Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in? Rhetorical question because I think people like RFKJr got into power because previous administrations didn't take care of the obvious things that need regulation, and if you ignore the basics for too long people flip over to someone who packages a couple of reasonable stances with a lot of damaging ideas.
I agree with RFK for pushing for change in this industry but I give him no credit, instead I blame previous administrations on both sides for not taking a better stance on regulating food like every other developed country in the world.
As a scientist I don’t think this change is really science based.
Banning artificial colors because “chemicals are bad” isn’t logical. Banning artificial dyes because one random paper maybe found a cancer link isn’t rational (generally if studies are all over the place the effect is so small you’re seeing noise).
If you want to avoid artificial dyes, cool, avoid them! But blanket bans of dyes where the data is questionable about harm isn’t logical.
The problem isn't that "chemicals are bad" but that we don't know which chemicals are bad. Ones that we have been eating for centuries are unlikely to be significantly harmful and we can stop consuming them them when evidence is found. But for things that we haven't been eating for that long we don't really know. Right now the system is sort of set up as default-allow. So what happens is that some company wants a blue dye because they think blue candy will sell. They try things until they find something that isn't obviously harmful and start selling it. Then in 20 years it is found that it actually was harmful in the long term and impacted a huge swath of the population. The company then searches around until they find another blue dye that isn't obviously harmful and the cycle repeats.
To some degree we do need to experiment and try new things. However for something like food dyes it likely isn't really worth the risk. Or at least they are far overused. Many of the foods with dyes aren't that healthy anyways, so maybe it is is best to have them less attractive to avoid ingesting more chemicals which we don't have strong long-term evidence that it is safe.
We see a very similar cycle with plastics, refrigerants and many other things. We use something for a long time before realizing that it actually has harmful effects, then industry just creates a new very similar chemical that isn't known to be bad yet (or at least isn't bad in the same way the last one is). In some cases it is probably worth it (refrigeration is a valuable technology) but in the cases where it isn't as valuable to society we should be much more conservative with what we allow.
That being said, the proposed regulation isn't scientific and doesn't play with this nuance. A more reasonable approach would be raising the standards for introducing new chemicals (natural or artificial) to food. Not just banning anything "artificial" (whatever that means).
As a non-scientist, I am not really any more qualified to give an opinion on this than any random person, but the fear around food dyes seems way overblown IMO.
You can read the statement from the FDA where they banned red dye 3, it's very short. [1] Here's a relevant quote:
>claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.
I have the same view, and I was hoping that someone would provide some evidence as to why they are harmful in typical quantities found in foods. It seems to me that because these additives are so widely used, we would know for sure if they were dangerous.
We have extremely pervasive health problems across the west, and many theories (you can surely think of 20), but all of them are weak under scrutiny, specifically because the phenomena are effectively impossible to isolate and pin down. You can't actually achieve a strong signal.
So if multiple studies link a low-value and/or easily replaceable additive to problems, we can remove it as a precaution.
Food colorants in particular serve _primarily_ an advertising role. In general, advertising junk food to children is often restricted and highly contested. The difference here is the child is expected to physically consume the artefact.
We should adopt a "default deny" stance and contested ingredients at least should show some kind of value. You can make a case for many preservatives. Paint is not like that.
It's called the precautionary principle. It's generally a good idea. And yes, you have to implement it at the regulatory level because otherwise Food Inc. will try to get away with everything they can.
> Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in?
They still aren't regulating it, they just held a press conference announcing, literally "we don’t have an agreement; we have an understanding" (and, as covered in this article, no one in the food industry seems to know who exactly the "understanding" is with).
Meanwhile they're firing anyone at the FDA or HHS that can do anything, and the EPA is trying to not regulate coal plants while the Trump administration uses emergency powers to keep coal plants running even over the economic objections of the power companies running them. And of course the EPA is delaying and relaxing the new limits on PFAS in drinking water from last year.
So...no, not really any sensible regulations here.
But it is creating real change already? All you have to do is ask, apparently. Regulation is coming, but not going to complain that companies are preemptively taking action.
One interesting thing about Trump is he’s so deeply popular with the Republican base that he can win elections despite being drastically outspent by the opposition. He also uses tools like primaries and executive orders against those who oppose him.
So whereas a normal candidate may be concerned about upsetting the corporations that fund their election, Trump has built a little bit of insulation against that. He can (and does frequently) take on big corporations other politicians would feel the need to not alienate.
No other Republican would dare cross agribusiness.
He also, for the same reasons, is able to make Republican politicians adopt his positions. So if he wants to do something that democrats already want to do (and that’s not as uncommon as you might think; he was a Democrat for decades) it gets done easily.
RFK Jr is the worst person, but he deserves credit when he’s right.
My favorite photo of Trump is him grinning his ass off because he forced RFK Jr not to kiss the ring, but to touch a cheeseburger. They really do deserve each other.
Google AI says: "While the term "insane" is subjective, dumping a bear carcass in Central Park is both illegal and highly inadvisable."
RFK believes "For decades, the CDC has kept a tight grip on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, concealing vital vaccine safety information from the public," - IE that CDC has conspired to conceal harmful effects of vaccines. If he finds that database, I'll gladly sit up and listen. But until he finds it I'll consider this a conspiracy theory and, according to Psychology Today, belief in conspiracy theories is not necessarily associated with mental disorders.
I disagree with a lot of people in the Trump administration, but I only use the word insane (in the subjective sense, not in the literally diagnosed sense) to describe RFKJr.
I don't give him credit because he comes to his view from a lot of dangerous mistrust of science and medicine. I know a lot of people at CDC who work on flu vaccines and AIDs research, and my step-father was on the team that eradicated smallpox. RFKJr has done unimaginable harm to public health and is pushing us backwards. The people at CDC genuinely want to help people. You can say they've done things wrong, overstepped in some way, or have too much research money from private industry, and that could be a good discussion. No group is perfect, but the answer isn't to destroy it all, or think the CDC is part of a conspiracy.
I think food dyes need more research and better understanding before deploying to millions of people, that is not the same as his anti-science stance. While breaking a lot of things, he also happened to do something good, I don't think that counts as "solving the actual problem".
And, as far as your last point about previous administrations I meant both democrat and republican, but it's been obvious a long time that Democrats pandering would cause a backlash.
At any rate, I don't discount peoples ideas as brainwashing or preconceived ideas, even people I disagree with. I want America to succeed. Trump even did a few things in his first term I agreed with. You seem to have a filter to think people who don't buy into this "new golden age" are brainwashed or tribal. This isn't true. Spend some time considering other view points.
The writing was on the wall for this before RFK Jr got installed. He may or may not be putting it over the finish line, but things were moving in that direction anyway. In 2023, California passed a law banning some additives effective 2027 [1].
In 2016, Mars pledged to remove artificial dyes from their products by 2021 [2]; they didn't do it [3], but they pledged to.
Even in the 90s artificial dyes already had a bad reputation. The manufacturers must have considered removal and it's shocking to me that their analysis must have guided them to keep them in despite nobody really asking for them. I guess people love bright colors.
What people say they want and what people choose to buy are very different things.
If you ask people "Do you want ____" in isolation, they'll always say "No" if they thing you're asking about has any negative connotation.
If you put two different products on the shelf next to each other that differ by that same thing and even advertise it prominently (e.g. one says "No artifical dyes or coloring") most people would probably choose the brighter one because, at time of purchase, their reveleaed preferences are actually different. Now add an extra $0.10 to the retail price for sourcing more expensive natural colorings and even more people will choose the artificial coloring version.
This pattern plays out prominently in all things food related. If you ask people "Do you wish the food supply was healthier?" everyone is going to tell you "Yes". Then when they're deciding where to go for lunch or what to order, they'll skip right past the healthy items and choose what tastes the best.
These hypothetical free-lunch questions are useless because consumers will always claim they don't want the thing they don't understand. If you ask people if they want their food to be "preservative free" they'll tell you yes, until they see their food going bad immediately and their options dry up. Ask if they want "anti caking agents" removed from food and they'll emphatically agree, until their shredded cheese is sticking together. Food science and popular opinion are two different worlds.
> What people say they want and what people choose to buy are very different things.
As the mac & cheese box featuring Super Mario in the article hints, a big chunk of these people are children. Is it any surprise they don't make the most rational of choices?
On the other hand, this is like asking an alcoholic if he wishes to quit drinking. He'll say yes, but then go into a bar on his way home from work... People claim to want to be healthy, yet their discipline isn't perfect and their will is not iron - what hypocrites!
On the third hand - people do vote and lobby for what they say they want (in this case banning artificial dyes). Why should we give preference to their decisions in the market, vs. their decisions in the voting booth? Or in other words - why do purchasing decisions reveal preference, but voting decisions do not?
The problem historically was that when consumers were given detailed ingredient labels, they often decided to not purchase the products. Chemical and food manufacturers spent vast amounts of money to get ingredient labels watered down so that consumers wouldn't see the chemical names. In the 70s labels were much more detailed.
Labels like "natural flavors" exist to cover up what's actually in the food. "natural vanilla flavoring" sounds much nicer than "vanillin and acetovanillone extracted from waste sawdust".
It's goes back even further. Artificial dyes already had bad reputations by the late 70s.
In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them. I remember because my father was an organic chemist by training, and he would look at most labels and explain what was in them, and why we weren't buying them. (My family ended up shopping for most of our groceries at organic food stores.)
It turns out that a lot of people didn't want those ingredients either, and it was impacting sales, so companies successfully lobbied to get the disclosure requirements watered down. These days labels in the US basically tell you nothing.
I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food.
We should be entitled by law to know what we're consuming, so that we can actually make informed decisions, and industrial food manufacturers don't want us to know, and have spent vast sums of money to ensure that we can't easily find out.
> In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them.
This is not true, and for some reason this seems to be a common urban myth.
The distinction between natural and artificial flavors goes back to 1906, and in 1938 there was a stronger law requiring the disclosure of artificial flavoring, color, or preservatives. I don't know if you're referring to the 1958 Food Additives and Amendment Act, but that didn't really affect ingredient listings either -- it was about food safety, not disclosure. But there was nothing substantially different about ingredient listings between the 1970s and today. I honestly don't know where you got this information, or what kind of ingredients you were under the impression that your father was able to analyze. The 1960s and 1970s was definitely the era when awareness around these things began to grow among consumers, so it definitely helps explain your father's attention to these things. But the idea that disclosure requirements have been watered down, or that this is due to corporate lobbying, is something like an urban legend. There are certainly issues around trade regulation and naming, like which species of fish are or are not allowed to be labeled as catfish, similar to how champagne can only come from a particular region of France. So there is definitely massive lobbying around geographical disclosures and naming. But the idea that there has been some kind of massive shift of disclosure in terms of chemicals is just not true. If you look up the ingredients on actual historical processed snack labels from the 1970s, they're not any different from today.
> I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food
Ironically, this is what the legislation is moving toward: Anything "natural" is good, while anything "chemical" is bad to a lot of the world.
"natural flavors" and "natural coloring" is also aggravating when you have food allergies. An example is paprika, which is sometimes listed and sometimes not. I hate that practice so much
It's not just the bright colors. The color of food greatly influences our perception of it. My grandmother was a caterer for many years, and she would tell me that the main difference between a chocolate cake and a vanilla one, is that one is brown. If you colored a cake brown, people would start to perceive it a chocolate.
2004 eastern US reporting in, can confirm the school Mountain dew conspiracy. I wonder if there's a site dedicated to tracking these kind of pre-social media viral memes and conspiracies. (I should say 'mass' social media since myspace was a thing, just barely anyone used it)
Why does it take so long? Existing EU recipes are already compliant
Kraft’s European products have for years used natural colours such as turmeric, paprika, beet juice or no colouring at all. That is why the 2025 U.S. pledge to go dye free by 2027 is largely irrelevant on this side of the Atlantic. So 2027? That does not make sense at all.. it's a n economic perspective, not a healthy one.
EU and US supply chains are vastly different, plus shifting the production lines from one to another doesn't happen overnight. This means that it could well take two years to fully move all their production facilities off synthetic food dyes.
Tumeric sometimes contains lead. I think only in India so far, but the FDA is about to move lots of testing to the states. Hopefully on a roadtrip or layover you won't have to research each state you are in before eating.
Demanding an entire industry change everything overnight doesn't work. Suppliers have to ramp up production, processes have to be reworked, purchasing contracts have already been set a year in advance.
I don't understand why Americans accept this behavior from corporates. They are basically poisoning people for economic reasons. Why don't they use that extra profit, made over the health of millions, to speed up this process.
I understand the need to phase out/in ingredients in this situation, however I've never understood when there is a simple ban on an unnecessary ingredient why it takes long. I'm specifically talking about those "microbeads" in bodywash that were banned a few years ago. The companies got years to phase them out. They served no real purpose and were not replaced with anything. Companies just had to stop adding them to the bodywash - why give them years to do so? I get that labelling would be inaccurate so give them a few months to change that.
They'd have to scrap all the food currently in the production and distribution pipeline, plus there would be a gap in food delivery as producers switch over to a new process. It's less disruptive to transition gradually.
Similar to why the USAID closure was gradual and gave aid recipients plenty of time to find new donors, because we wouldn't want hundreds of thousands of women and children to die of starvation and disease just to save a few bucks or wring out more viral memes [1].
Lumping all artificial dyes together is a sign the regulations RFK Jr. is proposing or implementing are unscientific. These are different chemicals, and actual scientific or medical arguments would treat them as such.
There's plenty of good discussion possible about which additives in food should be regulated more. But making this kind of unscientific push is harmful in the end.
I somewhat support being unscientific in this case.
It's not as though food dyes are being used to make healthy foods more palatable. It's quite the opposite, that food colorings are used to make processed foods more stimulating, which in turn makes non-processed foods less attractive.
I support this in the same way that I'd support an outright ban on processed food advertising (especially to children). There is a health crisis in the US (and much of the western world), with one factor being the prevalence and poor nutrition provided by processed foods.
Pet food is some of the most unsanitary "food" on earth. A lot of it is mass produced overseas with little to no regard as to the safety of the ingredients, and I would venture to say at least half of it is adulterated. We only find out about it when large numbers of pets start dying.
One of the lesser known things about heavily processed dog food is kind of dark. People don’t realize that they use animals from shelters that have been put down in dog food. It’s been a while, but I had read a few years ago that they found three amounts of the medicine they used to put animals down in dog food. I also recall your before that reading that some shelters make money by selling the dead animals they put down to food processing companies.
That sounds highly inefficient and therefore unlikely. Just thinking about the logistics of slaughtering all these different breeds of dogs makes me doubt that it can be done profitably.
I don’t think this is a science or safety issue, it’s an issue with bad ingredient labeling. They should name these numbered dyes something more understandable. “Red dye 4” sounds pretty sketchy when they could say “Cochineal extract for coloring”. People can reject the product because the ingredients include a bug derived coloring rather than fear of the unknown “red dye” invented by their imagined evil food scientists.
When I was a kid I ate lunch with a girl who couldn’t have M&Ms because she was allergic to the red die. I was appalled by this.
And the strangest thing about that story is that she was maybe 4 years old when Mars pulled the red M&Ms due to a cancer scare with a different red food coloring. Though my recollection was that it was a few years more recent than that, given how shelf life and supply chains work, I may have been getting back stock. I think I eventually proved to her that there were no red M&Ms anymore. I guess her parents hadn’t bothered to check for years. Not the first injustice I had tried to right but the easiest one.
Five years later they added Red back and I would think of her every time I ate M&Ms for a long time after.
The only reason they add dyes, outside of baked goods IMO, is because they've used so many artificial ingredients, fillers, and preservatives that the resulting food product no longer looks appetizing. Whole, fresh food has never needed dyes added to it to be enticing to our monkey brains.
Fruits and vegetables from a few hundred years ago would be almost unrecognizable and unpalatable to modern consumers. The colorful, delicious, and durable fruits and vegetables of today are the result of lots of work and selective breeding.
Because being unhealthy is the natural state of things, and keeping a handle on that fact, at scale, is difficult and complicated. We used to do a much worse job of it, though. Humans living in developed economies where everyone eats all these oft-maligned foods live much longer than their ancestors did a few centuries ago. And those who live into old age tend to remain healthier longer than those who did a few centuries ago.
That's to say that there isn't room for improvement, or that there aren't things in our food supply that don't belong there. But a sense of perspective is important. "Is this food coloring increasing people's lifetime risk of a specific cancer from 0.005% to 0.01%?" is still a pretty tidy improvement over, "Ugh, yet another outbreak of ergotism. Well, why don't we try burning witches to see if that puts it to a stop."
Little s Science can’t get “corrupted” because it is just a tool. When the scientific method is used to determine what people prefer to buy based on one second of looking at the product, that is arguably an immoral use of the scientific method especially if the health of the users is not taken into account.
That’s also to say that “trust the science“ can be a dangerous way to shut down discussion when people are actually grasping for words to understand whether a scientific method is being improperly used.
Are people so unhealthy? Life expectancies continue to rise. The "a majority of americans have a chronic health problem" stats include things like back pain. It turns out that if you live a long time you get chronic health problems.
What bugs me the most about companies like Kraft is that they could have replaced artificial dyes and ingredients any time they wanted to, but didn't. Clearly these companies are in it to make money, and they will sell the public whatever the public will eat, synthetic ingredients be damned, but maybe.. just maybe the government should be much, much more restrictive on the ingredients that goes into our foods...
> What bugs me the most about companies like Kraft is that they could have replaced artificial dyes and ingredients any time they wanted to, but didn't
They had replaced a lot of them already. Kraft's most iconic product (Mac & Cheese) replaced the artificial dyes years ago and this is only the last 10% of their products.
The fact that this is a legitimate question is very concerning. Some of these dyes are/were ubiquitous and there is very little research about them. IIRC a few have evidence of harm. Nothing should be this widely deployed without understanding them more.
If you were more questioning "Is natural actually better for people or just a nice sounding word" which could also be implied by your question, I agree with that, with the caveat that artificial stuff has more potential for surprises since it doesn't have the history of being used safely "natural" stuff does, and should have a higher bar of research.
It's also an easy thing to focus on. How many products that use dyes are extremely unhealthy for other reasons? If you are buying a cereal loaded with sugar and pretend to care about dyes for health reasons I'm going to laugh at you.
There are a lot of different artificial dyes. Most of them haven't been extensively studied in a rigorous way. It probably isn't even possible to determine whether they have any negative effects on human health because there's no ethical or affordable way to run that experiment. Since dyes are purely cosmetic and there's no actual need for them then it might be better to just avoid the risk.
This is accepting the premise that something synthetic is automatically worse than something extracted more directly from nature. I'm all for researching and banning substances which are actually harmful, but not for paranoia and the automatic assumption that a certain amount of chemistry turns something "natural" into something bad.
For example carmine is crushed up cactus parasite insects which a very small number of people are vulnerable to extreme allergic reactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal
>much more restrictive on the ingredients that goes into our food
How much human testing of every agricultural product do you want?
The greater problem is normalization of unhealthy food across an entire supermarket. Then it becomes unavoidable and invisible to consumers.
My personal bugaboos are added sugar and generous use of weird preservatives. If your supermarket has 20 aisles, 16 of them are loaded with sugary sulfite-preserved stuff, removing choice and visibility to consumers. And breads fortified with folic acid.
Re: preservatives, I remember watching a video a few years ago, where a woman decided that she didn't like all the preservatives in store-bought tortillas, so she was going to make them herself at home. It's a really simple thing to make, so why not?
They all went stale before the day was out. She compared the ingredients between what she had made and what came out of the box at the grocery store, and the ones that she didn't use? They were all preservatives.
Choose your battles wisely.
I will concede that the use of sweeteners in everything in the US is unhinged. It's hard to really understand until you've spent enough time out of the country to where you're buying groceries and looking at the ingredients. You come back to the states and everything tastes weirdly sweet. It was a real "fish don't know they're wet" moment for me, which mostly came about from marrying an Australian.
I'm still upset that I picked up a set of those little fruit cup things advertising "no added sugar", only to be met by intensely bitter and gross flavor. Turns out they added monk fruit extract instead, as an artificial sweetener. To FRUIT. Fruit is naturally sweet!
Flour fortification is one of the great public health successes of the 20th century, and I’m not aware of any data showing that folic acid is any more harmful than any of the other synthetic B vitamins added to our food. I’ve actively looked for such data, as someone with the fairly common genetic mutation affecting MTHFR, and frankly all I find is nonsense.
Bread is fortified with folic acid because it turns out it is really important for brain development during pregnancy and it can be too late to take supplements if you wait until you find out that you are pregnant. This is a positive public health intervention.
Absolutely, stop subsidizing corn and glucose syrup through ag policy, and tax sugar consumption. Mexico taxed sugar to mitigate obesity to great success. GLP-1s destroy demand (Walmart already sees this in their purchasing data for consumers who are on GLP-1s), but we should also restrict supply by not subsidizing it in the first place. Why are we paying both to make the poison and then treat the poison? Not very capital efficient!
Yes to the point of having it go under FDA review along with PFAS, BPA, mercury, etc. If sugar can survive their empirical heath analyses, then you can have all you want. Everyone should go and comment on the FDA's public docket if they feel the same: https://www.regulations.gov/docket/FDA-2025-N-1733
> Clearly these companies are in it to make money, and they will sell the public whatever the public will eat,
You are correct, but I find it alarming that anyone would deem this necessary to say out loud. These companies would happily watch us suffer an die from chronic illnesses en masse if it inched up their share value, as would any for-profit enterprise. The phrase "duh" comes to mind. The only thing stopping them is government regulation, though that approach is under perpetual attack by anti-government zealots, the most recent of which being Musk and his child assistants.
They don't care until there is some combination of public and government pressure, so you just have to keep pressuring, forever. Corporations are fundamentally unaccountability laundering profit machines (limited liability, nebulous shareholder ownership), and must be treated accordingly.
Which is the worst part about all of this: It took government pressure and calling them out to force a change. My anger at government is why they didn't do this SOONER? Why did it take someone like RJF jr. to move this needle? After all the people we've had at Sec. of Agriculture, HHS, and FDA Commissioners..
I don't think this was because people were putting pressure, otherwise the sheer numbers of those communities would have done something by now. It only required one person in power to say enough, fix this.
Readit News
I agree with RFK for pushing for change in this industry but I give him no credit, instead I blame previous administrations on both sides for not taking a better stance on regulating food like every other developed country in the world.
Banning artificial colors because “chemicals are bad” isn’t logical. Banning artificial dyes because one random paper maybe found a cancer link isn’t rational (generally if studies are all over the place the effect is so small you’re seeing noise).
If you want to avoid artificial dyes, cool, avoid them! But blanket bans of dyes where the data is questionable about harm isn’t logical.
To some degree we do need to experiment and try new things. However for something like food dyes it likely isn't really worth the risk. Or at least they are far overused. Many of the foods with dyes aren't that healthy anyways, so maybe it is is best to have them less attractive to avoid ingesting more chemicals which we don't have strong long-term evidence that it is safe.
We see a very similar cycle with plastics, refrigerants and many other things. We use something for a long time before realizing that it actually has harmful effects, then industry just creates a new very similar chemical that isn't known to be bad yet (or at least isn't bad in the same way the last one is). In some cases it is probably worth it (refrigeration is a valuable technology) but in the cases where it isn't as valuable to society we should be much more conservative with what we allow.
That being said, the proposed regulation isn't scientific and doesn't play with this nuance. A more reasonable approach would be raising the standards for introducing new chemicals (natural or artificial) to food. Not just banning anything "artificial" (whatever that means).
You can read the statement from the FDA where they banned red dye 3, it's very short. [1] Here's a relevant quote:
>claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-revoke-...
Also it's often hard to figure out...for example, is caramel color artificial or natural?
We have extremely pervasive health problems across the west, and many theories (you can surely think of 20), but all of them are weak under scrutiny, specifically because the phenomena are effectively impossible to isolate and pin down. You can't actually achieve a strong signal.
So if multiple studies link a low-value and/or easily replaceable additive to problems, we can remove it as a precaution.
Food colorants in particular serve _primarily_ an advertising role. In general, advertising junk food to children is often restricted and highly contested. The difference here is the child is expected to physically consume the artefact.
We should adopt a "default deny" stance and contested ingredients at least should show some kind of value. You can make a case for many preservatives. Paint is not like that.
Except in many cases it is hard to avoid them. Or very expensive.
You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color
They still aren't regulating it, they just held a press conference announcing, literally "we don’t have an agreement; we have an understanding" (and, as covered in this article, no one in the food industry seems to know who exactly the "understanding" is with).
Meanwhile they're firing anyone at the FDA or HHS that can do anything, and the EPA is trying to not regulate coal plants while the Trump administration uses emergency powers to keep coal plants running even over the economic objections of the power companies running them. And of course the EPA is delaying and relaxing the new limits on PFAS in drinking water from last year.
So...no, not really any sensible regulations here.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/hhs-fda-...
So whereas a normal candidate may be concerned about upsetting the corporations that fund their election, Trump has built a little bit of insulation against that. He can (and does frequently) take on big corporations other politicians would feel the need to not alienate.
No other Republican would dare cross agribusiness.
He also, for the same reasons, is able to make Republican politicians adopt his positions. So if he wants to do something that democrats already want to do (and that’s not as uncommon as you might think; he was a Democrat for decades) it gets done easily.
RFK Jr is the worst person, but he deserves credit when he’s right.
Dead Comment
I think the mark of political insanity is labeling someone "insane" simply because you apparently partially disagree with them.
> but I give him no credit
So you're not interested in solving the actual problem in favor of ensuring your preconceived ideas are never changed?
> instead I blame previous administrations
Yea I can't imagine the type of person they would have been pandering to. :|
RFK believes "For decades, the CDC has kept a tight grip on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, concealing vital vaccine safety information from the public," - IE that CDC has conspired to conceal harmful effects of vaccines. If he finds that database, I'll gladly sit up and listen. But until he finds it I'll consider this a conspiracy theory and, according to Psychology Today, belief in conspiracy theories is not necessarily associated with mental disorders.
I disagree with a lot of people in the Trump administration, but I only use the word insane (in the subjective sense, not in the literally diagnosed sense) to describe RFKJr.
I don't give him credit because he comes to his view from a lot of dangerous mistrust of science and medicine. I know a lot of people at CDC who work on flu vaccines and AIDs research, and my step-father was on the team that eradicated smallpox. RFKJr has done unimaginable harm to public health and is pushing us backwards. The people at CDC genuinely want to help people. You can say they've done things wrong, overstepped in some way, or have too much research money from private industry, and that could be a good discussion. No group is perfect, but the answer isn't to destroy it all, or think the CDC is part of a conspiracy.
I think food dyes need more research and better understanding before deploying to millions of people, that is not the same as his anti-science stance. While breaking a lot of things, he also happened to do something good, I don't think that counts as "solving the actual problem".
And, as far as your last point about previous administrations I meant both democrat and republican, but it's been obvious a long time that Democrats pandering would cause a backlash.
At any rate, I don't discount peoples ideas as brainwashing or preconceived ideas, even people I disagree with. I want America to succeed. Trump even did a few things in his first term I agreed with. You seem to have a filter to think people who don't buy into this "new golden age" are brainwashed or tribal. This isn't true. Spend some time considering other view points.
In 2016, Mars pledged to remove artificial dyes from their products by 2021 [2]; they didn't do it [3], but they pledged to.
[1] https://text.npr.org/2023/10/10/1204839281/california-ban-fo...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190902043853/https://www.mars....
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210204131124/https://www.cspin...
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What people say they want and what people choose to buy are very different things.
If you ask people "Do you want ____" in isolation, they'll always say "No" if they thing you're asking about has any negative connotation.
If you put two different products on the shelf next to each other that differ by that same thing and even advertise it prominently (e.g. one says "No artifical dyes or coloring") most people would probably choose the brighter one because, at time of purchase, their reveleaed preferences are actually different. Now add an extra $0.10 to the retail price for sourcing more expensive natural colorings and even more people will choose the artificial coloring version.
This pattern plays out prominently in all things food related. If you ask people "Do you wish the food supply was healthier?" everyone is going to tell you "Yes". Then when they're deciding where to go for lunch or what to order, they'll skip right past the healthy items and choose what tastes the best.
These hypothetical free-lunch questions are useless because consumers will always claim they don't want the thing they don't understand. If you ask people if they want their food to be "preservative free" they'll tell you yes, until they see their food going bad immediately and their options dry up. Ask if they want "anti caking agents" removed from food and they'll emphatically agree, until their shredded cheese is sticking together. Food science and popular opinion are two different worlds.
As the mac & cheese box featuring Super Mario in the article hints, a big chunk of these people are children. Is it any surprise they don't make the most rational of choices?
On the other hand, this is like asking an alcoholic if he wishes to quit drinking. He'll say yes, but then go into a bar on his way home from work... People claim to want to be healthy, yet their discipline isn't perfect and their will is not iron - what hypocrites!
On the third hand - people do vote and lobby for what they say they want (in this case banning artificial dyes). Why should we give preference to their decisions in the market, vs. their decisions in the voting booth? Or in other words - why do purchasing decisions reveal preference, but voting decisions do not?
Labels like "natural flavors" exist to cover up what's actually in the food. "natural vanilla flavoring" sounds much nicer than "vanillin and acetovanillone extracted from waste sawdust".
In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them. I remember because my father was an organic chemist by training, and he would look at most labels and explain what was in them, and why we weren't buying them. (My family ended up shopping for most of our groceries at organic food stores.)
It turns out that a lot of people didn't want those ingredients either, and it was impacting sales, so companies successfully lobbied to get the disclosure requirements watered down. These days labels in the US basically tell you nothing.
I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food.
We should be entitled by law to know what we're consuming, so that we can actually make informed decisions, and industrial food manufacturers don't want us to know, and have spent vast sums of money to ensure that we can't easily find out.
This is not true, and for some reason this seems to be a common urban myth.
The distinction between natural and artificial flavors goes back to 1906, and in 1938 there was a stronger law requiring the disclosure of artificial flavoring, color, or preservatives. I don't know if you're referring to the 1958 Food Additives and Amendment Act, but that didn't really affect ingredient listings either -- it was about food safety, not disclosure. But there was nothing substantially different about ingredient listings between the 1970s and today. I honestly don't know where you got this information, or what kind of ingredients you were under the impression that your father was able to analyze. The 1960s and 1970s was definitely the era when awareness around these things began to grow among consumers, so it definitely helps explain your father's attention to these things. But the idea that disclosure requirements have been watered down, or that this is due to corporate lobbying, is something like an urban legend. There are certainly issues around trade regulation and naming, like which species of fish are or are not allowed to be labeled as catfish, similar to how champagne can only come from a particular region of France. So there is definitely massive lobbying around geographical disclosures and naming. But the idea that there has been some kind of massive shift of disclosure in terms of chemicals is just not true. If you look up the ingredients on actual historical processed snack labels from the 1970s, they're not any different from today.
Ironically, this is what the legislation is moving toward: Anything "natural" is good, while anything "chemical" is bad to a lot of the world.
People say all sorts of things about what they do and do not want to buy, but actions speak louder than words.
https://archive.ph/GFMs0
EU and US supply chains are vastly different, plus shifting the production lines from one to another doesn't happen overnight. This means that it could well take two years to fully move all their production facilities off synthetic food dyes.
Similar to why the USAID closure was gradual and gave aid recipients plenty of time to find new donors, because we wouldn't want hundreds of thousands of women and children to die of starvation and disease just to save a few bucks or wring out more viral memes [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/politics/usaid-cuts-do... / https://archive.is/5BIAF
There's plenty of good discussion possible about which additives in food should be regulated more. But making this kind of unscientific push is harmful in the end.
"Some consumer advocacy groups argue the dyes aren’t worth the potential risk because they lack nutritional value."
It's the precautionary principle in action. Is it scientific? Not really. But does it make rational sense? Possibly.
It's not as though food dyes are being used to make healthy foods more palatable. It's quite the opposite, that food colorings are used to make processed foods more stimulating, which in turn makes non-processed foods less attractive.
I support this in the same way that I'd support an outright ban on processed food advertising (especially to children). There is a health crisis in the US (and much of the western world), with one factor being the prevalence and poor nutrition provided by processed foods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls
95% of people wouldn't realize that's code for "insect juice," and they might prefer the artificial color.
Naturally colored candies use beet extracts for red.
And the strangest thing about that story is that she was maybe 4 years old when Mars pulled the red M&Ms due to a cancer scare with a different red food coloring. Though my recollection was that it was a few years more recent than that, given how shelf life and supply chains work, I may have been getting back stock. I think I eventually proved to her that there were no red M&Ms anymore. I guess her parents hadn’t bothered to check for years. Not the first injustice I had tried to right but the easiest one.
Five years later they added Red back and I would think of her every time I ate M&Ms for a long time after.
I've been working on some improved labeling for certain grocery products:
https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/
Have you ever cooked? Most stews use spices for colouring. A paella looks ill without saffron in it.
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Why do we need these dyes in food?
Why are so many people so unhealthy? Could it be the food we are consuming?
Are we tracking the health and safety data from these policy changes to know if there is a change?
Because being unhealthy is the natural state of things, and keeping a handle on that fact, at scale, is difficult and complicated. We used to do a much worse job of it, though. Humans living in developed economies where everyone eats all these oft-maligned foods live much longer than their ancestors did a few centuries ago. And those who live into old age tend to remain healthier longer than those who did a few centuries ago.
That's to say that there isn't room for improvement, or that there aren't things in our food supply that don't belong there. But a sense of perspective is important. "Is this food coloring increasing people's lifetime risk of a specific cancer from 0.005% to 0.01%?" is still a pretty tidy improvement over, "Ugh, yet another outbreak of ergotism. Well, why don't we try burning witches to see if that puts it to a stop."
That’s also to say that “trust the science“ can be a dangerous way to shut down discussion when people are actually grasping for words to understand whether a scientific method is being improperly used.
There's no doubt about this. High sugar, low fiber is the biggest culprit.
They had replaced a lot of them already. Kraft's most iconic product (Mac & Cheese) replaced the artificial dyes years ago and this is only the last 10% of their products.
Are artificial dyes actually bad for you?
The fact that this is a legitimate question is very concerning. Some of these dyes are/were ubiquitous and there is very little research about them. IIRC a few have evidence of harm. Nothing should be this widely deployed without understanding them more.
If you were more questioning "Is natural actually better for people or just a nice sounding word" which could also be implied by your question, I agree with that, with the caveat that artificial stuff has more potential for surprises since it doesn't have the history of being used safely "natural" stuff does, and should have a higher bar of research.
People act like taking the food dye out of gushers is suddenly going to fix their problems. You need to avoid this food in the first place.
For example carmine is crushed up cactus parasite insects which a very small number of people are vulnerable to extreme allergic reactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal
>much more restrictive on the ingredients that goes into our food
How much human testing of every agricultural product do you want?
My personal bugaboos are added sugar and generous use of weird preservatives. If your supermarket has 20 aisles, 16 of them are loaded with sugary sulfite-preserved stuff, removing choice and visibility to consumers. And breads fortified with folic acid.
They all went stale before the day was out. She compared the ingredients between what she had made and what came out of the box at the grocery store, and the ones that she didn't use? They were all preservatives.
Choose your battles wisely.
I will concede that the use of sweeteners in everything in the US is unhinged. It's hard to really understand until you've spent enough time out of the country to where you're buying groceries and looking at the ingredients. You come back to the states and everything tastes weirdly sweet. It was a real "fish don't know they're wet" moment for me, which mostly came about from marrying an Australian.
After Mexico Implemented a Tax, Purchases of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Decreased and Water Increased: Difference by Place of Residence, Household Composition, and Income Level - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5525113/ | https://doi.org/10.3945/jn.117.251892
Building upon the sugar beverage tax in Mexico: a modelling study of tax alternatives to increase benefits - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10649495/ | https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2023-012227
USA Facts: Federal farm subsidies: What the data says - https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...
(~40 million acres of corn is used for inefficient ethanol biofuels as well, but I will reserve that rant for another thread)
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-chemical-safety/list-select-ch...
You are correct, but I find it alarming that anyone would deem this necessary to say out loud. These companies would happily watch us suffer an die from chronic illnesses en masse if it inched up their share value, as would any for-profit enterprise. The phrase "duh" comes to mind. The only thing stopping them is government regulation, though that approach is under perpetual attack by anti-government zealots, the most recent of which being Musk and his child assistants.
I don't think this was because people were putting pressure, otherwise the sheer numbers of those communities would have done something by now. It only required one person in power to say enough, fix this.