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.
magicalist · 1h ago
> 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.
jibe · 1h ago
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.
I'm not going to complain, but real change of what? It's no apparent loss, so I'm happy to say "cool", but we know we won't even be able to measure any public health benefit of what this non-binding, non-regulatory "understanding" is going to bring about.
Seems more like some number of food companies are happy to go along with something that costs them basically nothing, while anything meaningful won't actually be done or is actually in the process of being reversed.
toast0 · 1h ago
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].
Healthy food and cleaning up the food supply was an initiative of Michelle Obama. There was a big push to regulate healthly public school lunches and the FDA to have sensible regulations that matched the rest of the world. This all would have been accomplished a decade ago.
Instead, every Republican and Fox News called her a Communist (and worse) and that it was un-American to have the government tell people what to eat.
Even the whole notion of abolishing the food pyramid to advocate for more fibrous whole foods (e.g., vegetables, fruits) and stylizing it as a plate was her idea, later coopted by RFK Jr.
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.
spicybbq · 7m ago
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.
themaninthedark · 49m ago
As a non-scientist and definitely talking about anecdotes: I know of at least one kid who has Tourettes that is made worse by artificial dyes...
Also it's often hard to figure out...for example, is caramel color artificial or natural?
why_at · 55m ago
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.
> If you want to avoid artificial dyes, cool, avoid them!
Except in many cases it is hard to avoid them. Or very expensive.
bitwize · 1h ago
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.
timr · 1h ago
As a chemist, I can tell you that nearly everything you can think of -- "natural" or otherwise -- has been correlated to some negative outcome, in some organism, by some (usually crappy) study. These get laundered and blurred into "linked to negative health effects", by the lay press, which is widely repeated by people who don't know what they're talking about. P-hacking virtually guarantees that this will be the case, as long as someone, somewhere has the incentive to publish.
If you apply the "precautionary principle" this broadly, there's nothing left. It's basically the same reason that everything is labeled as "linked to cancer" by CA prop 65 (e.g. coffee, or...trees [1]).
The precautionary principle is not entirely benign. Here, though, it's not even apposite: the dyes being ditched here have been intensively studied for decades.
croes · 1h ago
Allowing artificial dyes that are consumed without proper testing for harm is illogical.
You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color
gruez · 1h ago
>You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color
Easy for you to say while writing a HN comment, but people would certainly be turned off by gray yolks[1] for instance, even if theoretically they were safe to eat.
While it's easy to fake a healthy golden yolk, in my experience raising chickens, pale yolks are usually from a troubled hen.
croes · 1h ago
And?
Just because people don’t like grey yolk doesn’t mean we should put an untested color in it.
RamblingCTO · 1h ago
I think that's the biggest issue nowadays/back then: we don't test shit like at all and find out decades later that it destroys us. For what? Because the market incentivizes temporary gains for "competitiveness". The whole system is misaligned. We have those e/acc and silicon valley peeps telling us it's for the PrOgReSs and it's necessary. All the while they eat grass fed beef. You gotta live what you preach!
thatjoeoverthr · 1h ago
In context, entirely logical!
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.
refurb · 1h ago
That fails the scientific method in several places.
Science doesn’t ban things with questionable data from poorly designed studies when other studies say the opposite.
Science doesn’t ban things because of some other problem where a causal link hasn’t been proven.
We already have a “default deny” system in place. Unless you have data saying it’s safe (according to regulations), a chemical can’t be used as a food additive.
Edited to add:
GRAS definition....."the use of a food substance may be GRAS either through scientific procedures or, for a substance used in food before 1958, through experience based on common use in food Under 21 CFR 170.30(b), general recognition of safety through scientific procedures requires the same quantity and quality of scientific evidence as is required to obtain approval of the substance as a food additive."
clcaev · 1h ago
> We already have a “default deny” system in place.
GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe) defies this reasonable expectation.
> Science doesn’t ban things with questionable data from poorly designed studies when other studies say the opposite.
Science doesn’t ban anything. That is simply put not the role of science.
Science can inform decision making, but it is not the only valid way to make decisions.
HumblyTossed · 1h ago
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.
timewizard · 32m ago
> Why did it take an insane person
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. :|
fabian2k · 27m ago
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.
jasonthorsness · 5h ago
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.
jyounker · 2h ago
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.
crazygringo · 2h ago
> 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.
Aurornis · 2h ago
> 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.
Aurornis · 2h ago
> despite nobody really asking for them
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.
like_any_other · 2h ago
> 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?
jyounker · 2h ago
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".
CjHuber · 2h ago
...or is the most convenient
sudobash1 · 2h ago
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.
compiler-guy · 2h ago
Chefs have a famous saying that "You eat with your eyes first." The color of one's food is a huge part of that first sample.
cma · 2h ago
I can report that Crystal Pepsi tasted like Pesi and not Sprite at least, so there must be some limitations.
bbarnett · 2h ago
I can believe this for the cake itself, not the icing, which is probably what she/you mean. Interesting.
bunderbunder · 5h ago
Just guessing, they did research and found that products with dyes sell better.
People say all sorts of things about what they do and do not want to buy, but actions speak louder than words.
Workaccount2 · 4h ago
Silly Rabbit! Original Trix With Artificial Colors Is Back After Customers Revolt
Oh yes there was huge conspiracy in my school of “Yellow 6” as found in Mountain Dew will shrink your testicles.
anon_cow1111 · 2h ago
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)
neuroelectron · 5h ago
I hope they remove them from animal food as well. Ol' Roy dog food uses tones of the stuff. Why?? So unnecessary.
Molitor5901 · 5h ago
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.
When I was a kid Ralston Purina owned a bunch of human food enterprises as well and that always disturbed me.
vel0city · 2h ago
I mean the company that makes M&Ms and Kind Bars also makes Whiskias and Royal Canin. In the end I don't get why it matters. Do we not expect there to be good standards for both?
hinkley · 1h ago
When I was a kid it was still considered normal for your dog to sleep outside. Most people drew the line at chaining your dog instead of having a fence, but that was about it. My dad built an insulated doghouse for our dog rather than let her stay inside. I thought that was weird, but I was the “weird kid” so who cares what I thought.
The number of things I thought should be true at that age that finally are is baffling. Even accounting for recent regressions.
ProfessorLayton · 1h ago
Why would it be weird to have a dog sleep in a shelter outside? Lots of people have dogs not just as pets, but to guard their property, and it's done all over the world.
My parent's shepherds stand by the door at bedtime asking to be let out to their dog house.
hinkley · 24m ago
Because they’re pack animals and you’re their pack.
Gracana · 2h ago
In Smithfield Virginia there's a big Smithfield Foods pork plant, and right next door is Premium Pet Health, which is a Smithfield-owned pet food plant. I've only ever been in the Smithfield plant, and it seems fine. Very industrial, but similar to other meat plants.
N_A_T_E · 5h ago
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.
dehrmann · 3h ago
> Cochineal extract for coloring
95% of people wouldn't realize that's code for "insect juice," and they might prefer the artificial color.
hinkley · 2h ago
Red 4 is already bug paste. Always has been. The “preference” based only on perception is just advertising.
Naturally colored candies use beet extracts for red.
cma · 2h ago
Wait until people find out where jelly beans come from.
kozubik · 2h ago
"... it’s an issue with bad ingredient labeling ..."
I've been working on some improved labeling for certain grocery products:
Awesome idea. Are you doing anything else in a similar vein?
FuriouslyAdrift · 5h ago
Since cochineal casues so many allergic reactions, there's already a law that they have to put it on the label.
hinkley · 2h ago
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.
toast0 · 1h ago
Wikipedia reports red M&Ms were eliminated in 1976, and added back in 1987. I'm sure it took several months for these changes to make it to the marketplace, but probably not years; M&Ms have a reasonable shelf life, but they do degrade, so year old stock isn't great.
My Mom was pretty salty about the red M&Ms going missing, and refused to eat blue M&Ms for quite some time.
hinkley · 24m ago
As I said, I’m pretty sure that number is wrong by a little. And does 76 mean January or December? That’s a long time for small children. This thread is about people announcing things and then taking a while to do them. But we were in a town hit particularly hard by a recession. I have no doubt they were turning inventory closer to the Best By date than yours was. I bet all those sales I remembered seeing (3 for a dollar!) were overstock.
candiddevmike · 5h ago
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.
AlotOfReading · 5h ago
People have been coloring food for thousands of years with dyes like Saffron, carmine, turmeric, and squid ink.
mensetmanusman · 3h ago
Those are spices with taste.
UncleMeat · 20m ago
You need so little tumeric or annatto to color food and they impart so little flavor in so many applications that the reason they are used is very obvious.
AlotOfReading · 2h ago
Carmine is better known as Red 4 these days. Doesn't have much taste. Saffron adds basically no taste in the amounts typically used for something like Saffron rice. Squid ink again, mostly for the striking color. The taste isn't particularly great.
Turmeric can go both ways, but the ground turmeric that's historically common for preservation reasons is much less flavorful than the fresh root. It's mostly a color thing.
Of course, we can also just open up a medieval cookbook to see what they say. The Forme of Cury is a nice 14th century example that's available from Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8102
As to colours, which perhaps would chiefly take place in suttleties, blood boiled and fried was used for dying black. saffron for yellow, and sanders for red. Alkenet is also used for colouring, and mulberries; amydon makes white; and turnesole [for yellow]
Alkanet is commonly used today for Rogan josh, but historically would have been more known for rouge and dying wine. A Mediterranean cookbook might have instead chosen amaranth for the same purpose
1oooqooq · 3h ago
flash freezing some paprika to remove the flavor is probably easier than boiling coal in a vacuum to make red 3.
mslansn · 3h ago
> Whole, fresh food has never needed dyes added to it to be enticing to our monkey brains.
Have you ever cooked? Most stews use spices for colouring. A paella looks ill without saffron in it.
alienbaby · 1h ago
_Most stews use spices for _coloring? A quick glance over my recipes and books shows none of the stews use any spices for colouring.
xnx · 4h ago
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.
jyounker · 2h ago
Most fruits and vegetables in grocery stores taste pretty bland. They're bred more for appearance, shelf stability, regularity, and transport rather than taste.
There are legendary varieties that are lost to time. Occasionally we rediscover them, and we get to compare. Usually the modern industrial varieties are pale imitations.
That’s not super true. Salmon for instance. Or Easter eggs.
bwestergard · 5h ago
Wild salmon have their characteristic color because they are eating organisms that contain the naturally occurring Astaxanthin. Farmed salmon subsist on grains, fish oils, etc and come out looking grey unless pigments are added to their feed.
interesting, the Salmon I have caught has not been as colorful- I mostly fish in the rivers though
edit: it looks like that vid had some steelhead (trout) mixed in? This is more like what I have seen, but the color is even more "dulled" in person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e09UmeqAd4g
maxerickson · 4h ago
Do yellow 5 next.
newsclues · 5h ago
I think this is a health and safety issue, and I think the food business has corrupted a lot of science.
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?
UncleMeat · 18m ago
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.
bunderbunder · 4h ago
> Why are so many people so unhealthy?
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."
newsclues · 4h ago
I think being healthy is far more natural than you say.
Go look at how native or indigenous people live vs people in cities.
bunderbunder · 3h ago
One of the things they have that people in developed economies generally don't is a 50% infant mortality rate.
The ones that don't achieve it through access to very unnatural artifacts such as vaccines that are quite likely to have been made using ultramodern technologies such as genetic modification.
Or, I've got quite a few friends who have various congenital conditions that mean that they absolutely would not have survived in a society with a more "natural" foodway. With the modern food supply chain, though, they're doing just fine. Unnatural things you get in some ultraprocessed foods, such as vitamin fortification, mean they can even do it without having to worry about developing comorbid chronic ailments due to malnutrition.
mensetmanusman · 3h ago
This is somewhat survivor bias though, because all the dead that didn’t survive their youth are actually dead.
In wealthy countries these would-be-dead people walk amongst us.
Nasrudith · 2h ago
That is a survival bias. Ironically if you want signs of good health practice look for unhealthy people - it means that they can survive vs the unhealthy just dying.
bunderbunder · 2h ago
A really good example of this was the paper that kicked off the whole "omega-3 fatty acids for heart health" thing. It ultimately got retracted.
The gist of the paper was that they observed that Inuit communities have really low rates of heart disease, and hypothesized that it could be because their traditional diet is very high in omega-3 fatty acids. The problem is, they don't actually have low rates of heart disease. They just have low rates of heart disease diagnosis, because they also have limited access to health care.
mensetmanusman · 3h ago
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.
xnx · 4h ago
> Why are so many people so unhealthy? Could it be the food we are consuming?
There's no doubt about this. High sugar, low fiber is the biggest culprit.
nradov · 2h ago
There's doubt about this. While high sugar and low fiber is problematic, sheer quantity might be a bigger culprit. And some indigenous populations seem to remain relatively healthy on low-fiber diets (i.e. eating mostly animal products).
decide1000 · 3h ago
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.
indrora · 3h ago
Supply chains.
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.
Aurornis · 2h ago
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.
decide1000 · 2h ago
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.
dehrmann · 3h ago
Guessing it's to ramp-up suppliers, change equipment over, and stockpile enough for the transition.
giarc · 3h ago
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.
mslansn · 2h ago
Of course the beads served a purpose: they were abrasive and exfoliating. And they were given time because they have to sell their existing inventory and use all the beads they already have purchased to put in their products.
spondylosaurus · 2h ago
Not sure why you're greyed out, because you're correct that those were literally exfoliant face washes. (No real loss in phasing them out because there are much better ways to exfoliate than rubbing your face with little pellets, but it wasn't some meaningless design choice.)
hinkley · 2h ago
And run out existing contracts with existing suppliers.
No comments yet
throwworhtthrow · 1h ago
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].
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.
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...
HWR_14 · 4h ago
> 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.
Are artificial dyes actually bad for you?
thinkingtoilet · 28m ago
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.
klik99 · 2h ago
> 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.
nradov · 3h ago
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.
tayo42 · 3h ago
If you care about being healthy why are you eating kraft mac and cheese in the first place.
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.
recursive · 1h ago
Good example of perfect being the enemy of good, or less bad.
unyttigfjelltol · 4h ago
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.
leviathant · 4h ago
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.
unyttigfjelltol · 2h ago
This is fair, but I think overstated. It's possible to preserve a tortilla for a few days without exotic additives. I'm not even criticizing sodium, although that's not a lot better. And yes, preservatives are better than eating spoiled food.
The problem is when the whole supermarket is full of highly preserved food, then this is normalized and health consequences are obscured. The deeper issue is that for perhaps 80% of people this is fine and profitable, but for let's say 20% it introduces weird, hard to trace health problems, which don't appear to come from the supermarket because all the normal foods are like this.
devin · 3h ago
Is sodium content comparable?
UncleMeat · 16m ago
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.
ksenzee · 2h ago
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.
spondylosaurus · 2h ago
To expand on "great public health successes": folic acid supplementation is particularly important if you're pregnant, because it significantly reduces the odds of having a baby with neural tube defects like spina bifida (which is one of the milder NTDs, frankly). But it's also important even if you're not pregnant because B vitamin deficiencies will wreck your health.
Yes, the FDA has been emphatic that the folic acid supplementation program is a success and we would be fools to think anything else. The reality, as best I can tell, is more nuanced and for a minority of people it's possible to have too much of a good thing, particularly where 5-MTHF would be more beneficial.[1]
I don't hope to resolve the debate, only to point out it should be possible to eat bread that is not fortified with folic acid, if for no reason than I'm not in the high risk group targeted by the FDA and there are potential benefits from reducing folic acid intake in the context of robust intake of folate from other sources.
Or, even simpler: why can't I buy bread without folic acid?
I can buy unfortified bread at each of the grocery stores in my small town. I can also buy it at the local bakery and at the bread stand at our small farmers market.
It would not surprise me that there are some places in the US that only have easy access to packaged industrial sandwich bread. It would surprise me very much if that was the norm for Americans.
zeta0134 · 4h ago
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!
standardUser · 3h ago
> 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.
xnx · 4h ago
The most harmful ingredient in our foods is sugar. Should the government restrict that?
toomuchtodo · 4h ago
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!
I completely agree with removing subsidies. I'm less convinced that ingredients should be banned. Weirdly the entire "supplement" industry can do whatever they want.
toomuchtodo · 4h ago
Not banned, taxed. These are behavioral economic nudges to encourage healthier outcomes. You can still get a Coca Cola, but the economics shouldn’t make it your primary source of hydration, right? If you’re expecting “will power” to fix this, the evidence is robust [1] that is not going to happen.
We tax alcohol and cigarettes similarly, and I don’t think it’s wild to consider processed sugars close to that same category from a health and reward center perspective.
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
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.
Molitor5901 · 4h ago
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.
carefulfungi · 1h ago
But, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, others have done this before RJF's appointment.
During the Obama administration, cherry picking some example:
It isn't correct to see these changes a singular improvement. These rules are constantly being fought over, sometimes becoming stricter, sometimes looser.
Are you asking why people are more susceptible to demagoguery than science education? History tells us what we need to know about that.
colechristensen · 4h ago
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?
Flatcircle · 44m ago
how did it take this long?
msgodel · 5h ago
The red dye they use in a lot of stuff is absolutely psychoactive. I used to intentionally consume things with it on long drives because it zaps my short term memory so I don't get bored and fall asleep. I noticed this effect after eating some red candy while trying to do math homework in college.
The downside of course is that once you get where you're going you're practically retarded for the next 12 hours or so and can't get any work done.
Workaccount2 · 4h ago
Cherries are absolutely dangerous because when I eat them my breathing gets difficult. No idea why they still allow companies to sell them to people...
I'm sure you can grasp how ridiculous that statement is, and reflect on your own.
msgodel · 4h ago
Heh, never said it shouldn't be allowed. I was just pointing out that some of these things are often more complex than they initially seem.
I thought it was moderately well known. A couple of decades ago a friend would take some red candy when hiking as it could give her (at least the feeling of) a significant short-term energy boost if needed, more than just regular sugar would.
I actually thought that particular red dye was banned where I'm from some time back, though I don't recall why. Allergies perhaps? But that's just a guess.
msgodel · 4h ago
You'll have to look for it yourself I guess? I don't know if anyone has even tried studying it, the effect is pretty subtle if you don't know to look for it. I'm just posting my experiences with it.
Night_Thastus · 4h ago
You can't just make a massive claim like that about such a common ingredient without backing it up. I'm not saying it's not true, it could be, but it's just inappropriate to state something is true like that with 0 evidence aside from personal experience.
msgodel · 4h ago
If that were the case posting on forums like this would be either entirely inappropriate or a complete waste of time.
account42 · 4h ago
Not at all. You can
a) Make claims that are not as extraordinary.
b) Back your claims up with evidence.
Making absolutely wild claims without evidence just makes you sound like a quack.
maxerickson · 4h ago
You complainers are missing the mark. You obviously can make extraordinary claims (see above for evidence).
What isn't reasonable is to also expect large numbers of people to take them seriously without evidence (see above for evidence of people questioning unsupported claims).
msgodel · 4h ago
Maybe a better way to phrase our question is "is making such claims productive?"
mike_ivanov · 1h ago
See my above comment - it's a relatively well studied topic, and yes - there is a link.
mike_ivanov · 1h ago
For the people downvoting this comment - it's a relatively well researched topic covered by at least three major studies with published papers, etc. If you are not aware of something, it does not necessarily mean it is wrong.
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.
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-...
Seems more like some number of food companies are happy to go along with something that costs them basically nothing, while anything meaningful won't actually be done or is actually in the process of being reversed.
[1] https://text.npr.org/2023/10/10/1204839281/california-ban-fo...
Instead, every Republican and Fox News called her a Communist (and worse) and that it was un-American to have the government tell people what to eat.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/06/house-gop-wants-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michelle-obamas-scho...
https://apnews.com/article/health-healthy-eating-a9f5cd19e17...
Banning artificial colors because “chemicals are bad” isn’t logical. Banning artificial dyes because one random paper maybe found a cancer link isn’t rational (generally if studies are all over the place the effect is so small you’re seeing noise).
If you want to avoid artificial dyes, cool, avoid them! But blanket bans of dyes where the data is questionable about harm isn’t logical.
Also it's often hard to figure out...for example, is caramel color artificial or natural?
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-...
Except in many cases it is hard to avoid them. Or very expensive.
If you apply the "precautionary principle" this broadly, there's nothing left. It's basically the same reason that everything is labeled as "linked to cancer" by CA prop 65 (e.g. coffee, or...trees [1]).
[1] https://x.com/RhonaA_PhD/status/1056921307634380800
You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color
Easy for you to say while writing a HN comment, but people would certainly be turned off by gray yolks[1] for instance, even if theoretically they were safe to eat.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/07/12/201501977/he...
Just because people don’t like grey yolk doesn’t mean we should put an untested color in it.
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.
Science doesn’t ban things with questionable data from poorly designed studies when other studies say the opposite.
Science doesn’t ban things because of some other problem where a causal link hasn’t been proven.
We already have a “default deny” system in place. Unless you have data saying it’s safe (according to regulations), a chemical can’t be used as a food additive.
Edited to add:
GRAS definition....."the use of a food substance may be GRAS either through scientific procedures or, for a substance used in food before 1958, through experience based on common use in food Under 21 CFR 170.30(b), general recognition of safety through scientific procedures requires the same quantity and quality of scientific evidence as is required to obtain approval of the substance as a food additive."
GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe) defies this reasonable expectation.
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/generall...
GRAS approvals include some rather novel food additives. Here is a list of recent notifications.
https://www.fda.gov/food/gras-notice-inventory/recently-publ...
Science doesn’t ban anything. That is simply put not the role of science.
Science can inform decision making, but it is not the only valid way to make decisions.
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. :|
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.
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.
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".
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls
The number of things I thought should be true at that age that finally are is baffling. Even accounting for recent regressions.
My parent's shepherds stand by the door at bedtime asking to be let out to their dog house.
95% of people wouldn't realize that's code for "insect juice," and they might prefer the artificial color.
Naturally colored candies use beet extracts for red.
I've been working on some improved labeling for certain grocery products:
https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/
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.
My Mom was pretty salty about the red M&Ms going missing, and refused to eat blue M&Ms for quite some time.
Turmeric can go both ways, but the ground turmeric that's historically common for preservation reasons is much less flavorful than the fresh root. It's mostly a color thing.
Of course, we can also just open up a medieval cookbook to see what they say. The Forme of Cury is a nice 14th century example that's available from Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8102
Alkanet is commonly used today for Rogan josh, but historically would have been more known for rouge and dying wine. A Mediterranean cookbook might have instead chosen amaranth for the same purposeHave you ever cooked? Most stews use spices for colouring. A paella looks ill without saffron in it.
There are legendary varieties that are lost to time. Occasionally we rediscover them, and we get to compare. Usually the modern industrial varieties are pale imitations.
https://gastropod.com/the-most-dangerous-fruit-in-america/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astaxanthin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvvshpw4FxM
Check at 6 minutes into the video.
edit: it looks like that vid had some steelhead (trout) mixed in? This is more like what I have seen, but the color is even more "dulled" in person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e09UmeqAd4g
Why do we need these dyes in food?
Why are so many people so unhealthy? Could it be the food we are consuming?
Are we tracking the health and safety data from these policy changes to know if there is a change?
Because being unhealthy is the natural state of things, and keeping a handle on that fact, at scale, is difficult and complicated. We used to do a much worse job of it, though. Humans living in developed economies where everyone eats all these oft-maligned foods live much longer than their ancestors did a few centuries ago. And those who live into old age tend to remain healthier longer than those who did a few centuries ago.
That's to say that there isn't room for improvement, or that there aren't things in our food supply that don't belong there. But a sense of perspective is important. "Is this food coloring increasing people's lifetime risk of a specific cancer from 0.005% to 0.01%?" is still a pretty tidy improvement over, "Ugh, yet another outbreak of ergotism. Well, why don't we try burning witches to see if that puts it to a stop."
Go look at how native or indigenous people live vs people in cities.
The ones that don't achieve it through access to very unnatural artifacts such as vaccines that are quite likely to have been made using ultramodern technologies such as genetic modification.
Or, I've got quite a few friends who have various congenital conditions that mean that they absolutely would not have survived in a society with a more "natural" foodway. With the modern food supply chain, though, they're doing just fine. Unnatural things you get in some ultraprocessed foods, such as vitamin fortification, mean they can even do it without having to worry about developing comorbid chronic ailments due to malnutrition.
In wealthy countries these would-be-dead people walk amongst us.
The gist of the paper was that they observed that Inuit communities have really low rates of heart disease, and hypothesized that it could be because their traditional diet is very high in omega-3 fatty acids. The problem is, they don't actually have low rates of heart disease. They just have low rates of heart disease diagnosis, because they also have limited access to health care.
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.
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.
No comments yet
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
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.
My personal bugaboos are added sugar and generous use of weird preservatives. If your supermarket has 20 aisles, 16 of them are loaded with sugary sulfite-preserved stuff, removing choice and visibility to consumers. And breads fortified with folic acid.
They all went stale before the day was out. She compared the ingredients between what she had made and what came out of the box at the grocery store, and the ones that she didn't use? They were all preservatives.
Choose your battles wisely.
I will concede that the use of sweeteners in everything in the US is unhinged. It's hard to really understand until you've spent enough time out of the country to where you're buying groceries and looking at the ingredients. You come back to the states and everything tastes weirdly sweet. It was a real "fish don't know they're wet" moment for me, which mostly came about from marrying an Australian.
The problem is when the whole supermarket is full of highly preserved food, then this is normalized and health consequences are obscured. The deeper issue is that for perhaps 80% of people this is fine and profitable, but for let's say 20% it introduces weird, hard to trace health problems, which don't appear to come from the supermarket because all the normal foods are like this.
This also reminded me of a great post from a few years ago about why salt is fortified with iodine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782954
I don't hope to resolve the debate, only to point out it should be possible to eat bread that is not fortified with folic acid, if for no reason than I'm not in the high risk group targeted by the FDA and there are potential benefits from reducing folic acid intake in the context of robust intake of folate from other sources.
Or, even simpler: why can't I buy bread without folic acid?
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11930790/
It would not surprise me that there are some places in the US that only have easy access to packaged industrial sandwich bread. It would surprise me very much if that was the norm for Americans.
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.
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)
Like there is probably some argument to be made about satiety, but I assure you, it is quite possible to consume excess calories in the form of pasta.
And then corn subsidies mostly benefit livestock and ethanol producers, processed food products are a small portion of the end use of field corn.
We tax alcohol and cigarettes similarly, and I don’t think it’s wild to consider processed sugars close to that same category from a health and reward center perspective.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43917096
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-chemical-safety/list-select-ch...
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.
During the Obama administration, cherry picking some example:
* Food safety regulatory improvement bill: https://www.fda.gov/food/guidance-regulation-food-and-dietar... * Improved labelling rules: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/21/health/fda-nutrition-labe... * EPA water safety rules made stricter, then rolled back by Trump: https://www.sgrlaw.com/epa-announces-plans-to-revoke-obama-w....
It isn't correct to see these changes a singular improvement. These rules are constantly being fought over, sometimes becoming stricter, sometimes looser.
Another example, NYC has fought to reduce sugary drink serving sizes and to require labels on high sugar foods. (https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/cdp/added-sugar...)
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 downside of course is that once you get where you're going you're practically retarded for the next 12 hours or so and can't get any work done.
I'm sure you can grasp how ridiculous that statement is, and reflect on your own.
* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3441937/
* https://oehha.ca.gov/sites/default/files/media/downloads/ris...
* https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/red-dye-40-adhd
I actually thought that particular red dye was banned where I'm from some time back, though I don't recall why. Allergies perhaps? But that's just a guess.
a) Make claims that are not as extraordinary.
b) Back your claims up with evidence.
Making absolutely wild claims without evidence just makes you sound like a quack.
What isn't reasonable is to also expect large numbers of people to take them seriously without evidence (see above for evidence of people questioning unsupported claims).
No comments yet