.
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I suppose it boils down to freedom of expression. Analog is a type of red plastic does nothing to humans, but can cause cancer if rats eat it. Do we ban it? What if we're actually trying to kill rats in our area?
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The FDA does believe there's strong evidence for its carcinogenicity. Literally the very first paragraph points that out and links to the 2012 publication
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23026007/
It's been banned from cosmetics since the 1990s and its restricted in food in European Union, China, and the United Kingdom and limited in Australia, and New Zealand. California was also banning it starting in 2027. The FDA is behind on this
You’re linking to a publication that has nothing to do with the FDA.
They are banning it now so that the incoming administration can't claim credit for banning it in a few months.
> They are banning it now so that the incoming administration can't claim credit for banning it in a few months.
The incoming administration won't be banning things from our food. It will be removing regulations and allowing corporations to put whatever they want into their products no matter what the harms are. I wouldn't be surprised if the incoming administration actually reverses the Red Dye No. 3 ban outright or just guts/weakens the FDA to the point where they can't do anything about it.
We're talking about an administration that previously pulled USDA inspectors out of slaughterhouses and allowed the corporations to police themselves. It killed a rule that forced poultry processors to dispose of chickens with lesions potentially caused by a cancer-causing virus and allowed them to just cut off the tumors (assuming they catch them, they also allowed chicken and pork processors to speed up their production lines, reducing the time workers have to spot problems). It reversed bans on harmful pesticides. It cut back regulations on foods that claim to be "organic". It waived nutrition/calorie label requirements for restaurants, and it allowed food companies to make substitutions and omissions in their products without updating ingredient labels.
I expect we'll be hearing about a lot of listeria salmonella and E. Coli illnesses/deaths in the near future, and much later on we'll be here commenting on articles talking about how deregulation of the food industry and regulatory capture by the food industry have resulted in a lot of preventable deaths from cancers and illnesses.
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But... they will anyway, if public sentiment favors it. If not, they'll blame the predecessor. This seems predestined to be.
From AP, seems like this has been in the works for over 2 years:
> Food and Drug Administration officials granted a 2022 petition filed by two dozen food safety and health advocates, who urged the agency to revoke authorization for the substance that gives some candies, snack cakes and maraschino cherries a bright red hue.
These regulations fit pretty well with the Democrats platform but until now they would have been near impossible to pass.
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They never would have banned it if RFK Jr. wasn't the HHS nominee.
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Doesn’t that make perfect sense? First test in animals. If carcinogenic in animals then don’t move to humans. A lack of studies in human is hardly a basis for ruling it safe.
That was a sensible simplified version of the logic during my training for regulation in drugs and medical devices, at least.
I think the primary reason it was banned in California last year was all the studies correlating it to deleterious cognitive impacts on children
https://www.additudemag.com/red-dye-3-ban-adhd-news/amp/
https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/potential-impact...
If a food additive is banned in the EU, it should be banned here IMO. The EU has a good track record on what should or should not be included in food
EU law works a bit different. EU law bans everything that has not been shown to be safe (or grandfathered in) while US allows everything that has not been shown to be dangerous. Neither system is perfect.
For example, Chia seeds where illegal in EU before 2020 (but you could still buy them). Not because it was dangerous but because no company had paid money to fund studies to prove that Chia seeds are not dangerous.
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Strictly speaking it isn't banned in the EU, it is banned in the EU _with the exception of processed cherries_. Quite why the cocktail cherry industry was considered so critical that it received a specific exception is unclear.
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You do know the US bans more food colors then the EU, right? You can't just say LGTM and go with what the EU does.
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By what measurement is their track record good?
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It's the old "better safe than sorry" routine. Very popular with politicians and managers, who are incentivized to take action on extremely minor issues and hold them up as heroic accomplishments while avoiding all the work and mess involved with fixing _actual_ systemic and cultural problems.
Banning all chemical that does exactly nothing except to absorb spectrum of light and make fake food look more like the real analog
Why some harmful substances are banned swiftly while others linger and whether this is about public health or legal optics.
Would it be better for them to just ignore the rules if they don't feel that the rules make sense?
How about the idea that it serves absolutely zero purpose, and could cause cancer?
Maybe that is reason enough to remove it from food? “Some people here” love Europe so much, they banned it for that reason. But, during this election, conservatives pushed for the same so now it’s strange how “some people here” are “pro food dyes”.
>>>How about the idea that it serves absolutely zero purpose, and could cause cancer?
I'm not going to bat for Red Dye specifically (I'd be perfectly happy for it to never be added to food), but I generally like a society that's default-allow more than default-deny. A lot of people will argue that certain things serve "zero purpose" because it's not something they personally care about. But presumably somebody wants their food to be red, or why would anyone be adding it?
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"conservatives pushed for the same"
RFK Jr is basically the polar opposite of a conservative, even though he hitched his wagon to Trump after Harris refused to return his calls. Seeing the Trump base adopt RFK's positions is...super weird. Trump is extremely pro Corporation and anti-regulation. RFK is anti-corporation and super pro regulation, and believes that fast food should be banned and the government should provide every American with three organic meals a day, which isn't really a Republican platform. And there's a good chance RFK Jr has served his purpose to the MAGA group and he'll start facing opposition that leads to his elimination from the administration.
Indeed, it's normal on HN to see endless attacks on California (which had already banned both red dye #3 and 40, among others, to the extent that they can as a state) for banning potential carcinogens, making this a rather hilarious turn of events.
And FWIW, the FDA started the process for this months ago, and months earlier received a petition (from a Democrat, if it matters) to ban the dye.
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It's not a technicality, it's the law.
The comparison between American and Canadian Froot Loop cereal is illuminating:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/uc265y/a...
It's the same from most things, I wonder why americans are ok with that
mcdonalds fries: https://boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/McDonalds-...
fanta: https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/ab2mWVvJ_Tp7.UWQpFd.pQ--/Y...
oats: https://foodbabe.com/app/uploads/2019/02/U.S.-vs.-Uk-quaker-...
chips: https://foodbabe.com/app/uploads/2019/02/U.S.-vs.-Uk-doritos...
I agree with you until you bring foodbabe into this. She’s notorious for hand-picking things that meet the MAHA agenda. For example, the oats argument, yes there is a ton of crap in the ultra processed Quaker oats, but that’s an old recipe. Here’s what they sell at target:
https://www.target.com/p/quaker-fruit-38-cream-instant-oatme...
STRAWBERRIES & CREAM INGREDIENTS: Whole grain oats, sugar, dried strawberries, salt, dried cream, natural flavor, nonfat dry milk, sea salt, dried vegetable juice concentrate (color), tocopherols (to preserve freshness).
There’s not always a one-to-one comparison, and I agree shady companies in the US have free rein over what crap they add to our foods, but this has already been debunked.
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The McDonald's fries are the exact same ingredients, the FDA just requires more granular specifications which look "scary". Those are the bracketed "sub"-ingredients you see versus just "Vegetable Oil" for the other side.
As to the additional anti-caking ingredient, I can't tell you. No idea if it's omitted from the UK side due to regulatory reasons or it's actually included but has no requirement to be listed, since it's included in a plethora of British foods in the same places that it's used in the US (things like powdered/confectioner's sugar):
https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/j.efsa.2020...
Either way, it's not particularly nefarious (despite her scary red highlight added to it).
As an aside, saying this as someone who's tried McDonald's in probably 60+ countries. It's all the same thing (except a few countries in Asia; Korea and Japan notably), especially like for like (Double Cheeseburger for Double Cheeseburger). I have no idea where this "European McDonald's is healthier/better" idea sprang up, outside of European superiority complexes (probably due to the need to self-justify how insanely busy McDonald's are in Europe). Especially in a country who's most famous takeaway item is overgreased fried chicken/fish and fries/chips tossed together in a bag, then covered and shaken in even more salt and condiments; possibly with a handful of cheese tossed on for good measure.
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I’m wondering, what are we seeing here? Actual difference in ingredients used, or a difference in regulations requiring listing all ingredients?
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Orange fanta is not really a good example because they are totally different flavored drinks. It’s less about chemical rules than the flavor design
Protip: neither of those are oats.
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Food Babe is a terrible source with an agenda. If you actually look at the safety profile of the things involved the differences are minimal. The real risk comes from all the sugar and simple carbs in both.
- The fry ingredients are exactly the same, the US just requires more granular labelling. PDMS is used in oils in Europe too. Maybe in McDonalds oil maybe not, unclear. It's authorized for use in the EU as E900, and it is inert, non-toxic and non-flammable. It's added to stop the fryer oil from spraying on the employees.
- Both Fantas are bad.
- The oats are comparing two different products. 1/4 the label in the US is mandatory breakdowns not required in the UK. 1/4 of the label is the "creaming agent" (starch, whey protein, casein protein, some oil -- nothing a bodybuilder wouldn't consume) and 1/4 is the added vitamins and minerals not present on the UK label. The only meaningful difference appears to be using strawberry-flavored apple chunks. Does it make a difference? Probably none.
- The doritos in the UK list an ingredient that's just "Cool Original Flavour" lmao that FB somehow decides not to highlight. The US requires a breakdown of the components of said "flavor." And the use of annatto vs FD&C dyes which there's really very little conclusive evidence one way or the other. But fine, I guess we can stop using Azo dyes.
The real question is: does swapping Azo dyes for anatto make Doritos measurably healthier or is the problem that you are eating Doritos.
As an oatmeal connoisseur, I'd be remiss not to point out that the two oatmeal products being compared there are not the same. The American product is specifically "Strawberries and Cream," which looks like it was deliberately picked because it adds a few extra scary-looking ingredients from the creaming agent; whereas the UK product is just "Heaps of Fruit," sans cream.
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I find this particularly interesting because it is due to market conditions, not legislation, that many Canadian foods have switched to colors from natural ingredients.
These companies appear to believe that Canadians prefer fewer artificial ingredients, and that Americans don't seem to care. Very curious.
It is happening, albeit slowly, here in the USA as well. Trader Joe’s generally has no added artificial dyes, fruit by the foot now is naturally colored, Whole Foods of course, and Wegmans bakery products.
Its just that there still are so many products you don’t expect- marshmallows with blue dye to make them more “bright white”, candies/sprinkles, any children’s medicine in syrup form (although you can now get some in dye free form finally)
I don't think Froot Loops ever used red 3. They use red 40.
It's more of a commentary about how food in the US is overly colored for no other reason than it looks cool, sometimes at the detriment of the health of the consumer.
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Hot Cheetos, outside the US and parts of LATAM, aren't red:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDOFPuy33m4
It's kinda jarring having grown up with that association.
The Canadian cereal was the same colour as in the US until a few years ago. I'm not sure what prompted the change.
Working towards getting the Canada European-Union Comprehensive Trade Agreement (CETA) ratified perhaps?
Those companies ought to be sued. They know that their die is cancer-linked and they still use it in the US even though they don't do it in Canada/EU.
We, as humanity, should sue all this big companies (nestle, coca-cola, etc.) for poisoning our lives for profit.
I looked into it, and from what I can tell the only link to cancer they've found so far is in male rats exposed to high levels of it, but they haven't found evidence that it causes cancer in humans or other animals.
What's odd to me is that it's still fine to sell food like bacon, where the link to cancer in humans appears to be much, much stronger.
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in the US, priority #1 is fiduciary duty to shareholders. if customers are buying, and we make it more expensive to make, then shareholders will be mad!
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The credibility of the food industry is so low that I think people would support bans on most additives on general principle. We look back at things like putting lead and radium in paint or using asbestos in insulation and say "they should have known better, how could they be so stupid". Well, good additives have a lengthy history of containing harmful additives and I think future generations will say the same about many of these currently in use. What's interesting is that from our current time we can see just how easily it happens, even with the amount of information available to average person.
I realized a long time ago that lack of information isn’t the problem. We’re basically living in a Brave New World now; most people are too distracted to realize they’re being poisoned and would only accept it if the very institutions doing it told them they were doing it. But IMO it’s more of an emotional thing - once you realize it it’s hard to go back to the comfy world of “actually the bureaucrats and shareholders are looking out for my well-being”.
Sometimes they just don't need to lie to us or hide some info, when it was proven and made public that cured meats cause different cancers nobody batted an eye.
> We look back at things like putting lead and radium in paint or using asbestos in insulation and say "they should have known better, how could they be so stupid"
The main thing is: they did know better. They lied to us. They spent a lot of time, money, and effort to lie to us.
And this has happened time and time again in many different industries. Just the other day there was a story on the HN front-page about the PFAS industry has been copying the tobacco playbook for in disinformation campaign.
Also on other topics. For example canned tuna with "Dolphin friendly" logos. Looks good, right? And then people look into it to see what it means, and turns out it has no value, is something the company simply invented themselves, and has done zero-effort to make anything more "dolphin friendly". The entire thing is a basically just a lie.
Many additives are probably entirely safe. Things like vitamin C and caramel are "an E number", and those are fine. But I sure don't trust things, and I don't have the resources to see what is and isn't safe myself, so best to just avoid most of it.
Labeling is the big one imo.
What gets tracked gets improved. I think we need to update the ingredient requirements for food (wtf is seasoning) but also update the fields on Nutritional Facts.
Having a drink like Oreo Coca-Cola read 0’s down the board is illustrative of my point. There’s lots of crap in our food but it’s been selected specifically for its ability to not be captured in the dozen or so categories deemed important back when legislation passed on food transparency.
Relevant news story from a few years ago in the UK, where a bakery was using US sprinkles on cakes, that aren't legal to use in the UK, due to Red #3 :
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1046348573/sprinklegate-sinks...
A moment's silence for the baker's daughter who couldn't go to Disneyland because of this regulatory overreach:
https://x.com/hausofvee/status/1448032811798175747
"British sprinkles just aren't the same, they're totally s*** and I hate them."
"I am extremely passionate about sprinkles."
Honestly hilarious. I feel his pain.
My goodness, for a website full of techincal individuals a lot of you are falling for the appeal to nature fallacy hard. Also, it looks like no one here knows how to defer to experts. I don't know much about food safety standards, chemical compositions, additives, etc. so I've talked with people who are experts instead. And from what I have gotten, most people are freaking out because they lack an understanding of what is really safe or not. People believe that since a certain scary sounding chemical was added that the food is now less safe when that's not the case.
> appeal to nature fallacy
Appeal to nature isn't a fallacy, it is a rhetorical device and can be a completely logical razor.
The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past. If we want a yellow food dye should we:
A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
Who the hell would take B? Unless we believe that our studies are infallible, all encompassing and perfectly established and executed the first will always be a better option. Time and time again we see that things previously thought safe are not but I would argue it is far far rarer to see that on the more naturally derived side of food.
>derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years
This one stands out to me because, as they say, “the dose makes the poison”. Taking some trace element from something “natural” and highly concentrating it is basically as novel as something new. Consuming a gram of something over a lifetime is different than consuming a gram of something every day.
Also, eating something for hundreds of thousands of years only means that most people will live several decades while eating it. It doesn’t mean people won’t be killed by it. It doesn’t mean people wont get cancer from it in 30-40 years. Killing 1% of the people that eat something would be a perfectly acceptable evolutionary loss, depending on the amount of nutrition and calories provided.
That’s why it is an appeal to nature fallacy. Because it says absolutely nothing about population level long term health effects.
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> The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past.
Okay, where in the evolutionary past did we eat Doritos colored with annatto?
> A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
A lot of things we have historically eaten are carcinogenic. Natural flavoring for root beer is flavored with sarsaparilla root. Fun fact, it contains safrole, a known carcinogen.
Carrots, bananas, parsley, black pepper, clove, anise contain alkenylbenzene compounds which cause cancer in rodents.
We've historically eaten coumarin-containing plants (tonka beans, cassia) -- carcinogenic.
Furoanocoumarins in parsnips, celery root, grapefruit, etc, can cause skin burns and prevent many drugs from working (or make them work too fast).
Cassava, sorghum, stone fruits, bamboo shoots and almonds contain cyanogenic glycosides which turn into cyanide when eaten.
Undercooked beans contain lectins, and 4-5 kidney beans are enough to cause somachache, vomiting and diarrhea.
Nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants) contain solanine which is toxic.
Various fruits like pineapples have raphides which are sharp spikes made of oxalic acid. If you eat particularly aggressive ones they can even cause bleeding.
The pawpaw fruit that has been eaten for generations contains annonacin, a neurotoxin.
People have been eating (prepared) mushrooms like gyromitra that have gyromitrin (metabolized to monomethylhydrazine, rocket fuel, a neurotoxin) for generations too. It can actually cause ALS over time.
Castor beans contain ricin.
The difference is apparently God doesn't have to publish this information on an ingredients list.
> B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
"A couple studies" is wildly disingenuous. A quick search will tell you as much.
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> Appeal to nature isn't a fallacy
It most certainly is.
> The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past.
Our evolutionary past is full of death and disease from what we ate. Humans have been drinking alcohol for centuries and there is strong scientific consensus that it causes cancer. Just because it's what humans have been doing doesn't mean it is safe and we should continue it.
> A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
> B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
You say "derive it from petroleum" like they pump it directly from the well into your food. Petroleum is composed of hydrocarbons, it's very useful and is used in a lot of different applications. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it is dangerous.
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I think an important note is that regulatory agencies in other countries have cracked down on some of those scary-sounding chemicals, due to them being unnecessary for food with no real benefit for the person eating it, and possible evidence of negative affects.
I mentioned this in another comment, but as someone who has lived for multiple years in the US and Europe, it is a drastic difference in food quality between the two. Much easier to eat foods made of whole ingredients where I lived in Europe - even many prepackaged foods that we’d buy at the grocery store.
I came across this link yesterday[1] on a health-focused HN thread[2]. The study split a group of overweight people up into low-carb and low-fat diets, to see which produced better weight loss. The group that lost the most weight was actually neither - it was just whoever ended up eating less processed foods and more whole foods.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42668123
> other countries have cracked down on some of those scary-sounding chemicals, due to them being unnecessary for food with no real benefit for the person eating it, and possible evidence of negative affects
Just because another country bans something does not make that thing harmful. Politicians banning food products and additives with no real scientific evidence is not unusual. They bend to public will, they are politicians after all. Also, studies that show "possible evidence of negative affects" in mice ingested at higher dosages then a human would ever eat or drink does not show they are harmful in humans. Humans are not mice after all.
> as someone who has lived for multiple years in the US and Europe, it is a drastic difference in food quality between the two
This is purely subjective, I've been to Europe and the Middle East, both have great food. But food in America is no worse in quality. The main difference is when I visited those area's I mostly ate out, at nicer restaurants where food would of course feel/taste/look better then the average meal at home or from fast food. But when eating at friends homes, the food quality (vegetables, fruits, meats) was no different than what I could get here in America.
> it was just whoever ended up eating less processed foods and more whole foods
I'm not arguing that we don't eat more ultra-processed foods. We do eat too many highly refined foods with little nutritional value. My argument is against blaming food additives, dyes, GMOs, HFCS, etc... Eating more whole foods, vegetables, and fruits would make you healthier, but that's due to the nutritional value, fiber, feeling more full for longer leading to reduced caloric intake, etc... Not because you got rid of food dyes.
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Have you considered that those experts might have perverse incentives? It’s not a secret that the very regulators whose job it is to make sure we don’t eat poison are the same people who sell the food. But sure feel free to “trust the experts”, I’ll be over here doing my best to not eat things made out of coal tar (even if someone in a lab coat says it’s okie dokie).
Every single thing in our society has perverse incentives. Every single person who ever sells you something has incentive to sell you as little as possible for as much money as possible. Every single employer has incentive to pay you as little as possible for as much labor as possible. But that's not how things end up happening, because other forces are at play.
People who worked their entire life in an industry and became experts on it, then become regulators for the same industry, have incentives to favor their industry, sure. But who else should be regulating the industry if not the expert in that industry? If you get someone who is not an insider, wouldn't they just fail at regulating, because they have no idea how it works? Also, the people who put someone in that position, isn't there a chain of accountability there? There are many people working side by side with the "evil person trying to enrich themselves". Bad acts come out. Incentives tend to balance each other out. It's not wrong that part of a regulator's job is to find a balance as to not destroy an industry while regulating it.
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Oh come off it. The United States has the highest rate of obesity in the WORLD (excluding some small Pacific islands). The US also has some of the most overengineered food. It doesn't take much to see the connection.
We are well past the point of carefully reasoning about food. It is time to start killing off additives first and asking questions later. "Freaking out" is the reasonable stance when everything in the grocery store is poison.
You are blaming the wrong thing though. America isn't obese because of red dye 40 or food additives, it's obese because Americans eat too much ultra processed foods that are high in calories and low in nutritional value. Along with minimal exercise and walking.
Banning red dye 40 isn't going to solve anything, companies are just going to find another food dye, natural or synthetic. There needs to be major changes in the average American diet to incorporate more whole foods, fiber, vegetables, fruits, etc... Once that is done then take a harder look at the dyes and additives.
This isn't even that surprising. It's been a controversial food additive banned in various countries basically my entire life, and I'm in my 40s.
People eat maraschino cherries on ice cream sundaes in many countries where people claim the dye is banned, yet the cherries still contain the die. Maybe you should reevaluate your position.
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As a benzene-handling professional for decades who never intends to cease entering environments subject to exposure, I've never considered intentionally ingesting non-food ingredients or contamination to be the least bit safe. Especially dyes and pesticides, if you study the chemistry of these you can see that very good characterization and identification of complex, unique, undesired impurities has not really been very comprehensive at all. Beside the possibility that the dye molecule itself may be the most toxic component anyway.
With industrial hazards there is at least one layer of PPE, and I can do anything I see fit to further mitigate exposure in any way.
I don't even know which dye is in things like Flamin Hot pop culture materials, but they sure look fake to me. And if the only PPE between me and the potentially-hazardous substance is the bag that the Cheetos come in, I'm always going to be highly dismayed when the integrity of the PPE is compromised for any reason :)
As non-food ingredients have proliferated over the decades, all I can say is why even bother?
Give me a break, they couldn't have used very good strawberries if they had to make them pink artificially.
I am a lifelong science dude myself, studied dyes quite a bit and even synthesized some in the lab. So on this I trust the judgment of young mothers who are avoiding junk food for their kids more so than other scientists who propose that dyes are completely harmless for some reason.
I also talked with people who are experts, and they assured me banning Red Dye 3, among other things, is necessary and it will improve population health in the long term.
See, I can also make shit up.
Great, but I can actually back it up. That's the difference here. I can point you to experts who agree with what I am saying and who I have chatted with.
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Or, maybe some of us have lived experience where artificial food dyes have detrimental effects to our children. I don't need science to tell me what my own two eyes and lived experience says. Do I really need a double blind study to tell me that when one of my kids eats food laced with these dyes, he's crazy for a week, but when he eats candy w/o these dyes, he just is a normal kid with a sugar rush?
My sibling comment goes into more detail, but claiming that anyone who has a lived experience is stupid (aka, falling for a logical fallacy) is just accelerating the distrust of "authority" at a time when we need it most.
> Do I really need a double blind study to tell me that when one of my kids eats food laced with these dyes, he's crazy for a week, but when he eats candy w/o these dyes, he just is a normal kid with a sugar rush?
TBH this sounds like exactly the kind of things double blind studies are invented for.
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Someone with one (1) anecdote is not an authority and shouldn't be trusted like one. Eroding trust in authorities by equating actual experts with somebody who has a half baked opinion based on an anecdote seems like the real issue to me.
Going around and assuming every opinion is based on objective reality instead of subjective experience filtered through human perception with all it's quirks is not a good way to arrive at truth.
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For anyone wondering why it takes so long to actually switch this stuff out, and the available alternatives to Red 3, I thought this piece from a food dyes company (no relation) was fascinating: https://na.sensientfoodcolors.com/confection/replacing-red-3...
You have to figure that if these guys had a drop-in replacement, they'd be offering it for sale at a high price, so this probably is the best you can do. The process changes and requalification looks like no fun at all. But it also looks pretty doable for a company in this line of business, so maybe you won't see too many color changes on the shelf with this ban.
> For anyone wondering why it takes so long to actually switch this stuff out
One counterpoint is do we really NEED to have brightly colored foods? It's a hard problem if you need a food to be bright red. But, that has to boil down to strictly to improving sales, right? Hypothetically, if all the artificial food dyes were banned, then all food companies would be on the same level playing field.
Color is definitely something that catches a person's eye, so if you have a "food product" that needs extra to convince someone to buy it, color is a way to do it. You can't taste it before purchasing. You can see and smell it, so they push those levers as much as they can.
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Visuals have a pretty big impact on food. I wonder how many foods would just look disgusting without any food dyes. Reminds me of butter companies trying to pass legislation to make margerine companies unable to dye their product to look like butter
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Thanks, that article was fascinating. I wasn't aware of how complex swapping it out could be, its continued use makes a lot more sense now.
I'm very curious on what's going to happen with cocktail cherries - I believe they use Red #3 (it's one of the only permitted uses in the UK).
There are a bunch of no-artificial-dye candies and whatnot on the market already, and they actually look better to me - they're not absurd unnatural colors.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37838521 - Oct 2023
Pretty wild how far the US is behind in banning these sort of things compared to other countries.
Only if they actually cause cancer. The FDA's statement (https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-revoke-...) says:
> The way that FD&C Red No. 3 causes cancer in male rats does not occur in humans. Relevant exposure levels to FD&C Red No. 3 for humans are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats. Studies in other animals and in humans did not show these effects; 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.
if "these sort of things" aren't actually harmful, and what we see in Europe is mostly governments reacting to unscientific panic among their citizens, then I'd say it's other countries that are wild, not the United States.
The European approach is: if it doesn't look on your plate the way it looked on the hoof or on the plant, it's probably not good to consume. This is a much better heuristic than "we haven't found any adverse effects yet, so call it GRAS". Science is great at determining the presence of specific effects. It's not so good at finding an absence of effect.
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I think I care about more than cancer. What if I cared about genetic defects, ADHD, mental health, water contamination, obesity…
Maybe if the dye served ANY purpose besides getting people to eat more of it, I could find a bit of care to not remove it from foods.
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> behind
Is it really a competition to see who can ban the most things? What's the prize if you win?
The prize to win is public health. There is absolutely no benefit in putting all this crap into food. Maybe some things are harmful and others are not but they are absolutely useless.
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If they're competing to ban dangerous things in our food supply then the "prize" is a longer healthier life for everyone who lives in any nation that engages in such competition? :shrug:
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Less cancer, mostly.
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Source? The last time I checked the FDA bans more food dyes than most other countries.
Go to Italy or France, or any EU state. The food is better and often cheaper in almost every case.
Even a McDonald's hamburger is good, and not dominated by the fake chemical garlic substitute. In the US, McDonald's french fries contain: Potatoes, Vegetable Oil (canola Oil, Corn Oil, Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Natural Beef Flavor [wheat And Milk Derivatives]), Dextrose, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate (maintain Color), Salt. natural Beef Flavor Contains Hydrolyzed Wheat And Hydrolyzed Milk As Starting Ingredients.
In Italy, the ingredients are: Potato, Oil, Salt.
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Not sure on food dyes but my understanding is the FDA is leagues behind the EU on regulation when it comes to food.
My experience in Italy with foods that normally cause some issues (dairy/cheese) really opened my eyes to that. My sister who doesn’t eat cheese/dairy at all here in the US was able to eat it there without issue because of how they process dairy over there or something.
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It's literally written on the article "The EU has a more robust system to review food additives than the US does"
Most other countries, maybe, now compared to the EU...
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Source?
At least one proposed solution I’ve seen is to split the FDA, because regulating food is almost nothing like regulating drugs in 2025.
We already have the FDA (most foods and drugs), the USDA (produce, animal products besides milk), and TTB (alcohol). Each one sets its own safety and labeling standards, which is why, for example, mixed drinks containing alcohol don't have to list allergens(!). Another level of fragmentation would be a disaster IMO. We could split the FDA, but we'd need to merge the food regulator half into one of those other existing agencies.
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Bans add a lot of overhead to both the agencies responsible for enforcing them and industry. Those agencies are only so large and are spread thin, sometimes there are 'bigger fish' they need to focus on.
I can understand waiting until there's sufficient evidence before starting that process.
Enforcing bans strikes me as a revenue generator, no?
Other countries manage to do this just fine.
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Does that mean the US is "ahead" for not allowing bemotrizinol in sunscreen?
Lots of other countries other than the US banned this dye years ago. So what changed in the US? Logically speaking we didn't just come to our collective senses. Did government lobbying budgets dry up? Or did the cost just increase where it wasn't worth paying anymore?
Technically it appears red dye no 3 was banned due to cancer and Delaney clause, however, keep in mind that I think the primary reason it was banned in California last year was all the studies correlating it to deleterious cognitive impacts on children
https://www.additudemag.com/red-dye-3-ban-adhd-news/amp/
https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/potential-impact...
For comparison:
> The European Food Safety Authority only allows erythrosine in processed cherries and pet foods.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythrosine
What other things does the US need to ban to catch up with Europe? Who is "right vs wrong" here? Is Europe wrong for having too many things banned, is US wrong for not having parity with what is banned in Europe?
Is Europe being overly cautious, is America being unsafe?
Admittedly to a fault, I tend to be quick to trust institutions and don't tend to be quick to believe conspiracies (not claiming that this is). With most of the additives to products that people seem to be worried about, I default to thinking it's not the most important thing I need to be concerned with in my daily life.
But the FDA making this ruling is validating for my friends who seem to go way out of their way to find product ingredients to be afraid of. I know people have been claiming for years that Red3 being allowed in the US is crazy.
I'm genuinely here to listen: how would someone who believes that the US allows far too many dangerous ingredients in consumer goods and believes the consumer needs to actively screen and research what is in their products convince me that I need to be more serious about screening the products I use for dangerous ingredients?
We don’t need to convince you of anything. If you care, you’ll look and do your own research about the ingredients. If you think you’re safe, then you’ll eat them,.
Is it not enough to know that the federal regulatory agencies are captured? Why wouldn’t they poison you if it increases their bottom line and they can get away with it?
I remember the concern about and ban of Red No. 2 when I was a kid. I've always been a little suspicous of colored food since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth_(dye)
Great. Hopefully in 50 years we'll have banned most of today's children's cereals.
According to Google:
>Red 3 dye has been banned in the European Union for food use since 1994
Seems pretty reasonable to me.
It's actually approved in EU for candied cherries and cocktail cherries.
The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
Cancer is a very wide category, I assume that it may induce a sub-group of all cancers. I believe the article mentions Thyroid cancer specifically.
It's specifically a type of cancer in rats with no human equivalent. But the FDA rules state they can ban an ingredient if it causes cancer in humans or animals.
2027 feels like a generous timeline for something identified as harmful...
Too late to go long on cochineal insect breeding shares?
Why not just ban every additive that causes cancer?
For anyone that pushes back on the government currently elected, well, far from optimal imagine that so many before them allowed a cancerous substance like this to be in so many foods
What about Red 40?
Now for the important question: which children's cereals will be changing color?
I assume all the really colorful ones, including froot loops. None / less of the organic ones.
Why don't all parents just buy the organic ones to start with? Lack of information?
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My Doritos will never be the same
Great, now ban Red 40 and the other synthetic dyes. You can't avoid them in anything marketed toward children. I have children and I know others who also have children that are highly sensitive to these dyes, causing major behavioral issues that last for 5-7 days after ingesting food/medicine/drinks that contain these dyes.
There is growing evidence that Red 40 causes IBD: https://www.uhhospitals.org/blog/articles/2023/02/can-red-fo...
That's been proven in double blinded studies, I assume.
Never been asked to participate in one. I am a huge proponent of the scientific method. This argument always interests me, though. (by the way, just a quick search on pubmed: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3441937/; https://www.cspinet.org/page/synthetic-food-dyes-health-risk... the EU bans some of these synthetic dyes: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/food-colours). Also reference the famous "Southampton six" study in 2007 which triggered evaluation of food dyes across Europe: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
As a parent, if I notice a correlation between an action and subsequent behavior, are you saying that my lived experience is irrelevant because... nobody bothered to include me in a specific double blind study? How many things do you do every day that have not been studied through exhaustive scientific research?
From my own lived experience, when one of my my kids eats a red velvet cake or a bag of Skittles or M&Ms that he's violent and crazy for a week, but if he has a few Oreos he's fine. If one of my other kids does the same thing, she doesn't have the same reaction. If I knew the exact chemical pathway that made this happen, I'd be thrilled. I am just living my life trying to parent kids in this world, and you know what, stupid bright dyes that do nothing other than make food appear unnaturally incandescent are practically impossible to avoid. So it's just one more thing that's piled on as a parent that you have to deal with.
If you ask me, this aggressive "well, you're stupid and you shouldn't trust your own eyes because science" attitude that has triggered the strong anti-authority sentiments globally. It's why objectively crazy people like RFK Jr get huge followings- I vehemently disagree with 99% of his rhetoric, especially his anti-vax viewpoints, but I totally agree with his stance on food additives such as these synthetic dyes.
I see the effects with my own eyes. Telling me I'm stupid doesn't help science, it just serves to further diminish the trust in the very institutions we need more now than ever.
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Like in overregulated Europe. Now the US fails!
this is merely a money grab by moneyd interests to ban dyes that are not patented and to force us onto something that is patented.
Finally
Getting it out of the way before RFK can do it, huh?
A comment by redserk in another thread might be enlightening to you, as someone else made the same uninformed remark:
"Incorrect.
https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-00830.pdf
Scroll down to "I. Introduction".
> In the Federal Register of February 17, 2023 (88 FR 10245), we announced that we filed a color additive petition (CAP 3C0323) jointly submitted by
RFK was not the HHS nominee in February 2023.
But it appears this process has been going even earlier than that: November 15, 2022 [0]
[0]: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/17/2023-03..."
I remain sceptical about the influence RFK has in this administration anyway, in comparison with corporate interests. Why would this time be any better than the previous Trump administration?
Might as well get some credit for the one or two good ideas he has before the antivaccine rhetoric begins and measles/mumps/whooping cough kills a few tens of thousands of people and the GQP goes "oops" and fires him and puts the old policies back in place.
Do libertarians support this kind of move?
No libertarians feel that people will likely get sick or die from bad products, and will sue the company/quit buying the product; aka let the market and survival of the fittest decide what people put in their bodies.
aka a system that doesn't work since FDA had to step in and ban this
The Biden admin is trying to take the few sane things the incoming Trump administration wants to do and do them first which has been funny to watch.
I think that Trump doesn't care one way or another about food coloring or Americans getting cancer, and as such his administration will likely leave such things alone and untouched for the most part unless the food lobby asks him to cancel or defund the FDA for campaign contributions or similar.
Harris blatantly copying the No Tax on Tips was particularly funny this election season. You could see on her face that she didn’t believe in it at all.
I don’t think she really has beliefs other than her career.
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Now do Red 40 and the others
[flagged]
Removing dyes and healthier food in general is one of RFK's stated goals so they'd call this a win. You need better news sources.
It’s not always easy to keep up with the Republicans’ evolving positions.
For the past century, they told everyone that it was none of the government’s business what people choose to eat. Now it suddenly is.
It does have a whiff of trying to mold the citizenry towards a physical ideal. Fitter, happier, more masculine energy.
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This is the old "at least Hitler made the trains run on time" thing again.
I'm all for removing dyes from food, but if the tradeoff is bringing back polio, no thanks.
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If they get cancer they will probably die earlier and save us more money on not having to distribute social security checks.
Maybe the FDA will get sued by the health insurance companies due to impacting their profits...
Between all the snarkyness (is that a word? I'm not a native speaker :-D) I think there's a point here. With all the regulations the EU has put up, and the bureaucracy that came with them, I'm really happy that we got food and its ingredients pretty tightly under control and locked down. Glad to see that other countries are prioritizing consumer safety, too.
But Musk, RFK Jr. and others were precisely the kind of people that were advocating for this kind of regulation to take place. Remember the thing about replacing seed oils (eugh) with beef tallow? I really don't think they are against this kind of regulation--on the contrary.
A quick search shows RFK is in favor of replacing seed oils with beef tallow? Is that supposed to be a good thing? What am I missing?
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The previous administration were the one who started Operation Warp Speed to reduce other regulatory hurdles, so maybe they will.
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"according to claude" makes it hard for my mind to give much credence to the post in a way very different from "according to Wikipedia" with a link. I intend this politely, but if I wanted to know what claude would output I would ask it myself, during the phase of the moon when the way I've chosen to word the prompt has the best chance of working.
FD&C Red 40 (Allura Red AC): Linked to hyperactivity in children in some studies, although evidence is mixed. Theoretical concerns regarding disruption of cell membrane integrity, potentially leading to increased permeability and toxicity.
FD&C Yellow 5 (Tartrazine): Some in vitro studies suggest potential neurotoxic effects, though human evidence is lacking. Theoretical concerns regarding modulation of neurotransmitters, potentially leading to behavioral changes.
FD&C Yellow 6 (Sunset Yellow FCF): Similar to Yellow 5, some in vitro studies raise concerns, but human evidence is limited. Theoretical concerns regarding binding to DNA, potentially leading to mutagenic effects.
FD&C Blue 1 (Brilliant Blue FCF): Theoretical concerns regarding exacerbation of respiratory conditions like asthma. Theoretical concerns regarding increased cell membrane permeability, potentially leading to toxicity.
FD&C Blue 2 (Indigo Carmine): Limited human studies, but some animal research suggests potential neurological impacts. Theoretical concerns regarding triggering or exacerbating immunological reactions.
Read food labels.
It'd be great if people stopped just copy-pasting stuff from LLMs and then responding to that instead of other real human people.
It's not a foregone conclusion that just because people haven't ingested things before doesn't inherently mean that ingesting them is bad. Saying it is is itself a pretty obvious logical fallacy. Now I'm not saying at all that ingesting oil, even byproducts after multiple rounds of synthesis, is a good idea. But it's not impossible to synthesize something edible out of something inedible, so the fact that oil is inedible doesn't mean that all oil derivatives are as well.
You have some valid points, but this mostly reads as exasperated defeatism that doesn't offer any actionable solutions.
Meanwhile cigarettes, which are also cancer linked, are legal with a warning and some picture on them.
And alcohol, which is also linked to cancer, is legal, with a warning on it.
And (non-self driving) automobiles, which kills tens of thousands of Americans yearly, with no warning or pictures, are legal.
Activities that reward being sedentary - a known factor in lethal cancers and disease - have no warning labels. When is my PS5 gonna warn me about playing video games?
While Americans are dying from a range of cardiovascular disease and cancers it's comforting to know that red M&Ms or red fruit punch won't be one of the causes.
Why’s there no avenue for receiving risk appropriate compensation funds for having increased personal risk of death by consuming something a reasonable expert in the industry could consider dangerous?
If I skirt the law on technicalities to cause harm to an employer for example, such as knowingly implementing trivial security encryption on critical transactions, I feel I could be liable for damages. Why is this a game of spot the problem and then get off with a warning before going to the next preplanned technicality workaround that usually also causes cancer but will buy them a few years until the process repeats?
Shouldn’t mass risk of life be considered a terror level charge? Or rather, instead of saying no to that question because it didn’t appear to meet X criteria, why aren’t we finding ways it could meet that criteria? For example if it needs a political reason, we should ask how this could be a politically motivated decision rather than saying this doesn’t appear to meet any political agenda. That’s how the laws are always completely one sided abused against normal people anyway in a more extreme stretch than my example. I think it’s reasonable to do a reasonable-amount of application back.
Because the people en masse have not successfully come together to demand this.
What makes companies more powerful than the people is not that companies actually have more power. They don't. It's that they concentrate the power they do have into the hands of a small group of decision-makers, which allows it to be deployed effectively. By comparison, the people are divided, disjointed, disorganized, and distracted, and as such typically fail to come together to demand specific changes they agree on.
Idk I think there is a ton of overlap between industry and the highest levels of government. They wouldn’t want pesky things like human well-being to get in the way of profit so they get their hands on some of the levers of power and mitigate their liability one way or the other. It’d probably take a class action lawsuit in the kind of case you describe to be brought to justice.
Most people wont like this, but the answer is because courts care about if the harm actually occurred in fact, not if there is risk that harm might occur.
You cant sue another driver because they risked crashing into your car.
It would set a precedent that is unpalatable to people who sell this stuff.