Comment by parineum
16 days ago
> that have much lower risk scores (as they are from plant and animal sources)
This is a fallacy. If anything, there's more reason to expect that a substance evolved to serve a biological function (that happens to be red) would have biological effects in humans than a substance developed specifically to be red and be biologically inert.
No, the bias towards natural isn't because of appeal to nature, it's because we co-evolved and we'd know by now if red insect dye is carcinogenic compared to a new synthetic dye that hasn't had decades of interaction with humans. We have a longer time window of prior experience with the older, natural ingredient.
We could be creating something as dangerous as asbestos artificially.