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...
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.
- 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"
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)
Blue raspberry is a standard slushie colour the world over, in my experience.
But it tastes nothing like raspberry?
It's not like most ice-cream flavors taste anything like the real thing...
Especially in the US (not Italian artisanal gelato)
I’ve not seen or heard of the idea since then, although this may reflect my own consumer preferences.
And the two original, traditional flavours of Tango Ice Blast are Red (Cherry) and Blue (Raspberry).
In fact, I can't remember ever seeing any other flavours, although according to their website there are others:
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
I agree with most of what you are saying. However, I think it's valid to also apply heavy scrutiny on new chemicals being added to the food chain. The default being to not allow it if it's not proven safe.
Red dye 3 probably shouldn't have been added to the food supply chain with that criteria but since it's already been there for decades with no strong link to negative outcomes there's little reason to ban it now.
Sometimes no bugs are allowed at all, people be getting upset if their pop tarts have bugs in them.
Sometimes it's like some bugs are allowed and just part of it like when I buy organic broccoli at the farmers market and need to soak it to get whatever those things are in there out. Or when I get those little mummified bugs in the bottom of oatmeal tins.
Sometimes it's like the food is literally coated in bugs like all that stuff that's coated on schellac. Which, finally to bring it back to a callback to your point, is both GRAS and also made of bugs.
I also learned today that the harvesting process kills the lac beetles.
- What functional groups does it have?
- How many functional groups does it have?
- How much electron delocalization does it have?
- How much of that electron delocalization is PAHs?
- Does the molecule participate in redox reactions?
Etc.
Basically check to see which molecules can generate free radicals, strip DNA, convert to dangerous metabolites, etc.
I wish it was as easy as this - while there are known toxicophores/no-go functional groups in medchem, there is going to be a big dearth of data on non-acute (e.g. not hERG, hepatotoxicity, etc) toxicity, which is really what the question is here: what are the marginal risks/rewards from eating existing food X (since we know it's probably not acutely toxic).
Because we're talking about food I would actually like to see the opposite. Provide peer reviewed, gold standard studies showing that what you want to put in food is in fact safe.
Proving something safe is logically equivalent to proving that it is not unsafe, which is the same thing as proving a negative, which cannot be done. I cannot prove there is not a teapot circling Mars, and I cannot prove that even the most inert ingredient, at some dose, will not harm you.
Anyone who has lived in California knows this absurdity more intuitively than most people, because California's stupid laws adopt the logic you are proposing, and basically everything in daily life is labeled as cancer-causing.
So, let’s stop pretending it’s not possible. We require drug companies show their products are safe and efficacious, and there is both a scientific and a legal framework by which we do this. Let’s debate whether or not the same framework should be applied to food additives (I would argue it should) rather than claim it is not possible.
We don’t do this.
What the FDA requires is acceptable safety in light of the benefit provided.
The FDA approves highly toxic drugs all the time. Including ones with the risk of death. I don’t think anyone would call chemotherapy “safe”.
If the FDA actually required every drug to be proven safe at any dose for everyone, we'd have no modern drugs.
Is that not what NCAP does?
Or what NTSB and FAA do with aviation?
You can prove that some things are safe. Does not mean infallible, means safe.
Really? You have some studies linking wheat and whole grains to cancer? And I don't mean wheat crops sprayed with glyphosate, just straight up wheat? Raspberries? Strawberries?
The reality is, very little of the actual natural food in our food chain is directly linked to cancer. All the additives we pile on top, on the other hand, are.
I would argue if we can't show a direct benefit to the consumer, it shouldn't be in the food chain. So, what is the direct benefit to a human consuming red-5? "It looks better on store shelves" isn't a direct benefit.
A shelf stabilizer? Sure, plenty of instances that makes a lot of sense. Food coloring that happens to be cheaper than natural alternatives? Just... no.
https://www.fda.gov/food/process-contaminants-food/acrylamid...
Strawberries are also linked to cancer, because they contain sugar.
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/62/15/4339/508983...
Almost all natural foods are linked to cancer. The important question is, how large is the risk?
Dark toast is obviously much riskier than Red dye No. 3. We should think about that when we consider what to ban.
Also: I've never bought this, but I just found this premade product, which is sold in my grocery store and is known to the state of California to cause cancer.
https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.197151007.html?...
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
You could be enjoying some all natural peanuts and be exposing yourself to a highly carcinogenic byproduct of a fungus that grows on them.
Hell, people were doing that for millennia until some scientists actually discovered it.
Toasting just increases the amount present.
Natural things aren't inherently safer. Are alcohol and red meat both considered natural? Alcohol is a group 1 carcinogen (same as tobacco and asbestos) and red meat is group 2A (probably linked to cancer). A cursory search shows some studies linking fish consumption to cancer, though I have no idea how accurate those studies are.
Yes they are.
We have been exposed to, and made adjustments for, things in our environments.
Novel chemicals have novel effects.
There are plenty of dangerous natural things, and there are safe artificial things (I suppose).
But there is a clear basis for eating food that your great grandparents would recognise.
There is also a slowly mounting volume of evidence that there is something wrong with ultra processed foods, hard to say what, but it is becoming clear they are bad for us.
So natural things are inherently safer, all else equal
The better alternative is to eat non processed food, but only early after reaping. Otherwise the natural (!) chemical reactions like oxidation makes them unhealthy.
The plants in my garden are all natural. I don't use chemicals. Still half of them contain poison like blueacid.
Just to say, natural doesn't mean healthy. Processed doesn't mean unhealthy.
I’m quite confident every health metric is better for the Red-3-eating cohort than the great grandparent cohort. Being a great grandparent is associated with cancer, dementia, and near-unity death rate.
Also I agree that not every thing natural is good. It is a rule of thumb, not a strict rule.
Mēh! The hippies were right (again): Eat food. Mostly plants. As unprocessed as you can.
Alcohol isn’t a natural food, it’s a result of food rotting. Much like rotten meat, you can naturally assume negative side effects
Red meat has positive benefits from its consumption, as does fish.
What is the benefit of red5? If aren’t going to address that, I’ll assume you aren’t interested in anything but whataboutism and aren’t actually engaging in a good faith discussion.
Which goal posts did I move? Directly addressing a foundational claim isn't moving goal posts. You said that very few natural foods are directly linked to cancer. That's demonstrably false, as red meat almost certainly is. To your next point:
> Alcohol isn’t a natural food, it’s a result of food rotting.
I genuinely have no idea what you mean by natural then. At what point does something become unnatural? Alcohol certainly occurs in nature quite a bit, and I don't know that I'd call all the instances "rotting". Leavening bread with yeast produces noticeable amounts of alcohol. Orange juice famously contains a surprisingly high level of alcohol.
> Red meat has positive benefits from its consumption, as does fish.
Of course they do and that's why I never claimed they didn't. I would assume all foods have health benefits (beyond the obvious one of course). However, you claimed that most natural foods don't have links to cancer in particular.
> What is the benefit of red5?
I only just realized you said "red 5" earlier. I assume you're referring to red 3 (erythrosine), though I don't think the specific dye matters here.
> If aren’t going to address that, I’ll assume you aren’t interested in anything but whataboutism and aren’t actually engaging in a good faith discussion.
I'm not an expert on the dye in question and know little about it so I purposely didn't comment on it. I don't think I need to do so in order to address your central claim, which seems to be--and correct me if I'm wrong--that to lower our cancer risk we shouldn't add things to our food chain which aren't naturally in our food chain. That claim relies on 1) being able to distinguish what is natural to our food chain, and 2) for natural things being less likely to cause cancer than unnatural things. I believe 2 is flawed for the reasons I already gave. 1 is a famously thorny subject. Even pre-history human diets were varied enough for adaptations for different regions to evolve.
Anyway, I'm an idiot on the subject of dyes but if you want my argument: adding regulations isn't a zero-cost thing. We shouldn't add them without solid justification. I don't have enough knowledge about this subject to know whether or not such justification exists for the red dye in question here. However, your proposed alternative doesn't sound well-defined enough to be argued without you being clearer about what you mean.
Health outcomes are noisy, especially if taken over a long time. Peer reviewed studies are often flawed in various ways and most scientific studies lack the statistical power to be inconclusive.
The fear based approach to human diets can not work. We have to accept risks in our lives if we want to eat at all.
It's the opposite of the US approach, which is to ban (only) proven-harmful ingredients.
I don't expect US food-safety laws to become more strict in the next four years, but who knows, maybe the dead-worm guy will surprise us.
Proofs don't apply in biology. Nothing in biology is a truly logical system that can be proved or disproved. That's true for chemistry and physics too- the only system where anything can be proved is math.
In science, instead we gather evidence and evaluate it, and often come to the conclusion that it is so unlikely something is dangerous (given the data) that we presume it's safe. People use the term "scientific proof", but I'm not aware of any in biology that would truly be classified as proof.
The thing we could prove is “no detectable increase versus control, in our test data”. There is no way to prove “x does not cause cancer” any more than there is a way to prove “x does not cause meteors” or “x does not cause spontaneous human resurrections” or “x does not cause humans to turn into unicorns”.
Proof by contradiction is just that, assume P -> get contradiction, therefore proof that !P.
People really need to retire this canard.
Because, sure there can be errors either way. But a study produces new knowledge, not just knowledge or "just as much a mystery"
Let's set workable standards for when something can be called safe and enforce them.
You also need to ask, what is the cost of not having this substance? In this case, the cost would be - you have food that isn't red. Is that a substantial problem for society?
To treat these as irrelevant and boil it down to "prove it is harmful or shut up" is needlessly reductive.
I'd like to point out that eating charred meat has a clear link with colon cancer, so we can't simply appeal to nature for safety.
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.
Given color improves the enjoyment of food, I'd argue it is useful though.
If there is no food coloring at all would we eat better? I bet yes. But we can't get there now. It will not pass any vote
I'm a big proponent of food safety regulation, but we have to acknowledge that there's no way to prove something is safe against all possible harms it might do. There will always be a risk in food. The question is how much risk will we tolerate?
I prefer the EUs precautionary principle that enables action to be taken when there is uncertainty over something.
"Hmm, there is an unknown risk with it, do I really need this unhealthy candy" no
"Do i really need this vegetable" yes
For an analogy, if your neighborhood is unsafe, you don't stop going to school altogether, you probably just won't go out for a night stroll.
This kind of absolute logical statement is very stupid.
Also, consider that when faced with unsure studies, the fact that fruits and vegetables are part of healthy human diet for centuries longer than a dye has been, is a major factor.
Yes - which includes vegetables. Humans can generally survive indefinitely on an all-meat diet.
> "Do i really need this vegetable" yes
No.
So, your general statement is correct, but you missed the basic fact that vegetables also fall into the category of "mostly unnecessary" things - so, my point stands.
PP Paper :
What is the scientific basis of this claim ?
It's pretty extraordinary that every single thing we eat is carcinogenic.
[0]Except water, maybe. I'd bet if you shoved enough water into a rat at minimum you could observe an increase in tumor growth rate though.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/panel-s-advice-cance...
It's also not true, since many foods - most vegetables, for example, or many types of fiber - do the complete opposite, and reduce your risk of cancer.
How about only put things in food that are contributing to the actual food? It's not just nutritional value, it's absolutely taste and texture as well. But visuals? Surely you can agree the balance of "is it worth it" is different for the color of a fruity loop than for nutritional value and taste.
You're correct that the "acceptable" line needs to be somewhere because risk isn't absolute, but that line can be in different places for different purposes. (And you can't just write off all cancer concerns because some of them probably aren't legitimate.)
Shouldn't we take the opposite approach? Make it very hard to use highly processed unnatural products, to the point where it's cheaper and easier for companies to fall back on less processed "clean label" ingredients.
I work in (well, adjacent to) the F&B sector and I can tell you that every large company knows exactly what clean food means, why it's healthier, and where to source the ingredients, and that they have equivalent food products using these either already on shelves, or waiting to be produced if there's a shift in consumer desires.
The reason that they don't already use them - the reason you mostly only see advertising for processed foods - is because the more highly processed a food is, the higher the profit margins for companies. I've seen it stated as a rule that every level of processing gives a 2x profit margin. So if you can process an item 3 times, you'll 6x your profit margins (obviously a rule of thumb rather than law).
I've see the labels at Starbucks, by the chocolate at the grocery store, and by the balsamic vinegar.
Sounds like a good way to kill a lot of people
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.
The water thing is even more unserious so I'll ignore it.
Everyone knows alcohol is a toxin. It is regulated. You have to be of certain age to buy it. It isn't normally in things you consume daily as a secondary ingredient in doses that would be harmful. You can taste it if it is. If you cannot taste it, you can recognize the effects from drinking it.
The dose makes the poison with any substance, that is a base tenant of toxicology. Not many people are unintentionally poisoning themselves with water.
Food and drug regulations save lives. If you want to argue against them, please at least do so in a manner that doesn't rely on absurdist examples.
Who is being absurd now?
Only because that's so far down on the list of immediate issues it causes.
Thousands of ppl die every year from being other end of DUI. I didn't choose to be on the road with ppl who choose to drink. It was forced on me.
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.
There've been ridiculous attempts to get rid of perfectly innocent flavor enhancers before, like the fight against MSG. Take out MSG, and food tastes less good. But take out a borderline red dye, and what's the worst that happens? Factories have to sell soda that's slightly less pretty in the bottle?
Probably all of them. We are super sensitive to colors.
Red meat and fish like tuna and salmon have carbon monoxide and sodium nitrate treatment just to keep them red because that's how people think they can judge quality.
> Consumers will pay up to $1 per pound more for darker colored salmon compared to salmon with lighter hues, according to research by DSM, a company that supplies pigmenting compounds to the salmon feed industry.
Seriously?
Alternatively, if we stopped dyeing fish, a year later people will have totally recalibrated what they think fresh, healthy fish looks like.
Wild salmon eat krill and other smaller organisms, many of which provide the components to turn the salmon meat a shade of pink.
Farmed salmon don't get the same components in their feed, so their meat isn't the same colour. So the farmers add some of those components into the salmon feed, et voila - pink salmon meat.
see https://www.dal.ca/news/2023/03/21/farmed-salmon-colour-heal...
Tuna
Pickles
Oranges (apples as well, but I can't find an old article)
Wasabi
Apricots
Ginger
Salmon
https://www.treehugger.com/foods-youd-never-guess-were-artif...
In many cases[0][1][2] it's treated with carbon monoxide to make it look redder.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5848116/
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=3801706&page=1
[2] https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2005/11/17/FDA-ask...
To paraphrase Shakespeare, “Would a Cheeto by any other color taste as savory?”
A paper on it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...
> 1. A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect, as in I could sleep for a year or This book weighs a ton.
> 2. A figure of speech in which the expression is an evident exaggeration of the meaning intended to be conveyed, or by which things are represented as much greater or less, better or worse, than they really are; a statement exaggerated fancifully, through excitement, or for effect.
> 3. Extreme exaggeration or overstatement; especially as a literary or rhetorical device.
From DuckDuckGo, quoting Wordnik, quoting The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
I mean, we absolutely do that already. There's plenty of folks on a low sodium diet because while the salt tastes great, it's bad for them.
In this case we aren't talking about eliminating the color red entirely, we're arguing about a slightly different color. You can get red from a strawberry, raspberry, cherry skin, etc. which will work just as well. It just won't be the neon-red that red-5 produces.
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.
What does B12 in alcohol do?
As for what that does [1], wet brain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke_encephalopathy
If someone you know is an alcoholic, try and get them to take b vitamins.
Call it risk reduction.
Should we ban alcohol? I think people should stop drinking it, but in general I don't think the sale of things that may be harmful in some ways should be entirely prohibited, it would just be good if we minimized the amount of potentially harmful ingredients in our general food supply. e.g. if someone wanted to buy/sell Red Dye No. 3 on its own I don't think that would be a big concern.
> By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products that had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, mascara that could cause blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law did not get through the Congress of the United States for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.
Why other than you? Because you have an impact on society. Your actions affect others.
Here's a better question, then: what health and safety decisions do I get to make on your behalf. What can I dictate to you that you can't do, or have to do? Can I mandate that you have to run 5 miles every day? It will be good for you to do, and it will impact others by increasing your productivity and lowering the cost of your healthcare on society. Is it reasonable that I should be able to use the threat of violence to induce you to exercise? Because that's all that regulation is: it's an outline of behaviors for which the threat of violence is a legitimate response.
Any of these scenarios should make it obvious there has to be some sort of regulation around these things, as no one individual is an encyclopedia of toxic substances, and we exist in a bazaar of choices.
There could be a compromise, much like there is with alcohol and tobacco, that if you absolutely wanted to buy something toxic, you could do so. However, that wouldn't really necessitate that you couldn't use it to harm someone else.
But that does not mean that humans don't eat any plastic. Tiny pieces of plastic gets transferred to the food by contact with plastic containers. Some processes like microwave ovens, radically increase the amount transferred as well. Previously it was thought that these microplastics would just be eliminated from the body through typical waste functions, but evidence is increasingly mounting that The microplastics actually stay in the body long term and destroy cells they come in contact with. Given we have found nontrivial levels of microplastics in all of our vital organs (including testicals!), that's a scary proposition.
A crude analogy might be germs. Humans don't eat germs directly either, but by nature of their size and invisibility to us, we end up consuming plenty of them.
https://www.google.com/search?q=do+humans+eat+plastic
Less than 500ms on my end. This is turning into a knock-on bad faith argument. I'll end it here, before I need to defend that the earth isn't flat
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.
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
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.
But RFK was also complaining about all the additives added to foods in the US, and wanted to get rid of everything from ultra processed foods to seed oils?
> 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.
Personally I really hope many Democrats can put The health of our people ahead of other things and work together to make meaningful changes, because something really needs to be done. Chronic health issues have exploded and it may already be too late for multiple generations who will suffer from chronic disease their entire life as a result of this. If those of us alive and aware of these problems now don't do something to correct this course, we will be guilty of criminal negligence to our descendants in my opinion.
He has a ton of other stuff much more aligned with the right
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...
That was a sensible simplified version of the logic during my training for regulation in drugs and medical devices, at least.
https://www.additudemag.com/red-dye-3-ban-adhd-news/amp/
https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/potential-impact...
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.
Using the word "banned" though is misleading. Most things are not approved because no one has petitioned for approval, not because they were found harmful. This happens more in Europe than the US though because the US has GRAS.
And to clarify, since it appears to not be well known even in the US, that GRAS = Generally Recognized As Safe[0], which isn't necessarily all that safe given the "testing" required to meet that "standard."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe
To add something to food in the EU, you need to prove FIRST it causes no harm. It follows the precautionary principle.
In the US, the FDA allows "similar compounds" rapid approval, allowing for the expansion of what's allowed without testing.
Here is the probably not too bad chatGPT summary
United States: Risk-Benefit Approach
General Approach:
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) operates under a risk-benefit analysis framework. This means additives can be approved if the benefits (e.g., preserving food, enhancing flavor) outweigh the potential risks when used as intended.
In some cases, manufacturers can self-certify an additive as "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS) without requiring FDA pre-approval. This system relies heavily on the manufacturer's responsibility and scientific consensus among qualified experts. Approval Process:
Data Submission: Manufacturers submit safety data for new additives, but the level of evidence required can vary. For GRAS substances, companies may use existing studies or published research instead of conducting new, comprehensive tests.
Rapid Approvals: The GRAS system allows additives to be introduced more quickly, provided there is no immediate evidence of harm. This has led to criticism that some substances enter the market without sufficient independent oversight.
The differing approaches to food additive regulation in the EU and the US stem from distinct legal frameworks, principles, and processes for evaluating food safety. Here's a breakdown of how it works:
European Union: Precautionary Principle
General Approach:
The EU adheres to the Precautionary Principle, which means a substance must be proven safe before it is approved for use.
Manufacturers or entities seeking approval for a food additive must provide comprehensive scientific evidence to demonstrate that the additive is harmless to humans. Approval Process:
Scientific Evaluation: The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) conducts a detailed risk assessment. Applicants must submit robust toxicological and safety data, including studies on metabolism, potential toxic effects, and exposure assessments.
Re-Evaluation: Even after approval, all additives are subject to periodic re-evaluation to ensure ongoing safety as new scientific evidence emerges.
Approved in EU* but not US:
Quinoline yellow (E104), Azorubine/Carmoisine (E122), Ponceau 4R (E124), Patent blue V (E131), Green S (E142), Brilliant Black BN (E151), Vegetable Carbon (E153), Amaranth (E123), Brown FK (E154), Brown HT (E155) and now Red Dye No 3 (E127)
Approved in US, but not in EU:
Orange B**, Citrus Red No. 2 and FD&C Green No. 3.
* Some individual EU countries ban some of these
** Not used despite approval
You can get more information on each of them here: https://ec.europa.eu/food/food-feed-portal/screen/food-addit...
Include obesity, diabetes. Then move onto the GMOs and Roundup and how GMOs enabled mass use of Roundup. Roundup is now being looked into as a potential source of the increase in autism, dementia and other neurorelated conditions.
Keep digging.
The most recent assessment was carried out between 2019 and 2023 by Member State Competent Authorities, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), and showed that there is currently no scientific or legal justification for a ban. This led to the renewal of approval of glyphosate in 2023.
Under the conditions of approval and by following good agricultural practices, glyphosate is considered not to pose any harmful effects on human health or unacceptable effects on the environment."
https://food.ec.europa.eu/plants/pesticides/approval-active-...
And because Roundup ready GMO are not in use, the usage is lower in the EU vs US.
One category of GMO is called “Roundup ready”
It means crops that can take Roundup and survive at high concentrations of glyphosate while natural crops have some limit of concentration. That means higher usage in the US.
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”.
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?
There is poison in our food.
So until there isn’t poison in our food, I think we reform the agency and go a little harder on the MBA led organizations that got us here.
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.
Trump is actually very, very anti-corporation. It's a very prominent part of his stump speeches and campaigning. He's accusing corporations of everything.
His fortune was made from real-estate speculation and the Trump corporation is basically run like a family business. If you were try to attach a label - he is pro-aristocracy. He believes wealth tied to land and inheritance is "legitimate", and wealth tried to trade and commerce as illegitimate.
Trying to find a coherent philosophy from Donald Trump is impossible.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/uc265y/a...
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...
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.
They changed the recipe after it received significant attention. Before then the company was happy to use food coloring on Apples to pretend it had strawberries while actually providing strawberries in another country.
The thing is you can’t bring attention to every single product, which is the point of regulations around deceptive packaging.
I don’t know for sure but it looks like in the image the oh so simple is a different product line. Seemingly similar to all of Lays chips which come in normal and the healthier line.
It's also an old image from 2019. What was the recipe like in 2019? (I don't know the answer, genuine question)
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.
There were no negative effects on rats at over 2g/kg. [1]
[1] https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/j.efsa.2020...
What is in the UK Doritos' "Cool Original Flavour" (read: Ranch) ingredient? Maybe something like Tomato Powder, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Buttermilk, Natural and Artificial Flavors?
The idea that people want to take him seriously as a food safety crusader is wild.
Exotic parasites is a known risk when eating roadkill. It's not a difficult connection to make.
https://apnews.com/article/rfk-new-york-ballot-access-lawsui...
Speaking to reporters in a hallway after court ended Wednesday, Kennedy was asked whether he picked up other roadkill.
“I’ve been picking up roadkill my whole life. I have a freezer full of it,” he said, eliciting laughter.
Kennedy campaign spokesperson Stefanie Spear later said by text that he wasn’t joking. She said that’s how Kennedy — a falconer who trains ravens — feeds his birds. She added that he no longer has the 21 cubic foot (0.59 cubic meter) refrigerator, which had been in New York’s Westchester County suburbs.
RFK Jr is not a child. He's in full control of the narrative he wants to portray about himself. If he wants to go say kooky things to reporters, he can't be upset if people think he is a kook. And he clearly seems to personally enjoy the reputation of being a kook, based on willingly he throws out jokes about it.
I have no problem with him being a kook! It's just ironic how many criticisms and conspiracy theories he throws out there about others and yet how seriously people want to take him.
Where did he say he actually eats the roadkill? One source?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/08/12/robert-f-kenne...
> He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)
Now this is clearly a joke. But the important thing is, he clearly enjoys trolling reporters. If you are not happy with the way RFK Jr. is treated in the media, take it up with RFK Jr.
To be fair, he didn't say that. He cited "the media" as a source. He was talking about you, who's said a few things now that the media didn't say with the justification of "not a crazy connection to make."
I understand where you're coming from, but I'd be more accurate to say e.g. "If you are not happy with RFK Jr.'s image," as opposed to trying to make that person out as an anti-media crusader.
I would actually really like to hear what the messed up opinions are, when I've watched interviews with him they've seemed pretty reasonable. He cites sources for basically all the claims he makes.
For me, one of his most controversial statements in recent memory had to be during a press conference he gave in 2023 when he stated that COVID might have been "ethnically targeted" to "attack Caucasians and Black people" and that "the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."
He tried to defend the statement by citing scientific studies, which is a habit of his that his supporters admire about him. However, actual experts in the field pointed out that his interpretation of the studies was flawed and there was no credible evidence to support the idea that COVID was engineered or had evolved to target or spare certain groups.
Sources:
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-f-kennedy-jr-false-claim...
2. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jul/19/robert-f-k...
3. https://nypost.com/2024/11/15/media/jake-tapper-rips-rfk-jr-...
>COVID-19 ORIGIN: COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
>Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research
So the US government has concluded that the virus almost certainly came from a lab conducting gain of function research.
What is gain of function? Making a virus more lethal.
RFKs words:
>There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately
It DOES impact some races more than others.
This is a completely plausible theory. I don’t understand why it’s a crazy idea at all.
Why wouldn’t a country trying to make a virus more lethal also try to curve its lethality away from its own people?
I would love to hear about my leaps in logic honestly.
Nobody is saying that it was definitely ethnically targeted, but it IS plausible. Just because the ethnicity involved makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean that it’s not possible.
Your comment suggests it’s an outrageous notion, but if that’s true then just give a decent argument why it’s actually outrageous.
Chinese leadership have specifically mentioned ethnically targeted bio weapons:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_bioweapon
>In 2017, a textbook published by the People's Liberation Army National Defence University called the Science of Military Strategy debuted the potential for biological warfare to include "specific ethnic genetic attacks."[10][11] The same year, former People's Liberation Army general Zhang Shibo authored a book that concluded that "modern biotechnology development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability," including "specific ethnic genetic attacks" (特定种族基因攻击).[10] In 2020, a professor at the same PLA university spoke of the "huge war effectiveness" of a "targeted attack that destroys a race, or a specific group of people."
Many who finally talk to him directly who thought like you do find out maybe not so crazy.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/01/14/los_angel...
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
Based on the provided transcript, the accusations and criticisms against RFK Jr. focus primarily on: 1. Allegations of Sexual Assault: • Multiple allegations have been reported, including by Vanity Fair. His response to these allegations has been a mixture of acknowledgment and apologizing directly to at least one accuser. 2. Acknowledgment of Past Wrongdoings: • RFK Jr. himself has admitted to having a problematic past, described as “skeletons in the closet,” though these have not been exhaustively detailed in the transcript. 3. Entitlement and Privilege: • Growing up as part of the Kennedy dynasty, RFK Jr. is characterized as having displayed behaviors shaped by immense privilege and a sense of entitlement, including unruly and eccentric conduct during his youth. 4. Controversial Political Views: • While not explicitly detailed in this transcript, RFK Jr.’s political stances (e.g., vaccine skepticism and other fringe views) have been controversial and polarizing, drawing criticism from various quarters.
There is no mention in the transcript of more serious accusations, such as criminal activity beyond the sexual assault allegations, nor evidence of deeper scandals. However, the discussion also suggests that there may be more allegations or controversies not covered explicitly in the transcript.
> LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is a doctor and transplant surgeon and invented drugs to fight pancreatic and other forms of cancer. He ACTUALLY talked to RFK Jr. and after listening to him talk and what he had to say instead of relying on mainstream media propaganda, he changed his opinion on him.
You have elected a bunch of ego driven loonies. Just accept it and hopefully you still get to vote in four years time. What a great time for this planet.
Billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong who prevented the LA Times staff from publishing their endorsement of Kamala Harris?
Also, seeing photo of him slurping up McDonald’s on the plane, guess healthy food isn’t the highest priority for him? Just the one he’s loudest about
No food is inherently unhealthy or bad, so I don’t think there’s any issue with him eating McDonalds on a plane. Maybe he was in a hurry, or just wanted to be social and stopped there with someone else who wanted it.
What is unhealthy is when the majority of your food is not nutritious, which is currently the case for most Americans. So why not try to make common American foods more nutritious by default, as they are in most other wealthy countries?
It was awesome living in a European country for a couple of years as an American. You learn that ingredient lists at the grocery store really are shorter in ways you don’t expect. It’s easy to buy a fruit yogurt that is just yogurt and fruit, for example. Not “yogurt, sugar, artificial and natural flavors” as you’ll find in many popular foods in the US. It was noticeable with a lot of different food choices.
Also, whenever we would come back to visit the US, after living there for a year or so, we would always have mild digestion issues and stomach cramps for a week or so. This was common among many expats that we talked to. We visited over a dozen countries while we lived there, and the US was the only one that had that issue.
But when you say "whenever we would come back to visit the US ... we would always have mild digestion issues and stomach cramps for a week or so" this does imply that there's something wrong with American processed food, and this isn't an issue of moderation.
Despite not liking the man, I actually agree with RFK on the healthy eating and think it's good that he has raised awareness of it. Red dye has finally been banned, this is good! Heck, I'm very liberal, this kind of regulation is what the US should have been doing a long time ago and happy to see it happening.
My point about RFK was not that he eats processed food sometimes and therefore he's a hypocrite, it's that he's willing to compromise his values for access to power. But hopefully it's just that one time to get on Trumps good side and he actually makes some good regulation about poisonous foods! The market is good at a lot of things, but not at keeping things healthy, so I'm glad republicans are seeing the value of regulation over unwavering belief in the free market.
It only make sense as a "gotcha" if you believe in absolutist purity tests. He looks fit and healthy.
Is there a video somewhere of him swearing on a bible that he will die before eating McDonalds?
Also there are memes from that picture of him grimacing and how frustrated he was.
No “gotcha”, I’m not a partisan. I don’t like Trump but there are a few things he’s done I like, but even with those I often don’t like HOW he did it. For example Greenland, I think that’s great for USs long term prospects (shipping routes), but to say military action is on the table is reckless. Not every criticism is a gotcha, and just because I disagree with 90% of what RFK believes doesn’t mean I don’t think his commitment to healthy eating is good. Maybe that you read a criticism as an absolute indictment of someone shows you have more purity tests than what you criticize.
Hope someday you get it
I have a diet I try to follow in general. I break it all the time and it's not a big deal at all. Sometimes I'll eat a cheeseburger with my coworkers. What does that say about my character? Should it say anything?
How much can one hate a burger? It's not like he is a Hindu or the burger contained his first born child.
Eating a cheeseburger is one thing, but he literally calls it poison.
Anyway, I hope he does succeed in pushing more regulation on what chemicals we have in food. I'm pro regulation for things like this - the market's always going to go to what's cheaper so regulation is needed to prevent companies poisoning consumers. I'm glad the republican party has come around to this point.
As far as I've seen the only debunking has been done on single vaccines like MMR, not on the full schedule of vaccines. And it's a lie to say that they have been thoroughly debunked. Studies have shown that some vaccines can cause allergic reactions. Autistic children have over a 3X rate of food allergies or neurotypical children. Doesn't that warrant studying that maybe adjuvants are causing an immune response and the immune response causes autism?
That, and perhaps the reason there are so many forms of autism is that the actual development of the brain is impacted so much by environment. If the children are given healthy, constructive environments to learn to interface with the world on their own terms, they'll have a better chance of benefiting others than if they're treated poorly and allowed to practice maladaptive patterns.
The covid vaccine nearly killed my father (which means covid itself probably would have) due to activating previously undiagnosed sarcoidosis, but subsequent vaccinations mediated by immunological awareness were safe and effective for him as with others.
Anyway, don't expect net positives out of RFK. He might be "independent" but you need many independent experts to reach a good understanding. Trump's administration isn't going to end corruption, it's just going to streamline it.
If all we get from RFK Jr. is releasing of all the data that the FDA and CDC have, that is a win for society. Autism is a huge problem and no one is talking about it. The autistic kids from the 90s and 2000s are still being supported by their parents, but what's going to happen in another 20 years when their parents are dead? Will we have millions of autistic homeless people on the streets? It's going to be overwhelming and we need to fully study this. One in 34 kids in the US have autism, what are we going to do in 50-60 years?
If you hit upon a scientifically accurate conclusion through an unrigorous process, basically by pure chance, this doesn't make you a good scientist.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/01/14/los_angel...
So many people who opposed him and then take the time to understand what is actually saying, not what they have been told he is saying, come to realize he is completely sane. Bernie Sanders is on that list fwiw.
You can be brilliant in one field and an idiot in everything else.
A lot of people think the Jews in Egypt built the pyramids, but they didn't.
This doesn't make them idiots.
(For anyone who doesn't know, the pyramids were there before Josef arrived.)
People aren't required to know everything, and when they don't that doesn't make them idiots.
The general issue is that people don't realize when they don't know something correctly, and it's impossible to vet every single thing you hear.
You can call him an idiot if he was corrected, and despite evidence he refuses to change his position. Has he done that?
Just because one doctor is stupid doesn't invalidate all doctors, does it? In that case, Dr. Ben Carson would be proof that Dr. Fauci is also an idiot.
You haven't researched him at all, have you?
If chemotherapy meds had the incredibly low adverse reaction rates of common vaccines with the same typically high effectiveness, I bet his general opinions on the subject would be different. No, of course we shouldn't require school children to get preventative chemotherapy because the risk-reward ratio would be awful. And of course we should vaccinate them against polio because there's trivial risk in the prevention compared to the life-altering effects of the illness.
Turns out medicine's complicated, who knew?
It's kind of the same with any treatment: chemotherapy may make you incredibly sick before it saves you. Willow tree bark may fix your headache but cause you to bleed profusely. Homeopathy may make you die of whatever you were sick with before it cures your dehydration. Everything has its tradeoffs.
Looks like you, me and RFK Jr. are perfectly aligned.
- 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.
I don't believe natural is inherently good nor artificial inherently bad but the USA product is objectively lower quality. IMHO it is cheaply made crap to fool people that do not read the ingredients.
I say if your product mentions strawberries and you get dyed apples instead the problem is not the person failing to read the ingredients list, something has gone wrong at the legislative level.
https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/quaker-oats-instant-oatmea...
Ingredients
Whole grain oats,sugar,dried raspberries,dried strawberries,natural flavor,tricalcium phosphate,salt,beet juice concentrate (color),iron,vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol).
The American version is identical to the UK version until "natural flavor." The US version then adds some vitamins plus tricalcium phosphate, salt, and beet juice concentrate. The only "scary" ingredient is tricalcium phosphate, which appears to be an anti-caking agent.
Edit: on Quaker's website
https://www.quakeroats.com/products/hot-cereals/instant-oatm...
It says "Tricalcium Phosphate is a source of phosphorus that also provides the essential mineral calcium." Which is actually what I suspected, it's another added vitamin that has the benefit of also being an anti caking agent.
There may be ostensible reasons why some of the extras we get are theoretically useful, but I'd still wonder why we're the only ones who go to all the trouble (when we don't seem to come out ahead for it, health-wise).
https://www.britishcornershop.co.uk/quaker-oat-so-simple-hea...
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/quaker-oats-high...
For some reason, the quaker oats uk website doesn't list it though, perhaps they're new formulations.
I imagine it's used to keep the fine powders (powdered salt or milk powder depending on the product) from caking. If the previous version didn't have any salt, then it might not have needed it.
These companies appear to believe that Canadians prefer fewer artificial ingredients, and that Americans don't seem to care. Very curious.
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)
"Concentrated carrot juice (for colour), Anthocyanin, Annatto, Turmeric, Natural flavour, Concentrated watermelon juice (for colour), Concentrated blueberry juice (for colour), Concentrated huito juice (for colour)" etc
From their ingredients.
My understanding is that a lot of food is colored to look "natural" for uniformity. A good example of this is applesauce.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDOFPuy33m4
It's kinda jarring having grown up with that association.
We, as humanity, should sue all this big companies (nestle, coca-cola, etc.) for poisoning our lives for profit.
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.
If unhealthy foods are to be banned, we must also ban cigarettes and alcohol. If we are to let people be bodybuilders, or body destroyers, then all of these things should be available for purchase.
Ultimately it is a special kind of arrogance to tell people what they are or are not allowed to do to the one thing they unambiguously own and control: their own body.
The tobacco industry fought tooth and nail against any suggestion that tobacco products are linked to cancer and even advertised cigarettes as healthy.
I agree with you in principle. I would caution against taking for granted what we know today to be very clearly unhealthy and cancer-causing. It is often an up-hill decades long battle against incredibly wealthy interests to get to the truth.
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.
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.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1046348573/sprinklegate-sinks...
"I am extremely passionate about sprinkles."
Honestly hilarious. I feel his pain.
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.
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.
But it would be an evolutionary loss, unlike a synthetic compound that has been equally as well studied scientifically - this odds on would make the natural compound safer to consume… not sure why this is so complicated to understand
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.
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.
No one inhales six apples in a sitting but I sure have eaten 200g of chocolate in an hour before.
It's useful to go for more "natural" foods because they aren't designed to make me eat as much of it as possible. Even if fruit loops were as healthy as an apple the apple still wins because the fruit loops are deliberately engineered to encourage you to eat more of them.
If hard ciders count then I sure have.
> It's useful to go for more "natural" foods because they aren't designed to make me eat as much of it as possible.
I'm not saying that fruits, vegetables, legumes, and other foods you get from nature aren't healthy, of course they are. The fallacy is to say that because it's natural it's inherently better then an artificial or synthetic counterpart. Instead of worrying about if the food dye in your fruit loops uses red bell peppers or is synthetically extracted from petroleum, how about we worry about people consuming too much ultra-processed, high calorie, and low nutrional foods. That will make a greater impact on the general populations health here in America. Banning additives and food dyes won't stop people from eating 2000 calories of fried oreos.
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://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/health/to-lose-weight-focus...
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.
But the prevalence of the above ingredients serves to increase consumption of processed foods relative to whole foods, both by increasing “addictiveness” aka how much people eat, and by decreasing its cost. HFCS is the best example of this, having heightened addictive properties via increased satiety suppression and dopamine response compared to other sugars, while being heavily subsidized to the point that final prices see a 15% reduction. As a result, HFCS is added to many products it has no business being in, because it increases sales (and so consumption, of processed foods).
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.
Is it really not how things end up happening? We must be living in two different realities. The greater the power, the higher the likelihood it becomes corrupted. With such a high incentive to give into corruption, you can’t just hand-wave it away with “but I’m sure it gets balanced out by something”. Your local family doctor might be a good enough person to help you get better without expensive drugs, but the head of a large institution? Fat chance.
An institution's whole point is to be a system where you don't have to trust individuals. It's a way to deal with complex nature of our reality. People should really learn what institutions are, how they function, what accountability mechanisms they contain, instead of blaming them based on conjecture. "Look, this bad thing happened. And this person has this bad incentive. Now we know the whole story." We don't.
People place trust in faceless institutions all the time. That's why you sit in a box that produces about 50 explosions per second when you drive a car. I don't think you would've gained much by being comfortable with the character of your car designer. If you think building cars is complex, laws and regulations are just as complex. And it takes teams of lawyers, hundreds of pages of documents, and a lot of data to figure out what makes sense. But it's easy to armchair-judge all of that as "just some faceless institution".
> what forces exist to prevent them from being corrupted?
Why are you right now not stealing from your work, or vulnerable people around you? Why are you not trying to screw over everybody you meet? Those forces and more. There's a lot of scrutiny built into most institutions.
> the growing cynicism in institutions is because of evidence of corruption
I don't think we use the word "evidence" the same way. Having perverse incentives is not evidence.
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.
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.
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.
This is simply an application of the Precautionary Principle to things already associated with harm. Since we can't know all the goods or harms that can come from a substance, if something is known to cause potential harm and it's unnecessary, then we shouldn't consume it. The human body is an absurdly complex multi-variate system, and throwing a bunch of unnecessary random shit at it not a great idea in general, but is generally reasonable when we don't know whether it's producing harms or benefits or neither. However, when we know these additives can produce harms, and it is wildly impractical to do repeated, controlled longitudinal studies with large sample sizes on humans, all at various levels of exposure. So, since the substances are entirely unnecessary we might as well just avoid them unless they are essential to creating products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Additives_Amendment_of_19...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food,_Drug,_and_Cosmet...
See, I can also make shit up.
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.
TBH this sounds like exactly the kind of things double blind studies are invented for.
But even if there were none that showed a link, I should just continue to feed my child something that would cause adverse reactions?
What’s crazy to me is … we are talking about a totally unnecessary food additive. It’s not like I’m arguing against some critical public health intervention to prevent a deadly virus. It’s a dye to make food turn a color.
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.
Arguing with me that I could not possibly have experienced a cause and effect because some people didn't hold enough large enough placebo controlled double blind studies (I say this because double blind studies have studied this exact phenomenon, and triggered the retraction of some of these dyes in other countries) is just insulting after a while.
We know so little about nutrition and how different individuals process different nutrients that the scientific consensus on healthy food habits, weight loss, etc have shifted dramatically over the years. We are facing an obesity epidemic in the US. A little humility would be nice in the face of what clearly is not working for the majority of the population.
I mean, it's just food dye for God's sake, what's the "scientific" argument that foods must contain artificial colors?
Just glossing over your complete misuse of objective here btw. There is nothing objective about your subjective* "lived realiy".
*Definition of subjective: 1. Dependent on or taking place in a person's mind rather than the external world. / 2. Based on a given person's experience, understanding, and feelings; personal or individual.
Edit: curious about your first sentence: what makes you against unnecessary food additives? Is it a double blind study? If so, can you name it or an expert opinion on the matter that you trust?
> [...] 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.
I'm saying that you making a mountain out of a belief does directly translate to a distrust in experts, in a way that telling somebody they might just be wrong/it was a coincidence/whatever couldn't do.
At the end of the day most people just see what the want or expect to see, when there isn't a strong enough correlation in another direction. That's why, a reader, one should not value any anecdote too highly.
> curious about your first sentence: what makes you against unnecessary food additives? Is it a double blind study?
The question reads like a gotcha, but I'll answer anyway: The fact that there aren't enough studies about many such ingredients, and that I don't have time to check which are definitely vs. lack data.
That's the exact sort of distrust in authorities you purport yourself to be against.
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.
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.
People cannot become experts for every decision they must make.
The point being that humans are bad at weighing risk/reward and make bad decisions all of the time.
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).
https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-00830.pdf
Related:
FDA weighing ban on red dye No. 3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42542951 - Dec 2024
FDA may ban artificial red dye from beverages, candy and other foods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42382676 - Dec 2024
US Food and Drug Administration moves to ban red food dye - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42352983 - Dec 2024
The data and puzzling history behind California's new red food dye ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857175 - Oct 2023
California becomes first US state to ban 4 potentially harmful chemicals in food - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37838521 - Oct 2023
> 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.
I mean, that's just not true. Fruit Loops are sold in Europe as well (albeit with slightly different colors), and there's no hoof or plant that produces anything that looks like Fruit Loops. Food coloring is a worldwide phenomenon.
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.
Your comment violates the following hacker news guideline:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for the full set.
Is it really a competition to see who can ban the most things? What's the prize if you win?
Things like Veggie Libel Laws are very much against the public interest but farm owners have managed to somehow be both rich and adored by the populace so here we are
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.
Let's not forget that Europe had massive epidemic of horse meat being snuck into the supply chain with no one catching on.
* The beef flavor is mimicking frying in beef tallow. If you use Marmite in your brown gravy you're using the same trick.
* Americans, being flushed with corn and corn syrup which is sweeter than granulated sugar, developed a sweeter tooth than other places which is why the dextrose.
* Potatoes once cut and exposed to air get that gross dark color. Most home cooks usually solve that by keeping them submerged in water until frying but Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate works the same.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-requirements/f...
Unless you can put it under "natural and artificial flavors and colors" which covers all the things you should actually care about.
The FDA also bans more food dyes than the EU.
Feel free to regail someone who cares about the food regulations of the world.
The FDA factoid is cool -- they just didn't ban the dye that causes cancer.
Have you been to a farmer's market in the US? Potatoes are potatoes. In fact, potatoes are native to this continent and we have more potato cultivars to choose from. You can get very high quality meat there.
Saying all US food is lower quality is kind of a wild opinion.
You're the one that responded to my comment about comparing the US to the rest of the world by saying I needed to compare it to the EU. I didn't hop into your comment chain with random factoids.
> I'm not personally acquainted with every nation's food regulatory regime.
Didn't stop you from providing uninformed commentary tho.
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.
For example, the US has much stricter standards for preventing bacterial contamination than Europe, outside of the Nordics which share similar food safety regulations as the US. The US prohibits a lot of food importation from Europe because of lower food safety standards related to contamination.
Europe makes a lot of food safety exceptions on the basis of a process being "traditional" in some sense, nominally preserving culture. The US is a bit more technocratic less prone to the naturalistic fallacy; the FDA doesn't care that something is cultural or traditional, if there is scientific evidence of material risk then it will be banned.
If I had to summarize their food safety perspectives, the EU tends to focus more on allowable ingredients, the US tends to focus more on the uncontaminated and sterile handling of the food supply chain.
Dairy products in the US tend to contain more lactose, and French/Italian dairy products have less due to the prevalence of aged cheeses and fermentation.
There are many other differences, and none of these seem related to some sort of mystery-makes-you-shit-yourself additive.
<selfpromotion>We sell uncolored raw milk cheddar cheese made with A2 milk, if someone has an issue with cheese in the US give ours a try!</selfpromotion>
[1] https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/food-colours
[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/color-additives-information-consume...
Quinoline Yellow (E 104), Sunset Yellow FCF/Orange Yellow S (E 110), Azorubine/Carmoisine (E 122), Amaranth (E 123), Ponceau 4R/Cochineal Red A (E 124), Erythrosine/Red No. 3 (E 127), Allura Red AC (E 129), Patent Blue V (E 131), Indigotine/Indigo carmine (E 132), Brilliant Blue FCF (E 133), Green S (E 142), Brilliant Black PN (E 151), Brown HT (E 155), Litholrubine BK (E 180)
Some of these names may be confusing since their names imply they're natural when in fact they are synthetic (e.g. Amaranth, Cochineal Red A, Indigo carmine).
Lost in the woods, are you?
https://www.tilleydistribution.com/insights/food-regulations...
https://eatwell.uky.edu/sites/default/files/2024-08/foods-us...
I can understand waiting until there's sufficient evidence before starting that process.
https://www.additudemag.com/red-dye-3-ban-adhd-news/amp/
https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/potential-impact...
> The European Food Safety Authority only allows erythrosine in processed cherries and pet foods.
Is Europe being overly cautious, is America being unsafe?
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?
Look, there are plenty of things in our diets that won’t cause harm in small amounts just because a large amount causes harm to a rat. Some people (somewhat rationally) extended that to food dyes and additives.
If you or I want to choose differently that’s great, but denigrating people who don’t make the same choices you do is condescending and unhelpful.
This is one of those things where "taste" is basically sweetness. I used to love cereal. Ate bowls of it all the time. I've been on a basic oatmeal with blueberries kick for the last couple years, though, and whenever I try cereals I used to like again I'm disgusted by how sweet they are. You really can only taste sweetness. Kids love that sweetness, though, and brands are extremely focused on marketing candy to children as "healthy" breakfast staples. Lots of kids think stuff tastes bad because it doesn't taste like candy.
The price of "organic" cereals is an issue though.
Edit:
The only people I've ever heard of whining about cereals having bad ingredients are the people everyone calls conspiracy nuts, this is my issue with calling things "conspiracy theories" and dismissing people, when someone brings forth valid information, you miss out because you're blindly dismissing them based on bias not fact.
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.
[1] https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/food-colours
[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/color-additives-information-consume...
> 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?
"Noticing a correlation" could very well just be confirmation bias. For decades, parents thought that giving kids sugar made them more energetic, but the scientific consensus is that there is no link between the two.
At some point, as the adage says, "Doctor, when I do this, it hurts! What do I do?" ... "Treatment is simple. Don't do that"
I assume that you would agree that allergies are real and afflict some people but not others -- if your son or daughter entered anaphylaxis shock after eating a PB&J sandwich, would you sit there and scold the child- "but double blind studies show, Chunky Skippy is a safe food! This is just confirmation bias!" Why is it so hard to believe that, in this case, artificial food dyes could cause adverse reactions in some people and not others?
It took £750k back in 2007 to administer a double blind study to explore the link between hyperactive behavior in children and artificial food dyes [0] - a study that included Red 40. I don't have an extra $1MM+ burning a hole in my pocket just to prove what I already know with my own kids. Believe what you want, but if consuming neon red food is that important to you, God speed. I will not be feeding it to my one child who has a reaction to it. I avoid it for the others, because.... even though I know they won't have an adverse reaction, what's the point? The dye doesn't make the food taste any different/better.
[0] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2007/09/hyperactivity-in-...
Taste is a subjective experience and the color definitely makes the food taste different/better, there are plenty of studies on the topic. I agree fully with the rest of your comment though.
Now that we have good quality studies (see meta-analysis[0]) that prove the causal link between food dyes in general and the consequences in the behavior of children, the risk-benefit analysis tilts heavily against them. While we don't necessarily have certainty about which ones are bad, we know that on aggregate they are bad.
This fact alone should be enough to either start state-funded studies to clear this situation out, or ban them entirely and only re-introduce them on a case-by-case basis as they are proven safe by RCTs.
"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?
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.
I'm all for removing dyes from food, but if the tradeoff is bringing back polio, no thanks.
How, exactly, are they causing that to come about? I find this is just a scaremongering tactic that everyone with some ties or ideological adherence to institutional science resorts to, on the other hand, with no sound argument whatsoever. It's just a mindless knee-jerk reaction.
By spreading rumours and falsehoods about vacines. Which reduce vacination rates and leaves an opening for diseases like polio to spread.
Which part of that are you having trouble believing? Just so we can chat about those parts.
It's really obvious how poorly this stuff plays out, you look at New York. When you read a news story about polio/measles/whopping cough etc, from New York, it will say "it was detected in New York City (or Brooklyn), Orange, Rockland and Sullivan counties".
That's often indiciative of a specific sect of orthodox Jewish communities whose charismatic leader is against vaccination. It's a tight-knit community that tends to live in densely populated environments. (So more viral spread than similar relgious sects like the Amish) People tend to follow the guidance and don't vaccinate. Fortunately, while polio virus has been detected in samples, as far as I know there are not any cases. Measles and whopping cough cases are fairly common.
This isn't a "left" and "right" issue. It's an authoritarian issue where seeding mistrust of institutions is important. Polio hasn't been eradicated to the point that eliminating vaccination is smart. Smallpox was -- and we don't vaccinate the general public anymore. (We do vaccinate soliders as the Soviets/Russians/USA weaponized it)
This means that unvaccinated people can be infected with a strain of polio that can cause paralysis. This is extremely rare in the US (there was one case of one affected person in 2022).
Currently, the polio vaccine is recommended in the US, and vaccination rates in different US States are between 86% (Idaho) and 99% (Mississippi). If the vaccination rate decreases, it is possible that polio cases will become more common, or even that polio might become endemic again.
RFK has said conflicting things about the polio vaccine. Aaron Siri, a lawyer affiliated with Kennedy, petitioned the FDA to revoke polio vaccine's approval, but RFK said that he supports the polio vaccine in response. I think it's fair to be skeptical, though, given his general position on vaccines.
If RFK's actions cause polio vaccination rates to fall, there is a real reason to be concerned. I don't think this is scaremongering, this is a plausible possibility based on what we know about polio, and about RFK's position on vaccination.
> Kennedy has insisted that he is not anti-vaccine, saying he only wants vaccines to be rigorously tested, but he also has shown opposition to a wide range of immunizations. Kennedy said in a 2023 podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told Fox News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.
> “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.
> That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”
RFK on Lex Fridman's podcast.
We do have long-term studies on vaccines. Vaccines are some of the best-studied medical intervention. There is plenty of data about their efficacy and side-effects. Implying that we "need more studies" before we can be sure about vaccines is, in my opinion, dishonest and misleading.
see: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/03/7190377...
I read about this right before covid in Wired magazine. Now, they lick the assholes of all the big pharma companies and anyone wanting more science are 'deniers', turning it into a relgion.
This is the old "the person my news sources repeatedly tell me to dislike is like Hitler".
[0] Mussolini, no?
The topic is also RFK and his views, which include quite prominent anti-vaccine activism.
> Removing dyes and healthier food in general is one of RFK's stated goals
I'd rather have vaccines and dyes than no vaccines and no dyes.
> On July 21, 2022, the USA witnessed the first case of poliomyelitis after 3 decades of its eradication.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/health/polio-vaccine-outb...
> Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic who may become the secretary of health and human services, has said the idea that vaccination has nearly eradicated polio is “a mythology.”
> The virus that paralyzed the young man had been circulating for months, and it was later detected in the sewage of multiple New York counties with vaccination rates hovering around 60 percent, prompting the state to declare an emergency.
Including helping worsen a measles outbreak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Samoa_measles_outbreak
Not the sort of person you want to promote to policy decisions, where he can do more damage.
Find me one where saturated fat is isolated from every confounding factor. There is none. They are epidemiological studies linking saturated fat from junk food (itself mostly comprised of processed carbs with a myriad of artificial ingredients) to heart disease. That's akin to claiming that dairy protein alone is bad for health because almost every junk dessert has some form of dairy in it as an ingredient.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
You cant sue another driver because they risked crashing into your car.
