Fun fact - this is how blue raspberry was created as a flavor. Raspberry flavored things were purple, made from a combination of red and blue dye. The red dye (red no 2) was banned. So companies making raspberry flavored stuff just left the red dye out and said "raspberry is blue now" and we all went "shit yeah it is, always has been! why would raspberry be anything other than blue?"
Common varieties of raspberries aren't purple, and I've never heard of raspberry flavor being purple.
So they didn't remove the red to leave blue, because there was never blue in the first place -- they just switched from red to blue, as this lengthy history explains:
I said "raspberry-flavored things" and I guess in the most inclusive sense raspberries are raspberry-flavored so well done there for making me put one finger in the air in outrage and then silently pull it back down while adopting a thoughtful expression. In a less-inclusive sense, raspberry-flavored things are flavored with "mostly esters of the banana, cherry, and pineapple variety" according to the article so it could be argued that there are a lot of raspberry flavored things (including a dust cloud in space, https://next.voxcreative.com/ad/20726659/space-taste-like-ra...) but funnily enough raspberries aren't one of them.
> Food products labeled as blue raspberry flavor are commonly dyed with a bright blue synthetic food coloring, such as brilliant blue FCF (also called Blue #1) having European food coloring number E133. The blue color was used to differentiate raspberry-flavored foods from cherry-, watermelon-, and strawberry-flavored foods, each of which is typically red. The use of blue dye also partially is due to the FDA's 1976 banning of amaranth-based Red Dye No. 2, which had previously been heavily used in raspberry-flavored products.
- it's usually sold as "blue raspberry", not "raspberry"; so you know that it's nothing natural here
- it's mostly used in soft-drinks or other foods that are ~~nothing~~ anything but natural
So my guess is that nobody was thinking they were buying something made of actual rasperries; they knew that they were buying something 100% artificial like "mango madness" or "knockout fruit punch"
Never seen it as a slushie in Italy but we do have azure ice cream. It used to be called "puffo" (=Smurf) but smurfs aren't popular anymore, so now they usually sell it as "marshmallow" or "cotton candy".
Surely no visit to a UK chain cinema (Odeon/Vue) in summer is complete without a refreshing and sugar-free Tango Ice Blast?! It's the "UK’S N0.1 FROZEN DRINK BRAND", according to their own marketing.
And the two original, traditional flavours of Tango Ice Blast are Red (Cherry) and Blue (Raspberry).
In fact, I can't remember ever seeing any other flavours, although according to their website there are others:
Blue raspberry is a candy only flavor. It doesn't really taste like raspberry. Its pretty common as a flavor in the us at least, it's one of my favorite candy flavors.
I feel like you might run into it at a carnival or theme park. It's found in things like candy, Kona ice, extremely artificially flavored drinks, etc. Junk food.
> There don’t appear to be any studies establishing links between red dye No. 3 and cancer in humans, and “relevant exposure levels to FD&C Red No. 3 for humans are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats,” the FDA said in its constituent update posted Wednesday. “Claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.”
> But “it doesn’t matter, because the FDA mandate under the Delaney Clause says that if it shows cancer in animals or humans, they’re supposed to keep it from the food supply,” said Dr. Jennifer Pomeranz, associate professor of public health policy and management at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.
Even more confusing - the FDA still doesn't believe there's a cancer link with humans. But they are banning it anyway on a technicality.
Serious question:
If there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing color, why risk it? What is the benefit?
The problem with that premise is that almost every substance has a remote chance of causing cancer in some way or another. Just ask the state of California. So you would have to ban everything if that is really your stance.
The correct (and scientifically valid) thing to do is to only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done. Otherwise, anyone can simply say X is harmful and pass regulations to get their pet bogeyman pulled off the market, and that is basically what is happening here.
> only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done
I agree with most of what you are saying. However, I think it's valid to also apply heavy scrutiny on new chemicals being added to the food chain. The default being to not allow it if it's not proven safe.
Red dye 3 probably shouldn't have been added to the food supply chain with that criteria but since it's already been there for decades with no strong link to negative outcomes there's little reason to ban it now.
You really don't want to know about GRAS (Generally recognized as safe) then. 700 food substances were grandfathered into the food supply chain and most new things are self-affirmed by the company selling them.
Sometimes no bugs are allowed at all, people be getting upset if their pop tarts have bugs in them.
Sometimes it's like some bugs are allowed and just part of it like when I buy organic broccoli at the farmers market and need to soak it to get whatever those things are in there out. Or when I get those little mummified bugs in the bottom of oatmeal tins.
Sometimes it's like the food is literally coated in bugs like all that stuff that's coated on schellac. Which, finally to bring it back to a callback to your point, is both GRAS and also made of bugs.
Shellac isn't made of bugs - it's made by bugs. Specifically, it's the resin secreted by a female lac beetle onto the branch of the trees that they live and feed on.
I don't disagree with you, but we don't have heavy scrutiny on the existing and natural chemicals that are in the food chain from all of the plants that we eat.
Once you have that trained, you'll be able to publish it and dramatically improve the current SoTA!
I wish it was as easy as this - while there are known toxicophores/no-go functional groups in medchem, there is going to be a big dearth of data on non-acute (e.g. not hERG, hepatotoxicity, etc) toxicity, which is really what the question is here: what are the marginal risks/rewards from eating existing food X (since we know it's probably not acutely toxic).
> The correct (and scientifically valid) thing to do is to only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done.
Because we're talking about food I would actually like to see the opposite. Provide peer reviewed, gold standard studies showing that what you want to put in food is in fact safe.
There is no such thing as proving something "safe". Go back and re-read the parent comment. The important point you are missing is that basically anything can be "linked" to cancer, and if you adopt the argument you are making, there would be nothing left.
Proving something safe is logically equivalent to proving that it is not unsafe, which is the same thing as proving a negative, which cannot be done. I cannot prove there is not a teapot circling Mars, and I cannot prove that even the most inert ingredient, at some dose, will not harm you.
Anyone who has lived in California knows this absurdity more intuitively than most people, because California's stupid laws adopt the logic you are proposing, and basically everything in daily life is labeled as cancer-causing.
A lot of folks in child comments are echoing your sentiment that something “cannot be proved safe”. Your argument that proving something is “not unsafe” is proving a negative is fallacious; the same can literally be said about anything (proving something is X is the same as proving it is not not-X). Proving drugs are safe and effective is literally one of the jobs of the FDA. If you do not believe that is possible, then we may as well tear down the entire drug regulatory apparatus. I imagine you and many other commenters will sing a different tune when posed with that suggestion.
So, let’s stop pretending it’s not possible. We require drug companies show their products are safe and efficacious, and there is both a scientific and a legal framework by which we do this. Let’s debate whether or not the same framework should be applied to food additives (I would argue it should) rather than claim it is not possible.
>There is no such thing as proving something "safe". Go back and re-read the parent comment. The important point you are missing is that basically anything can be "linked" to cancer, and if you adopt the argument you are making, there would be nothing left.
Really? You have some studies linking wheat and whole grains to cancer? And I don't mean wheat crops sprayed with glyphosate, just straight up wheat? Raspberries? Strawberries?
The reality is, very little of the actual natural food in our food chain is directly linked to cancer. All the additives we pile on top, on the other hand, are.
I would argue if we can't show a direct benefit to the consumer, it shouldn't be in the food chain. So, what is the direct benefit to a human consuming red-5? "It looks better on store shelves" isn't a direct benefit.
A shelf stabilizer? Sure, plenty of instances that makes a lot of sense. Food coloring that happens to be cheaper than natural alternatives? Just... no.
Untrue, you can buy burnt bread at most grocery stores. Go to the bakery, look at the ends. Many will have burnt tips.
Also: I've never bought this, but I just found this premade product, which is sold in my grocery store and is known to the state of California to cause cancer.
> The reality is, very little of the actual natural food in our food chain is directly linked to cancer.
Natural things aren't inherently safer. Are alcohol and red meat both considered natural? Alcohol is a group 1 carcinogen (same as tobacco and asbestos) and red meat is group 2A (probably linked to cancer). A cursory search shows some studies linking fish consumption to cancer, though I have no idea how accurate those studies are.
Fun fact - some things that cause cancer can help prevent cancer. Several studies have concluded that marinading meat in beer significantly reduces the carcinogenic compounds developed by frying or grilling meat.
We have been exposed to, and made adjustments for, things in our environments.
Novel chemicals have novel effects.
There are plenty of dangerous natural things, and there are safe artificial things (I suppose).
But there is a clear basis for eating food that your great grandparents would recognise.
There is also a slowly mounting volume of evidence that there is something wrong with ultra processed foods, hard to say what, but it is becoming clear they are bad for us.
So natural things are inherently safer, all else equal
Ultra processed foods are usually unhealthy because of the relative high amount of additives that are 'needed' to proloung their conservation. Those additives can be natural, like sugar and salt, but still are unhealthy in large quantities. Also heating, which can be seen as natural, can proloung conservation, but often have the side effect of chemical reactions into unhealthy molecules.
The better alternative is to eat non processed food, but only early after reaping. Otherwise the natural (!) chemical reactions like oxidation makes them unhealthy.
The plants in my garden are all natural. I don't use chemicals. Still half of them contain poison like blueacid.
Just to say, natural doesn't mean healthy. Processed doesn't mean unhealthy.
> But there is a clear basis for eating food that your great grandparents would recognise.
I’m quite confident every health metric is better for the Red-3-eating cohort than the great grandparent cohort. Being a great grandparent is associated with cancer, dementia, and near-unity death rate.
I’ll ignore for a second you completely avoided the point to move the goal posts.
Alcohol isn’t a natural food, it’s a result of food rotting. Much like rotten meat, you can naturally assume negative side effects
Red meat has positive benefits from its consumption, as does fish.
What is the benefit of red5? If aren’t going to address that, I’ll assume you aren’t interested in anything but whataboutism and aren’t actually engaging in a good faith discussion.
> I’ll ignore for a second you completely avoided the point to move the goal posts.
Which goal posts did I move? Directly addressing a foundational claim isn't moving goal posts. You said that very few natural foods are directly linked to cancer. That's demonstrably false, as red meat almost certainly is. To your next point:
> Alcohol isn’t a natural food, it’s a result of food rotting.
I genuinely have no idea what you mean by natural then. At what point does something become unnatural? Alcohol certainly occurs in nature quite a bit, and I don't know that I'd call all the instances "rotting". Leavening bread with yeast produces noticeable amounts of alcohol. Orange juice famously contains a surprisingly high level of alcohol.
> Red meat has positive benefits from its consumption, as does fish.
Of course they do and that's why I never claimed they didn't. I would assume all foods have health benefits (beyond the obvious one of course). However, you claimed that most natural foods don't have links to cancer in particular.
> What is the benefit of red5?
I only just realized you said "red 5" earlier. I assume you're referring to red 3 (erythrosine), though I don't think the specific dye matters here.
> If aren’t going to address that, I’ll assume you aren’t interested in anything but whataboutism and aren’t actually engaging in a good faith discussion.
I'm not an expert on the dye in question and know little about it so I purposely didn't comment on it. I don't think I need to do so in order to address your central claim, which seems to be--and correct me if I'm wrong--that to lower our cancer risk we shouldn't add things to our food chain which aren't naturally in our food chain. That claim relies on 1) being able to distinguish what is natural to our food chain, and 2) for natural things being less likely to cause cancer than unnatural things. I believe 2 is flawed for the reasons I already gave. 1 is a famously thorny subject. Even pre-history human diets were varied enough for adaptations for different regions to evolve.
Anyway, I'm an idiot on the subject of dyes but if you want my argument: adding regulations isn't a zero-cost thing. We shouldn't add them without solid justification. I don't have enough knowledge about this subject to know whether or not such justification exists for the red dye in question here. However, your proposed alternative doesn't sound well-defined enough to be argued without you being clearer about what you mean.
Health outcomes are noisy, especially if taken over a long time. Peer reviewed studies are often flawed in various ways and most scientific studies lack the statistical power to be inconclusive.
The fear based approach to human diets can not work. We have to accept risks in our lives if we want to eat at all.
Natural food is not safe. Many natural foods that people eat, specifically plants, contain natural toxins and carcinogens that would probably not pass your threshold for "safe".[1]
I don't know about "peer-reviewed gold-standard studies," but what you've described is basically how the EU does it – what goes in food must be proven safe.
It's the opposite of the US approach, which is to ban (only) proven-harmful ingredients.
I don't expect US food-safety laws to become more strict in the next four years, but who knows, maybe the dead-worm guy will surprise us.
and that's also completely and totally irrelevant to the problem at hand.
Proofs don't apply in biology. Nothing in biology is a truly logical system that can be proved or disproved. That's true for chemistry and physics too- the only system where anything can be proved is math.
In science, instead we gather evidence and evaluate it, and often come to the conclusion that it is so unlikely something is dangerous (given the data) that we presume it's safe. People use the term "scientific proof", but I'm not aware of any in biology that would truly be classified as proof.
It is logically and practically impossible to prove things to be untrue. We can only prove things that are true.
The thing we could prove is “no detectable increase versus control, in our test data”. There is no way to prove “x does not cause cancer” any more than there is a way to prove “x does not cause meteors” or “x does not cause spontaneous human resurrections” or “x does not cause humans to turn into unicorns”.
There is no distinction in logic between a positive statement and a negative statement. Every proof of a proposition P is also a proof of !Q where Q = !P.
Proof by contradiction is just that, assume P -> get contradiction, therefore proof that !P.
Practically impossible, not logically impossible. "For all" proofs do exist in mathematics, but obviously it's very unlikely that you could do such a proof for physical reality.
How does “no detectable increase versus control, in our test data” not prove there is no connection (errors in the study aside). And why does that not prove anything, but "yes detectable increase versus control, in our test data” does?
Because, sure there can be errors either way. But a study produces new knowledge, not just knowledge or "just as much a mystery"
It is certainly possible to show that there is no positive correlation with a certain statistical significance. Pretending we're talking about such high standards as "no human future or presently alive could ever be harmed by any quantity of x" completely misses the point and borders on bad faith.
Let's set workable standards for when something can be called safe and enforce them.
No, you assign a risk score as well as a cost score to all the industrial inputs that you can use. In this case, there are readily available red food dyes (eg cochineal from industrially farmed insects) that have much lower risk scores (as they are from plant and animal sources) and not significantly different cost scores.
You also need to ask, what is the cost of not having this substance? In this case, the cost would be - you have food that isn't red. Is that a substantial problem for society?
To treat these as irrelevant and boil it down to "prove it is harmful or shut up" is needlessly reductive.
> that have much lower risk scores (as they are from plant and animal sources)
This is a fallacy. If anything, there's more reason to expect that a substance evolved to serve a biological function (that happens to be red) would have biological effects in humans than a substance developed specifically to be red and be biologically inert.
So let's ban all artificial food dyes. Natural ones work fine. Artificial dyes lead to a race of food manufacturers adding more dye to make their junk food products more appealing.
"Presentation of food" is not "nothing useful". People who see basically eat with eyes. Like plate/food ratio can make you overeat. Or some food can be totally fine, but if it is just made to look bad for example rotten/expired it can be vomit inducing. Just like if someone says you just ate something bad, if you think what you eat is harmful the body will react
If there is no food coloring at all would we eat better? I bet yes. But we can't get there now. It will not pass any vote
No you would only have to ban things with no nutritional benefit. The comment you replied to specified the case in question: it only lends the food a color.
I'm not really pro-bureaucrat, but perhaps the standard for food should be slightly different. Just maybe, (novel) food (additives/preservatives/ingredients) should first be proven safe, rather than waiting until they're proven unsafe to prohibit them. It's not as if this was a substance humans regularly ingested for centuries and people are only now wigging out... look at the wikipedia entry for this. The only halogen that's not part of this thing is apparently bromine, the IUPAC name for the chemical's about as long as my comment here.
I'm a big proponent of food safety regulation, but we have to acknowledge that there's no way to prove something is safe against all possible harms it might do. There will always be a risk in food. The question is how much risk will we tolerate?
Well, I guess you should start by banning all fruits and vegetables, because there's evidence that they contain toxins and carcinogens, and we're not sure if they're "safe"[1].
That is not how precautions work. If unsure, you ban the mostly unnecessary things.
"Hmm, there is an unknown risk with it, do I really need this unhealthy candy" no
"Do i really need this vegetable" yes
For an analogy, if your neighborhood is unsafe, you don't stop going to school altogether, you probably just won't go out for a night stroll.
This kind of absolute logical statement is very stupid.
Also, consider that when faced with unsure studies, the fact that fruits and vegetables are part of healthy human diet for centuries longer than a dye has been, is a major factor.
> That is not how precautions work. If unsure, you ban the mostly unnecessary things.
Yes - which includes vegetables. Humans can generally survive indefinitely on an all-meat diet.
> "Do i really need this vegetable" yes
No.
So, your general statement is correct, but you missed the basic fact that vegetables also fall into the category of "mostly unnecessary" things - so, my point stands.
You're just being obtuse now. Surely you understand the dietary difference between a vegetable and a dye that exists purely for aesthetic purposes? If not, there is no point continuing this.
It's not extraordinary to state that every single thing we eat[0] can have a study designed around it to show that it might cause cancer -- that is how studies and chemicals (things we eat) work.
[0]Except water, maybe. I'd bet if you shoved enough water into a rat at minimum you could observe an increase in tumor growth rate though.
It's a strawman argument often brought up to argue against banning potentially cancer causing foods.
It's also not true, since many foods - most vegetables, for example, or many types of fiber - do the complete opposite, and reduce your risk of cancer.
> The correct (and scientifically valid) thing to do is to only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done.
How about only put things in food that are contributing to the actual food? It's not just nutritional value, it's absolutely taste and texture as well. But visuals? Surely you can agree the balance of "is it worth it" is different for the color of a fruity loop than for nutritional value and taste.
You're correct that the "acceptable" line needs to be somewhere because risk isn't absolute, but that line can be in different places for different purposes. (And you can't just write off all cancer concerns because some of them probably aren't legitimate.)
I'm not sure why you're getting downvotes for this because it seems to me a highly valid stance. Why do we allow mostly unchecked, highly processed junk food in our society, only banning items that have a high level of risk of being poisonous, if at all? Especially since the main target of a lot of it is children.
Shouldn't we take the opposite approach? Make it very hard to use highly processed unnatural products, to the point where it's cheaper and easier for companies to fall back on less processed "clean label" ingredients.
I work in (well, adjacent to) the F&B sector and I can tell you that every large company knows exactly what clean food means, why it's healthier, and where to source the ingredients, and that they have equivalent food products using these either already on shelves, or waiting to be produced if there's a shift in consumer desires.
The reason that they don't already use them - the reason you mostly only see advertising for processed foods - is because the more highly processed a food is, the higher the profit margins for companies. I've seen it stated as a rule that every level of processing gives a 2x profit margin. So if you can process an item 3 times, you'll 6x your profit margins (obviously a rule of thumb rather than law).
Alcohol causes cancer, should we reenact prohibition? Water is poisonous in large enough doses. Should we ban water?
Nothing in this world is truly free of all risk. We have to make judgement calls with every single substance. Yes, coloring food is a legitimate use with real benefits that we need to weigh against the risks. And we also need to consider the very real costs of enforcement and burden of compliance. Bans are an extreme option that does not come without costs for the government and society.
Obviously the problem is that Red no3 is so prevalent and completely unregulated. Alcohol is sold separately and ID is needed to purchase and isn't added to children's food. If the dye was only sold separately in bottles this debate wouldn't be happening.
The water thing is even more unserious so I'll ignore it.
Everyone knows alcohol is a toxin. It is regulated. You have to be of certain age to buy it. It isn't normally in things you consume daily as a secondary ingredient in doses that would be harmful. You can taste it if it is. If you cannot taste it, you can recognize the effects from drinking it.
The dose makes the poison with any substance, that is a base tenant of toxicology. Not many people are unintentionally poisoning themselves with water.
Food and drug regulations save lives. If you want to argue against them, please at least do so in a manner that doesn't rely on absurdist examples.
I am not sure you understood my comment. I wasn't calling anyone absurd, and I was using the fact that it is regulated to reinforce the idea that it is a known toxin.
We (humans) don't subsist on some Matrix-like slop that provides all of our nutrients for no pleasure. Eating is a weird combination of necessity and pleasure activity. You could ask: if there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing taste, why risk it? You'd ban most spices with this line of reasoning.
At the end of the day, the safest thing (in terms of avoiding cancer) is probably to plant some potatoes in your backyard and eat them unspiced and unbuttered for the rest of your life. Most of us prefer food that is a bit more appealing than that, however. Appealing in all aspects - taste, texture, and appearance.
Other than bakery items, what foods do you regularly eat that depend on having a specific color? I don't see how that's anything other than a marketing tool to make them stand out on store shelves. When you order something in a restaurant, you typically don't even know what their version will look like until it gets to your table. I've never, not once, added dyes to home cooking outside of cake icings and things like that.
There've been ridiculous attempts to get rid of perfectly innocent flavor enhancers before, like the fight against MSG. Take out MSG, and food tastes less good. But take out a borderline red dye, and what's the worst that happens? Factories have to sell soda that's slightly less pretty in the bottle?
> what foods do you regularly eat that depend on having a specific color?
Probably all of them. We are super sensitive to colors.
Red meat and fish like tuna and salmon have carbon monoxide and sodium nitrate treatment just to keep them red because that's how people think they can judge quality.
> Consumers will pay up to $1 per pound more for darker colored salmon compared to salmon with lighter hues, according to research by DSM, a company that supplies pigmenting compounds to the salmon feed industry.
Wild salmon eat krill and other smaller organisms, many of which provide the components to turn the salmon meat a shade of pink.
Farmed salmon don't get the same components in their feed, so their meat isn't the same colour. So the farmers add some of those components into the salmon feed, et voila - pink salmon meat.
Very off-topic but I can't wait to read in the news about some kids school report about Shakespeare being written by some LLM which has training data that includes this quote ;)
They rot on the shelves ... when competitors can make their alternatives more flamboyant to stand out. Not if everyone stops needlessly coloring those foods.
I mean … the pickled ginger served by my local Japanese sushi place is … well, the color of ginger (same shade as like a ginger beer) and it tastes fine to me?
Nope, eating nothing but potatoes for the rest of your life is a fantastic way to ensure that you end up with severe macro/micronutrient deficiencies, which will be a very effective way of generating disease, including cancer.
> 1. A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect, as in I could sleep for a year or This book weighs a ton.
> 2. A figure of speech in which the expression is an evident exaggeration of the meaning intended to be conveyed, or by which things are represented as much greater or less, better or worse, than they really are; a statement exaggerated fancifully, through excitement, or for effect.
> 3. Extreme exaggeration or overstatement; especially as a literary or rhetorical device.
From DuckDuckGo, quoting Wordnik, quoting The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
For fun, you could grow your own seasoning (besides herbs, easy too) for those potatoes. I recently learned about the plant Salicornia - you can dehydrate them and grind them to make a green salt. I'm going to try to grow some this year.
>We (humans) don't subsist on some Matrix-like slop that provides all of our nutrients for no pleasure. Eating is a weird combination of necessity and pleasure activity. You could ask: if there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing taste, why risk it? You'd ban most spices with this line of reasoning.
I mean, we absolutely do that already. There's plenty of folks on a low sodium diet because while the salt tastes great, it's bad for them.
In this case we aren't talking about eliminating the color red entirely, we're arguing about a slightly different color. You can get red from a strawberry, raspberry, cherry skin, etc. which will work just as well. It just won't be the neon-red that red-5 produces.
Yup, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of dyes one could use to get red that are completely harmless. Although they may be more expensive, I have no clue.
I don't think anyone really cares or thinks there's some benefit. The problem is (I think) that this leads to some people believing that the dye causes cancer, when there's been no direct link in humans.
The studies that show cancer in rats involve the equivalent of you eating like a pound of the substance a day or more when the dosage you’re exposed to is in milligrams for food.
Plenty of things you eat would kill you if you ate thousands of times as much per day. Most spices. 100 cups of coffee will likely kill you.
But red dye has little to no value to consumers and there are equally viable alternatives. No one is going to start bootlegging red dye 3 if it is banned. Alcohol has huge value and is basically impossible to ban.
If you are asking what would putting B12 (or B1) in alcohol do: prevent serious irreversible deficiencies that are not only horrible for the person themselves, but people as a whole, one way or another.
Well, we did TRY banning alcohol, but it didn't go that well. We do at least generally attempt to prevent children from consuming alcohol, though.
Should we ban alcohol? I think people should stop drinking it, but in general I don't think the sale of things that may be harmful in some ways should be entirely prohibited, it would just be good if we minimized the amount of potentially harmful ingredients in our general food supply. e.g. if someone wanted to buy/sell Red Dye No. 3 on its own I don't think that would be a big concern.
Yeah, B12 AND B1 in alchohol alike. There are lots of people around age 50 who get admitted to social home and have irreversible B1 deficiency, labeled as "alcohol-induced B1 deficiency".
Follow-on serious question: who gets to decide what risk is too much and what reward isn't enough for me and my body? Why should that be anyone other than me?
Because that's what we tried for a hundred years and its how we ended up with innumerable wildly dangerous products on the market. The amount of research to vet all the products in your daily life would be astronomical and that's even assuming the companies making them are honest about the ingredients. Here's the context of why the FDA was founded:
> By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products that had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, mascara that could cause blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law did not get through the Congress of the United States for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.
But this is to do with food I eat. I don't feed it to other people.
Here's a better question, then: what health and safety decisions do I get to make on your behalf. What can I dictate to you that you can't do, or have to do? Can I mandate that you have to run 5 miles every day? It will be good for you to do, and it will impact others by increasing your productivity and lowering the cost of your healthcare on society. Is it reasonable that I should be able to use the threat of violence to induce you to exercise? Because that's all that regulation is: it's an outline of behaviors for which the threat of violence is a legitimate response.
Would you be upset if you ate something every day and didn't understand the risks fully and then developed a disease because of it? What if no one understood the risks aside from the entity that sold it to you? Would you be upset if someone you cared about deeply, say a child, made a mistake of never understanding there was a risk to consuming something, say, baby food, and then developed a life ending disease because of it? Would you feel responsible if you facilitated giving that person you cared about the food you chose to buy and there by aided in ending their life prematurely?
Any of these scenarios should make it obvious there has to be some sort of regulation around these things, as no one individual is an encyclopedia of toxic substances, and we exist in a bazaar of choices.
There could be a compromise, much like there is with alcohol and tobacco, that if you absolutely wanted to buy something toxic, you could do so. However, that wouldn't really necessitate that you couldn't use it to harm someone else.
I suppose it boils down to freedom of expression. Analog is a type of red plastic does nothing to humans, but can cause cancer if rats eat it. Do we ban it? What if we're actually trying to kill rats in our area?
Yes, of course. Humans do not directly eat plastic. At least nobody I know chews on plastic plates or cups.
But that does not mean that humans don't eat any plastic. Tiny pieces of plastic gets transferred to the food by contact with plastic containers. Some processes like microwave ovens, radically increase the amount transferred as well. Previously it was thought that these microplastics would just be eliminated from the body through typical waste functions, but evidence is increasingly mounting that The microplastics actually stay in the body long term and destroy cells they come in contact with. Given we have found nontrivial levels of microplastics in all of our vital organs (including testicals!), that's a scary proposition.
A crude analogy might be germs. Humans don't eat germs directly either, but by nature of their size and invisibility to us, we end up consuming plenty of them.
Don't forget about drinking it. Plastic water bottles are insanely profitable. And nobody really knows how many people daily a hot coffee that came from a Keurig pod and went into a styrofoam cup.
Just because an argument is wrong (and in this case gp is very wrong), does not mean it is in bad faith. Arguing in bad faith requires intent. I see no evidence of intent in gp's message. Ironically, if it didn't then one could say that dismissing arguments as bad faith (without evidence) of such is itself a form of bad faith, meaning your dismissal would be in bad faith. However, I see no evidence that you intended to argue in bad faith.
It's only in bad faith if the poster knows the statement to be false. You can't prove that they do, therefore it's pretty rude (to say the least) to accuse them of bad faith. It's also not remotely "easily observable" that humans constantly consume microplastic.
The FDA does believe there's strong evidence for its carcinogenicity. Literally the very first paragraph points that out and links to the 2012 publication
It's been banned from cosmetics since the 1990s and its restricted in food in European Union, China, and the United Kingdom and limited in Australia, and New Zealand. California was also banning it starting in 2027. The FDA is behind on this
> They are banning it now so that the incoming administration can't claim credit for banning it in a few months.
The incoming administration won't be banning things from our food. It will be removing regulations and allowing corporations to put whatever they want into their products no matter what the harms are. I wouldn't be surprised if the incoming administration actually reverses the Red Dye No. 3 ban outright or just guts/weakens the FDA to the point where they can't do anything about it.
We're talking about an administration that previously pulled USDA inspectors out of slaughterhouses and allowed the corporations to police themselves. It killed a rule that forced poultry processors to dispose of chickens with lesions potentially caused by a cancer-causing virus and allowed them to just cut off the tumors (assuming they catch them, they also allowed chicken and pork processors to speed up their production lines, reducing the time workers have to spot problems). It reversed bans on harmful pesticides. It cut back regulations on foods that claim to be "organic". It waived nutrition/calorie label requirements for restaurants, and it allowed food companies to make substitutions and omissions in their products without updating ingredient labels.
I expect we'll be hearing about a lot of listeria salmonella and E. Coli illnesses/deaths in the near future, and much later on we'll be here commenting on articles talking about how deregulation of the food industry and regulatory capture by the food industry have resulted in a lot of preventable deaths from cancers and illnesses.
>The incoming administration won't be banning things from our food. It will be removing regulations and allowing corporations to put whatever they want into their products no matter what the harms are.
But RFK was also complaining about all the additives added to foods in the US, and wanted to get rid of everything from ultra processed foods to seed oils?
It will be interesting to see the conflict between the industry lobbyists stuffing trump's pockets with cash and RFK Jr. who is extremely opinionated. My guess is that either RFK Jr. folds and makes compromises whenever trump asks him to in order to stay in his position or he gets thrown out on his ass for standing up for what he believes. I really don't know how firmly RFK Jr will hold to his convictions, but I do know that Trump has no problems getting rid of anyone who refuses to be blindly loyal to him.
Why does he appoint any of the disastrously unqualified people that he does? He seems to enjoy creating chaos. Maybe he even hopes to put the food industry in a position where they have to beg him to rein in RFK Jr's plans.
From AP, seems like this has been in the works for over 2 years:
> Food and Drug Administration officials granted a 2022 petition filed by two dozen food safety and health advocates, who urged the agency to revoke authorization for the substance that gives some candies, snack cakes and maraschino cherries a bright red hue.
Historically I would agree, but we are in a new world. RFK Jr is the face of increased FDA regulation and banning of potentially toxic materials, and he is coming under the Trump administration. For the vast majority of his life, he was a Democrat Fighting frequently Republican administrations purposes of environment and health, but he is now very much rejected by The Democratic party. The Republican party seems to be welcoming him fairly warmly, although it will be interesting to see how long that persists as soon as he has some disagreement with Trump or starts making a real impact.
Personally I really hope many Democrats can put The health of our people ahead of other things and work together to make meaningful changes, because something really needs to be done. Chronic health issues have exploded and it may already be too late for multiple generations who will suffer from chronic disease their entire life as a result of this. If those of us alive and aware of these problems now don't do something to correct this course, we will be guilty of criminal negligence to our descendants in my opinion.
Doesn’t that make perfect sense? First test in animals. If carcinogenic in animals then don’t move to humans. A lack of studies in human is hardly a basis for ruling it safe.
That was a sensible simplified version of the logic during my training for regulation in drugs and medical devices, at least.
EU law works a bit different. EU law bans everything that has not been shown to be safe (or grandfathered in) while US allows everything that has not been shown to be dangerous. Neither system is perfect.
For example, Chia seeds where illegal in EU before 2020 (but you could still buy them). Not because it was dangerous but because no company had paid money to fund studies to prove that Chia seeds are not dangerous.
Strictly speaking it isn't banned in the EU, it is banned in the EU _with the exception of processed cherries_. Quite why the cocktail cherry industry was considered so critical that it received a specific exception is unclear.
I don't know whether that's literally true, but I can certainly tell you that there is no point in banning stuff nobody in the EU is thinking of using anyway. US companies are way more "adventurous" with their additives, which makes regulation here even more important.
There are in fact several food dyes in the EU that are "banned" in the US.
Using the word "banned" though is misleading. Most things are not approved because no one has petitioned for approval, not because they were found harmful. This happens more in Europe than the US though because the US has GRAS.
And to clarify, since it appears to not be well known even in the US, that GRAS = Generally Recognized As Safe[0], which isn't necessarily all that safe given the "testing" required to meet that "standard."
Its not just that. Different ideas on how to regulate.
To add something to food in the EU, you need to prove FIRST it causes no harm. It follows the precautionary principle.
In the US, the FDA allows "similar compounds" rapid approval, allowing for the expansion of what's allowed without testing.
Here is the probably not too bad chatGPT summary
United States: Risk-Benefit Approach
General Approach:
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) operates under a risk-benefit analysis framework. This means additives can be approved if the benefits (e.g., preserving food, enhancing flavor) outweigh the potential risks when used as intended.
In some cases, manufacturers can self-certify an additive as "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS) without requiring FDA pre-approval. This system relies heavily on the manufacturer's responsibility and scientific consensus among qualified experts.
Approval Process:
Data Submission: Manufacturers submit safety data for new additives, but the level of evidence required can vary. For GRAS substances, companies may use existing studies or published research instead of conducting new, comprehensive tests.
Rapid Approvals: The GRAS system allows additives to be introduced more quickly, provided there is no immediate evidence of harm. This has led to criticism that some substances enter the market without sufficient independent oversight.
The differing approaches to food additive regulation in the EU and the US stem from distinct legal frameworks, principles, and processes for evaluating food safety. Here's a breakdown of how it works:
European Union: Precautionary Principle
General Approach:
The EU adheres to the Precautionary Principle, which means a substance must be proven safe before it is approved for use.
Manufacturers or entities seeking approval for a food additive must provide comprehensive scientific evidence to demonstrate that the additive is harmless to humans.
Approval Process:
Scientific Evaluation: The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) conducts a detailed risk assessment. Applicants must submit robust toxicological and safety data, including studies on metabolism, potential toxic effects, and exposure assessments.
Re-Evaluation: Even after approval, all additives are subject to periodic re-evaluation to ensure ongoing safety as new scientific evidence emerges.
Quinoline yellow (E104), Azorubine/Carmoisine (E122), Ponceau 4R (E124), Patent blue V (E131), Green S (E142), Brilliant Black BN (E151), Vegetable Carbon (E153), Amaranth (E123), Brown FK (E154), Brown HT (E155) and now Red Dye No 3 (E127)
Approved in US, but not in EU:
Orange B**, Citrus Red No. 2 and FD&C Green No. 3.
look at the health of average person in EU vs US particularly related to food related disorders.
Include obesity, diabetes. Then move onto the GMOs and Roundup and how GMOs enabled mass use of Roundup. Roundup is now being looked into as a potential source of the increase in autism, dementia and other neurorelated conditions.
"Glyphosate has been assessed 3 times in the EU. The first assessment resulted in initial approval of glyphosate in the EU in July 2002. The second assessment, which was carried out between 2012 and 2017, led to the first renewal of approval.
The most recent assessment was carried out between 2019 and 2023 by Member State Competent Authorities, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), and showed that there is currently no scientific or legal justification for a ban. This led to the renewal of approval of glyphosate in 2023.
Under the conditions of approval and by following good agricultural practices, glyphosate is considered not to pose any harmful effects on human health or unacceptable effects on the environment."
It means crops that can take Roundup and survive at high concentrations of glyphosate while natural crops have some limit of concentration. That means higher usage in the US.
It's the old "better safe than sorry" routine. Very popular with politicians and managers, who are incentivized to take action on extremely minor issues and hold them up as heroic accomplishments while avoiding all the work and mess involved with fixing _actual_ systemic and cultural problems.
How about the idea that it serves absolutely zero purpose, and could cause cancer?
Maybe that is reason enough to remove it from food? “Some people here” love Europe so much, they banned it for that reason. But, during this election, conservatives pushed for the same so now it’s strange how “some people here” are “pro food dyes”.
>>>How about the idea that it serves absolutely zero purpose, and could cause cancer?
I'm not going to bat for Red Dye specifically (I'd be perfectly happy for it to never be added to food), but I generally like a society that's default-allow more than default-deny. A lot of people will argue that certain things serve "zero purpose" because it's not something they personally care about. But presumably somebody wants their food to be red, or why would anyone be adding it?
RFK Jr is basically the polar opposite of a conservative, even though he hitched his wagon to Trump after Harris refused to return his calls. Seeing the Trump base adopt RFK's positions is...super weird. Trump is extremely pro Corporation and anti-regulation. RFK is anti-corporation and super pro regulation, and believes that fast food should be banned and the government should provide every American with three organic meals a day, which isn't really a Republican platform. And there's a good chance RFK Jr has served his purpose to the MAGA group and he'll start facing opposition that leads to his elimination from the administration.
Indeed, it's normal on HN to see endless attacks on California (which had already banned both red dye #3 and 40, among others, to the extent that they can as a state) for banning potential carcinogens, making this a rather hilarious turn of events.
And FWIW, the FDA started the process for this months ago, and months earlier received a petition (from a Democrat, if it matters) to ban the dye.
RFK Jr is MAGA where it counts: Anti-vaccine, vaccines cause autism, HPV vaccine doesn't work, Covid attacks whites/black but spares jews/chinese by design.
> Trump is extremely pro Corporation and anti-regulation
Trump is actually very, very anti-corporation. It's a very prominent part of his stump speeches and campaigning. He's accusing corporations of everything.
His fortune was made from real-estate speculation and the Trump corporation is basically run like a family business. If you were try to attach a label - he is pro-aristocracy. He believes wealth tied to land and inheritance is "legitimate", and wealth tried to trade and commerce as illegitimate.
Right. Michelle Obama pushed for a lot of things that RFK wants. Now that the Republicans suddenly want what the Democrats have always wanted of course they're going to pass those laws
I agree with you until you bring foodbabe into this. She’s notorious for hand-picking things that meet the MAHA agenda. For example, the oats argument, yes there is a ton of crap in the ultra processed Quaker oats, but that’s an old recipe. Here’s what they sell at target:
There’s not always a one-to-one comparison, and I agree shady companies in the US have free rein over what crap they add to our foods, but this has already been debunked.
They changed the recipe after it received significant attention. Before then the company was happy to use food coloring on Apples to pretend it had strawberries while actually providing strawberries in another country.
The thing is you can’t bring attention to every single product, which is the point of regulations around deceptive packaging.
I don’t know for sure but it looks like in the image the oh so simple is a different product line. Seemingly similar to all of Lays chips which come in normal and the healthier line.
The McDonald's fries are the exact same ingredients, the FDA just requires more granular specifications which look "scary". Those are the bracketed "sub"-ingredients you see versus just "Vegetable Oil" for the other side.
As to the additional anti-caking ingredient, I can't tell you. No idea if it's omitted from the UK side due to regulatory reasons or it's actually included but has no requirement to be listed, since it's included in a plethora of British foods in the same places that it's used in the US (things like powdered/confectioner's sugar):
Either way, it's not particularly nefarious (despite her scary red highlight added to it).
As an aside, saying this as someone who's tried McDonald's in probably 60+ countries. It's all the same thing (except a few countries in Asia; Korea and Japan notably), especially like for like (Double Cheeseburger for Double Cheeseburger). I have no idea where this "European McDonald's is healthier/better" idea sprang up, outside of European superiority complexes (probably due to the need to self-justify how insanely busy McDonald's are in Europe). Especially in a country who's most famous takeaway item is overgreased fried chicken/fish and fries/chips tossed together in a bag, then covered and shaken in even more salt and condiments; possibly with a handful of cheese tossed on for good measure.
The "scary red" polydimethylsiloxane is in basically everything, and it's inert, non-toxic and non-flammable. It's permitted in the EU as E900. It's an anti-foaming agent used in trace quantities to prevent oil from splattering on the employees.
There were no negative effects on rats at over 2g/kg. [1]
Also: canola oil is a rapeseed oil. You can imagine why a lot of people are more comfortable calling it "canola" than "rapeseed" (and hence why it's written that way on US packaging).
Canola was also originally a trademark (name comes from "Canada oil low acid") - it's made from rapeseed that was specifically bred for low erucic acid. It definitely made it easier to market.
Yeah, take the Doritos as an example: the UK bag lists "Cheese Powder", the US bag lists "Cheddar Cheese" with sub-ingredients in parentheses (plus Whey and Skim Milk).
What is in the UK Doritos' "Cool Original Flavour" (read: Ranch) ingredient? Maybe something like Tomato Powder, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Buttermilk, Natural and Artificial Flavors?
Whoa, hold on. RFK may be right about this one thing in the same way a broken clock happens to occasionally be right, but let's not rush to take away his nutcase title. He has some truly messed up opinions about a variety of topics.
I'm being flip, but it's not a lie. He doesn't know where the brainworm came from, and it was revealed later that he has been eating roadkill meat his whole life.
Exotic parasites is a known risk when eating roadkill. It's not a difficult connection to make.
Speaking to reporters in a hallway after court ended Wednesday, Kennedy was asked whether he picked up other roadkill.
“I’ve been picking up roadkill my whole life. I have a freezer full of it,” he said, eliciting laughter.
Kennedy campaign spokesperson Stefanie Spear later said by text that he wasn’t joking. She said that’s how Kennedy — a falconer who trains ravens — feeds his birds. She added that he no longer has the 21 cubic foot (0.59 cubic meter) refrigerator, which had been in New York’s Westchester County suburbs.
How's that a lie? It came from his own mouth! It's his PR person who walked it back and cooked up an explanation.
RFK Jr is not a child. He's in full control of the narrative he wants to portray about himself. If he wants to go say kooky things to reporters, he can't be upset if people think he is a kook. And he clearly seems to personally enjoy the reputation of being a kook, based on willingly he throws out jokes about it.
I have no problem with him being a kook! It's just ironic how many criticisms and conspiracy theories he throws out there about others and yet how seriously people want to take him.
He explained it was for his birds. If you don't believe the words from his mouth, now you're in conspiracy theory territory and believing what you want to believe instead of what is documented. You're free to do that, but understand that it's a lie.
Where did he say he actually eats the roadkill? One source?
Eating roadkill is not that uncommon in the US. So it's not a crazy connection to make. He admitted to having a walk-in size freezer of the stuff and that he's a redneck.
> He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)
Now this is clearly a joke. But the important thing is, he clearly enjoys trolling reporters. If you are not happy with the way RFK Jr. is treated in the media, take it up with RFK Jr.
> If you are not happy with the way RFK Jr. is treated in the media,
To be fair, he didn't say that. He cited "the media" as a source. He was talking about you, who's said a few things now that the media didn't say with the justification of "not a crazy connection to make."
I understand where you're coming from, but I'd be more accurate to say e.g. "If you are not happy with RFK Jr.'s image," as opposed to trying to make that person out as an anti-media crusader.
He's not even really a food safety crusader, he's just a vocal proponent of the "whole foods movement". Other than that, he's a former heroin addict Kennedy dynasty failson.
>truly messed up opinions about a variety of topics.
I would actually really like to hear what the messed up opinions are, when I've watched interviews with him they've seemed pretty reasonable. He cites sources for basically all the claims he makes.
I hesitate to dive into this because I'm really not interested in arguing the nuances of RFK with people on the internet (not you, others). RFK Jr. has a long history of controversial statements regarding COVID, COVID vaccines and being anti-vaccine, or vaccine-skeptical as his supporters like to frame him.
For me, one of his most controversial statements in recent memory had to be during a press conference he gave in 2023 when he stated that COVID might have been "ethnically targeted" to "attack Caucasians and Black people" and that "the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."
He tried to defend the statement by citing scientific studies, which is a habit of his that his supporters admire about him. However, actual experts in the field pointed out that his interpretation of the studies was flawed and there was no credible evidence to support the idea that COVID was engineered or had evolved to target or spare certain groups.
Yeah, this shit is why I was hesitant to dive into the topic. You've made several leaps of logic here that I don't feel like debunking or discussing further, and I'll note that you've conveniently forgotten to defend the most controversial part of his statement – that the engineered virus supposedly curves its lethality away from Ashkenazi Jews as well, which would imply that that group also had something to do with its manufacture.
It’s entirely possible that it’s a coincidence, groups of people share genes in common. It’s actually rather unlikely that a gene, especially one that seems to confer some resistance to the effects of a virus, would exist for only one group of people in the entire world.
I would love to hear about my leaps in logic honestly.
Nobody is saying that it was definitely ethnically targeted, but it IS plausible. Just because the ethnicity involved makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean that it’s not possible.
Your comment suggests it’s an outrageous notion, but if that’s true then just give a decent argument why it’s actually outrageous.
Chinese leadership have specifically mentioned ethnically targeted bio weapons:
>In 2017, a textbook published by the People's Liberation Army National Defence University called the Science of Military Strategy debuted the potential for biological warfare to include "specific ethnic genetic attacks."[10][11] The same year, former People's Liberation Army general Zhang Shibo authored a book that concluded that "modern biotechnology development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability," including "specific ethnic genetic attacks" (特定种族基因攻击).[10] In 2020, a professor at the same PLA university spoke of the "huge war effectiveness" of a "targeted attack that destroys a race, or a specific group of people."
RFK Jr is not a good person, is not a smart person, and we should not attempt to whitewash or legitimize him. He has a complex early life, but his actions today are his own choices.
Based on the provided transcript, the accusations and criticisms against RFK Jr. focus primarily on:
1. Allegations of Sexual Assault:
• Multiple allegations have been reported, including by Vanity Fair. His response to these allegations has been a mixture of acknowledgment and apologizing directly to at least one accuser.
2. Acknowledgment of Past Wrongdoings:
• RFK Jr. himself has admitted to having a problematic past, described as “skeletons in the closet,” though these have not been exhaustively detailed in the transcript.
3. Entitlement and Privilege:
• Growing up as part of the Kennedy dynasty, RFK Jr. is characterized as having displayed behaviors shaped by immense privilege and a sense of entitlement, including unruly and eccentric conduct during his youth.
4. Controversial Political Views:
• While not explicitly detailed in this transcript, RFK Jr.’s political stances (e.g., vaccine skepticism and other fringe views) have been controversial and polarizing, drawing criticism from various quarters.
There is no mention in the transcript of more serious accusations, such as criminal activity beyond the sexual assault allegations, nor evidence of deeper scandals. However, the discussion also suggests that there may be more allegations or controversies not covered explicitly in the transcript.
I fail to see how your link supports your questioning or your statement, could you explain it? It looks like it's just the opinion of the owner of the Los Angeles Times, a person that some might feel is heavily biased.
> LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is a doctor and transplant surgeon and invented drugs to fight pancreatic and other forms of cancer. He ACTUALLY talked to RFK Jr. and after listening to him talk and what he had to say instead of relying on mainstream media propaganda, he changed his opinion on him.
RFK Jr has frequently and publicly claimed that the side effects and dangers of most all vaccines are worse than the diseases they prevent. There is no legitimate data that even suggests that is true. You can get into the minutia of potential dangers and health effects of vaccines all you want. But when you look at the actual outcomes, like with COVID, the public is far, far better off having taken them and RFK's fear mongering endangers the public health.
They’re all talking rubbish. Trump said he will finish the war in UA within 24 hours. They are just talking stuff angry people swallow like pelicans.
You have elected a bunch of ego driven loonies. Just accept it and hopefully you still get to vote in four years time. What a great time for this planet.
Moderation matters. If you eat mostly whole, nutritious foods, it’s totally fine to eat processed food occasionally.
No food is inherently unhealthy or bad, so I don’t think there’s any issue with him eating McDonalds on a plane. Maybe he was in a hurry, or just wanted to be social and stopped there with someone else who wanted it.
What is unhealthy is when the majority of your food is not nutritious, which is currently the case for most Americans. So why not try to make common American foods more nutritious by default, as they are in most other wealthy countries?
It was awesome living in a European country for a couple of years as an American. You learn that ingredient lists at the grocery store really are shorter in ways you don’t expect. It’s easy to buy a fruit yogurt that is just yogurt and fruit, for example. Not “yogurt, sugar, artificial and natural flavors” as you’ll find in many popular foods in the US. It was noticeable with a lot of different food choices.
Also, whenever we would come back to visit the US, after living there for a year or so, we would always have mild digestion issues and stomach cramps for a week or so. This was common among many expats that we talked to. We visited over a dozen countries while we lived there, and the US was the only one that had that issue.
But when you say "whenever we would come back to visit the US ... we would always have mild digestion issues and stomach cramps for a week or so" this does imply that there's something wrong with American processed food, and this isn't an issue of moderation.
Despite not liking the man, I actually agree with RFK on the healthy eating and think it's good that he has raised awareness of it. Red dye has finally been banned, this is good! Heck, I'm very liberal, this kind of regulation is what the US should have been doing a long time ago and happy to see it happening.
My point about RFK was not that he eats processed food sometimes and therefore he's a hypocrite, it's that he's willing to compromise his values for access to power. But hopefully it's just that one time to get on Trumps good side and he actually makes some good regulation about poisonous foods! The market is good at a lot of things, but not at keeping things healthy, so I'm glad republicans are seeing the value of regulation over unwavering belief in the free market.
Let me be more explicit about my point. I believe RFK genuinely wants to promote healthy living, and I agree with that. But Trump requires loyalty to be part of his inner circle and forcing RFK to eat mcds is getting RFK to prove that loyalty. RFK obviously hated eating that burger. My point is, if he’s willing to compromise his values for access to power does he really prioritize his values or does he prioritize access to power?
No “gotcha”, I’m not a partisan. I don’t like Trump but there are a few things he’s done I like, but even with those I often don’t like HOW he did it. For example Greenland, I think that’s great for USs long term prospects (shipping routes), but to say military action is on the table is reckless. Not every criticism is a gotcha, and just because I disagree with 90% of what RFK believes doesn’t mean I don’t think his commitment to healthy eating is good. Maybe that you read a criticism as an absolute indictment of someone shows you have more purity tests than what you criticize.
I just don't see the rationale in framing it as a morality and value test in the first place that is worth reading into.
I have a diet I try to follow in general. I break it all the time and it's not a big deal at all. Sometimes I'll eat a cheeseburger with my coworkers. What does that say about my character? Should it say anything?
How much can one hate a burger? It's not like he is a Hindu or the burger contained his first born child.
I mean, he says "Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes onto that airplane is, like, just poison" on a podcast, and a couple of days later he's looking unhappy eating a mcds burger with trump in a very publicized photo.
Eating a cheeseburger is one thing, but he literally calls it poison.
Anyway, I hope he does succeed in pushing more regulation on what chemicals we have in food. I'm pro regulation for things like this - the market's always going to go to what's cheaper so regulation is needed to prevent companies poisoning consumers. I'm glad the republican party has come around to this point.
A broken clock is right once a day. RFK Jr. is not the nutcase we're told he is, he's a very slight different kind of nutcase that's just as bad because he mixes legitimate concerns with his absolutely insane point of view, and uses the same spurious arguments for both, muddying the water for everyone.
Are you against the FDA releasing all the data from the pharmaceutical companies so that others can conduct their own studies from full data? Right now every single head of the HHS, FDA and CDC want to protect pharma companies and let them hide all their data. RFK Jr. is the first candidate that isn't looking for a job in industry afterwards and wants to actually free the data for the sake of the American people. For that alone I think he should be head of HHS.
As far as I've seen the only debunking has been done on single vaccines like MMR, not on the full schedule of vaccines. And it's a lie to say that they have been thoroughly debunked. Studies have shown that some vaccines can cause allergic reactions. Autistic children have over a 3X rate of food allergies or neurotypical children. Doesn't that warrant studying that maybe adjuvants are causing an immune response and the immune response causes autism?
My money is on the neurological development of autism involving some form of hyper-connectedness which also expresses itself in the gut in over-sensitivity, causing the allergies.
That, and perhaps the reason there are so many forms of autism is that the actual development of the brain is impacted so much by environment. If the children are given healthy, constructive environments to learn to interface with the world on their own terms, they'll have a better chance of benefiting others than if they're treated poorly and allowed to practice maladaptive patterns.
The covid vaccine nearly killed my father (which means covid itself probably would have) due to activating previously undiagnosed sarcoidosis, but subsequent vaccinations mediated by immunological awareness were safe and effective for him as with others.
Anyway, don't expect net positives out of RFK. He might be "independent" but you need many independent experts to reach a good understanding. Trump's administration isn't going to end corruption, it's just going to streamline it.
I respect your speculation and I think that by studying with the full data we can get closer to a real answer, rather than everyone throwing their hands up and saying "there's nothing we can do!"
If all we get from RFK Jr. is releasing of all the data that the FDA and CDC have, that is a win for society. Autism is a huge problem and no one is talking about it. The autistic kids from the 90s and 2000s are still being supported by their parents, but what's going to happen in another 20 years when their parents are dead? Will we have millions of autistic homeless people on the streets? It's going to be overwhelming and we need to fully study this. One in 34 kids in the US have autism, what are we going to do in 50-60 years?
So many people who opposed him and then take the time to understand what is actually saying, not what they have been told he is saying, come to realize he is completely sane. Bernie Sanders is on that list fwiw.
The proof here seems to be an interview with someone (owner of the LA Times) who talked with RFK for a few hours came away believing he knows more than doctors. Is that right?
Not knowing something isn't what makes them idiots. Spouting off about it as though they do is what ruins their credibility. At the very least it demonstrates that they're bad at vetting their sources.
I was talking about Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong not Dr. Ben Carson. Care to show any evidence that Soon-Shiong is an idiot?
Just because one doctor is stupid doesn't invalidate all doctors, does it? In that case, Dr. Ben Carson would be proof that Dr. Fauci is also an idiot.
Of course not, but it highlights the risk of Appeal to Authority: one's expertise in a specific field does not make them experts in others, even ones adjacent to their own. For a more local example, I have a lot of experience writing Python. Someone outside the field might mistakenly think my opinions on, say, Java, are equally informed. They're not.
Of course not. That would make him an expert on developing oncology drugs, not on the ethics of drug safety and especially not on communicable disease control.
If chemotherapy meds had the incredibly low adverse reaction rates of common vaccines with the same typically high effectiveness, I bet his general opinions on the subject would be different. No, of course we shouldn't require school children to get preventative chemotherapy because the risk-reward ratio would be awful. And of course we should vaccinate them against polio because there's trivial risk in the prevention compared to the life-altering effects of the illness.
He filed to get the FDA to revoke the polio vaccine. He’s rabidly anti-vax, routinely spewing lies that have been debunked repeatedly. He is absolutely a nut case that happens to have some points of view that many could agree with.
My wife's a doctor, and had patients begging her for leftover Vioxx samples after Merck pulled it from the market, preferring to take their chances with heart issues rather than living in agonizing pain that Vioxx was especially good at treating.
Just because a drug works well doesn't mean that it's moral to release a drug that knowingly kills tens of thousands of people a year and then hide that data.
I agree. In my opinion, hiding the risk was the sin, not releasing the drug. Many, many people with chronic pain conditions would gladly accept the risk.
It's kind of the same with any treatment: chemotherapy may make you incredibly sick before it saves you. Willow tree bark may fix your headache but cause you to bleed profusely. Homeopathy may make you die of whatever you were sick with before it cures your dehydration. Everything has its tradeoffs.
We need to the full information in order to make our own choices. Right now pharma companies hide a lot of the information, including from clinical trials from drugs. All the data should be released and not hidden so that people can make their own choices on what medications they take and if they want to risk taking it, that's fine because they have all the information and they can make their own risk/reward judgement.
Looks like you, me and RFK Jr. are perfectly aligned.
protip: do not drink fanta, do not eat mcdonalds fries, do eat oats (but just buy real oats and throw in raspberrys or whatever), do not eat chips. Doesn't matter whether you are in the US or UK :)
Food Babe is a terrible source with an agenda. If you actually look at the safety profile of the things involved the differences are minimal. The real risk comes from all the sugar and simple carbs in both.
- The fry ingredients are exactly the same, the US just requires more granular labelling. PDMS is used in oils in Europe too. Maybe in McDonalds oil maybe not, unclear. It's authorized for use in the EU as E900, and it is inert, non-toxic and non-flammable. It's added to stop the fryer oil from spraying on the employees.
- Both Fantas are bad.
- The oats are comparing two different products. 1/4 the label in the US is mandatory breakdowns not required in the UK. 1/4 of the label is the "creaming agent" (starch, whey protein, casein protein, some oil -- nothing a bodybuilder wouldn't consume) and 1/4 is the added vitamins and minerals not present on the UK label. The only meaningful difference appears to be using strawberry-flavored apple chunks. Does it make a difference? Probably none.
- The doritos in the UK list an ingredient that's just "Cool Original Flavour" lmao that FB somehow decides not to highlight. The US requires a breakdown of the components of said "flavor." And the use of annatto vs FD&C dyes which there's really very little conclusive evidence one way or the other. But fine, I guess we can stop using Azo dyes.
The real question is: does swapping Azo dyes for anatto make Doritos measurably healthier or is the problem that you are eating Doritos.
As an oatmeal connoisseur, I'd be remiss not to point out that the two oatmeal products being compared there are not the same. The American product is specifically "Strawberries and Cream," which looks like it was deliberately picked because it adds a few extra scary-looking ingredients from the creaming agent; whereas the UK product is just "Heaps of Fruit," sans cream.
The UK product contains freeze dried strawberries and raspberries. The USA market "strawberries and cream" contains no strawberry, instead it has freeze dried apple dyed red with added strawberry flavor.
I don't believe natural is inherently good nor artificial inherently bad but the USA product is objectively lower quality. IMHO it is cheaply made crap to fool people that do not read the ingredients.
I say if your product mentions strawberries and you get dyed apples instead the problem is not the person failing to read the ingredients list, something has gone wrong at the legislative level.
The American version is identical to the UK version until "natural flavor." The US version then adds some vitamins plus tricalcium phosphate, salt, and beet juice concentrate. The only "scary" ingredient is tricalcium phosphate, which appears to be an anti-caking agent.
It says "Tricalcium Phosphate is a source of phosphorus that also provides the essential mineral calcium." Which is actually what I suspected, it's another added vitamin that has the benefit of also being an anti caking agent.
Why does our version need an anti-caking agent when theirs doesn't? And why do we need to get calcium from checks notes oat meal (the non-cream version, mind you) when people in other countries can get it from things it's in naturally, like milk?
There may be ostensible reasons why some of the extras we get are theoretically useful, but I'd still wonder why we're the only ones who go to all the trouble (when we don't seem to come out ahead for it, health-wise).
For some reason, the quaker oats uk website doesn't list it though, perhaps they're new formulations.
I imagine it's used to keep the fine powders (powdered salt or milk powder depending on the product) from caking. If the previous version didn't have any salt, then it might not have needed it.
I find this particularly interesting because it is due to market conditions, not legislation, that many Canadian foods have switched to colors from natural ingredients.
These companies appear to believe that Canadians prefer fewer artificial ingredients, and that Americans don't seem to care. Very curious.
It is happening, albeit slowly, here in the USA as well. Trader Joe’s generally has no added artificial dyes, fruit by the foot now is naturally colored, Whole Foods of course, and Wegmans bakery products.
Its just that there still are so many products you don’t expect- marshmallows with blue dye to make them more “bright white”, candies/sprinkles, any children’s medicine in syrup form (although you can now get some in dye free form finally)
It's more of a commentary about how food in the US is overly colored for no other reason than it looks cool, sometimes at the detriment of the health of the consumer.
Neither color of Fruit Loops is natural. American food is colored to look cool, because cool sells better with Americans. Canadian food is colored to look dull, because dull sells better with Canadians.
It's just how cereal is made. Before fruit loops are loops, they are grain mash. That grain mash is mostly uniform in color and brown-ish. In order to have a bowl filled with loops where some of the loops are yellow and others are green and others are blue, they add different colors of dye. It's the same whether it's neon green or organic green - the dye is added at the end for appeal to the consumer.
I looked into it, and from what I can tell the only link to cancer they've found so far is in male rats exposed to high levels of it, but they haven't found evidence that it causes cancer in humans or other animals.
What's odd to me is that it's still fine to sell food like bacon, where the link to cancer in humans appears to be much, much stronger.
…or cigarettes, which are available for sale everywhere.
If unhealthy foods are to be banned, we must also ban cigarettes and alcohol. If we are to let people be bodybuilders, or body destroyers, then all of these things should be available for purchase.
Ultimately it is a special kind of arrogance to tell people what they are or are not allowed to do to the one thing they unambiguously own and control: their own body.
Keep in mind that the negative effects (beyond the coughing and diminished lung capacity) of cigarettes have only been publicly admitted to and explicitly taught only very recently in the history of tobacco.
The tobacco industry fought tooth and nail against any suggestion that tobacco products are linked to cancer and even advertised cigarettes as healthy.
I agree with you in principle. I would caution against taking for granted what we know today to be very clearly unhealthy and cancer-causing. It is often an up-hill decades long battle against incredibly wealthy interests to get to the truth.
Ok, well then, I’m sure no Americans are eating high levels of foods that contain dyes. So, surely there are long term 20 year plus studies on cumulative effects, right?
in the US, priority #1 is fiduciary duty to shareholders. if customers are buying, and we make it more expensive to make, then shareholders will be mad!
Azo dyes, in the quantities used in food, do not cause cancer. What causes diabetes and cancer is obesity which you're likely getting from consuming the food -- dyed naturally or artificially. The dye is ancillary. People need to eat less of the Doritos, the azo dyes aren't the problem.
The credibility of the food industry is so low that I think people would support bans on most additives on general principle. We look back at things like putting lead and radium in paint or using asbestos in insulation and say "they should have known better, how could they be so stupid". Well, good additives have a lengthy history of containing harmful additives and I think future generations will say the same about many of these currently in use. What's interesting is that from our current time we can see just how easily it happens, even with the amount of information available to average person.
I realized a long time ago that lack of information isn’t the problem. We’re basically living in a Brave New World now; most people are too distracted to realize they’re being poisoned and would only accept it if the very institutions doing it told them they were doing it. But IMO it’s more of an emotional thing - once you realize it it’s hard to go back to the comfy world of “actually the bureaucrats and shareholders are looking out for my well-being”.
Sometimes they just don't need to lie to us or hide some info, when it was proven and made public that cured meats cause different cancers nobody batted an eye.
> We look back at things like putting lead and radium in paint or using asbestos in insulation and say "they should have known better, how could they be so stupid"
The main thing is: they did know better. They lied to us. They spent a lot of time, money, and effort to lie to us.
And this has happened time and time again in many different industries. Just the other day there was a story on the HN front-page about the PFAS industry has been copying the tobacco playbook for in disinformation campaign.
Also on other topics. For example canned tuna with "Dolphin friendly" logos. Looks good, right? And then people look into it to see what it means, and turns out it has no value, is something the company simply invented themselves, and has done zero-effort to make anything more "dolphin friendly". The entire thing is a basically just a lie.
Many additives are probably entirely safe. Things like vitamin C and caramel are "an E number", and those are fine. But I sure don't trust things, and I don't have the resources to see what is and isn't safe myself, so best to just avoid most of it.
What gets tracked gets improved. I think we need to update the ingredient requirements for food (wtf is seasoning) but also update the fields on Nutritional Facts.
Having a drink like Oreo Coca-Cola read 0’s down the board is illustrative of my point. There’s lots of crap in our food but it’s been selected specifically for its ability to not be captured in the dozen or so categories deemed important back when legislation passed on food transparency.
Relevant news story from a few years ago in the UK, where a bakery was using US sprinkles on cakes, that aren't legal to use in the UK, due to Red #3 :
My goodness, for a website full of techincal individuals a lot of you are falling for the appeal to nature fallacy hard. Also, it looks like no one here knows how to defer to experts. I don't know much about food safety standards, chemical compositions, additives, etc. so I've talked with people who are experts instead. And from what I have gotten, most people are freaking out because they lack an understanding of what is really safe or not. People believe that since a certain scary sounding chemical was added that the food is now less safe when that's not the case.
Appeal to nature isn't a fallacy, it is a rhetorical device and can be a completely logical razor.
The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past. If we want a yellow food dye should we:
A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
Who the hell would take B? Unless we believe that our studies are infallible, all encompassing and perfectly established and executed the first will always be a better option. Time and time again we see that things previously thought safe are not but I would argue it is far far rarer to see that on the more naturally derived side of food.
>derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years
This one stands out to me because, as they say, “the dose makes the poison”. Taking some trace element from something “natural” and highly concentrating it is basically as novel as something new. Consuming a gram of something over a lifetime is different than consuming a gram of something every day.
Also, eating something for hundreds of thousands of years only means that most people will live several decades while eating it. It doesn’t mean people won’t be killed by it. It doesn’t mean people wont get cancer from it in 30-40 years. Killing 1% of the people that eat something would be a perfectly acceptable evolutionary loss, depending on the amount of nutrition and calories provided.
That’s why it is an appeal to nature fallacy. Because it says absolutely nothing about population level long term health effects.
> doesn’t mean people won’t be killed by it. It doesn’t mean people wont get cancer from it in 30-40 years. Killing 1% of the people that eat something would be a perfectly acceptable evolutionary loss
But it would be an evolutionary loss, unlike a synthetic compound that has been equally as well studied scientifically - this odds on would make the natural compound safer to consume… not sure why this is so complicated to understand
> The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past.
Okay, where in the evolutionary past did we eat Doritos colored with annatto?
> A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
A lot of things we have historically eaten are carcinogenic. Natural flavoring for root beer is flavored with sarsaparilla root. Fun fact, it contains safrole, a known carcinogen.
Carrots, bananas, parsley, black pepper, clove, anise contain alkenylbenzene compounds which cause cancer in rodents.
Furoanocoumarins in parsnips, celery root, grapefruit, etc, can cause skin burns and prevent many drugs from working (or make them work too fast).
Cassava, sorghum, stone fruits, bamboo shoots and almonds contain cyanogenic glycosides which turn into cyanide when eaten.
Undercooked beans contain lectins, and 4-5 kidney beans are enough to cause somachache, vomiting and diarrhea.
Nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants) contain solanine which is toxic.
Various fruits like pineapples have raphides which are sharp spikes made of oxalic acid. If you eat particularly aggressive ones they can even cause bleeding.
The pawpaw fruit that has been eaten for generations contains annonacin, a neurotoxin.
People have been eating (prepared) mushrooms like gyromitra that have gyromitrin (metabolized to monomethylhydrazine, rocket fuel, a neurotoxin) for generations too. It can actually cause ALS over time.
Castor beans contain ricin.
The difference is apparently God doesn't have to publish this information on an ingredients list.
> B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
"A couple studies" is wildly disingenuous. A quick search will tell you as much.
> The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past.
Our evolutionary past is full of death and disease from what we ate. Humans have been drinking alcohol for centuries and there is strong scientific consensus that it causes cancer. Just because it's what humans have been doing doesn't mean it is safe and we should continue it.
> A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
> B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
You say "derive it from petroleum" like they pump it directly from the well into your food. Petroleum is composed of hydrocarbons, it's very useful and is used in a lot of different applications. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it is dangerous.
If it's a fallacy then it's one I plan to keep falling for because it's useful.
No one inhales six apples in a sitting but I sure have eaten 200g of chocolate in an hour before.
It's useful to go for more "natural" foods because they aren't designed to make me eat as much of it as possible. Even if fruit loops were as healthy as an apple the apple still wins because the fruit loops are deliberately engineered to encourage you to eat more of them.
> It's useful to go for more "natural" foods because they aren't designed to make me eat as much of it as possible.
I'm not saying that fruits, vegetables, legumes, and other foods you get from nature aren't healthy, of course they are. The fallacy is to say that because it's natural it's inherently better then an artificial or synthetic counterpart. Instead of worrying about if the food dye in your fruit loops uses red bell peppers or is synthetically extracted from petroleum, how about we worry about people consuming too much ultra-processed, high calorie, and low nutrional foods. That will make a greater impact on the general populations health here in America. Banning additives and food dyes won't stop people from eating 2000 calories of fried oreos.
I think an important note is that regulatory agencies in other countries have cracked down on some of those scary-sounding chemicals, due to them being unnecessary for food with no real benefit for the person eating it, and possible evidence of negative affects.
I mentioned this in another comment, but as someone who has lived for multiple years in the US and Europe, it is a drastic difference in food quality between the two. Much easier to eat foods made of whole ingredients where I lived in Europe - even many prepackaged foods that we’d buy at the grocery store.
I came across this link yesterday[1] on a health-focused HN thread[2]. The study split a group of overweight people up into low-carb and low-fat diets, to see which produced better weight loss. The group that lost the most weight was actually neither - it was just whoever ended up eating less processed foods and more whole foods.
> other countries have cracked down on some of those scary-sounding chemicals, due to them being unnecessary for food with no real benefit for the person eating it, and possible evidence of negative affects
Just because another country bans something does not make that thing harmful. Politicians banning food products and additives with no real scientific evidence is not unusual. They bend to public will, they are politicians after all. Also, studies that show "possible evidence of negative affects" in mice ingested at higher dosages then a human would ever eat or drink does not show they are harmful in humans. Humans are not mice after all.
> as someone who has lived for multiple years in the US and Europe, it is a drastic difference in food quality between the two
This is purely subjective, I've been to Europe and the Middle East, both have great food. But food in America is no worse in quality. The main difference is when I visited those area's I mostly ate out, at nicer restaurants where food would of course feel/taste/look better then the average meal at home or from fast food. But when eating at friends homes, the food quality (vegetables, fruits, meats) was no different than what I could get here in America.
> it was just whoever ended up eating less processed foods and more whole foods
I'm not arguing that we don't eat more ultra-processed foods. We do eat too many highly refined foods with little nutritional value. My argument is against blaming food additives, dyes, GMOs, HFCS, etc... Eating more whole foods, vegetables, and fruits would make you healthier, but that's due to the nutritional value, fiber, feeling more full for longer leading to reduced caloric intake, etc... Not because you got rid of food dyes.
> I'm not arguing that we don't eat more ultra-processed foods. We do eat too many highly refined foods with little nutritional value. My argument is against blaming food additives, dyes, GMOs, HFCS, etc... Eating more whole foods, vegetables, and fruits would make you healthier, but that's due to the nutritional value, fiber, feeling more full for longer leading to reduced caloric intake, etc... Not because you got rid of food dyes.
But the prevalence of the above ingredients serves to increase consumption of processed foods relative to whole foods, both by increasing “addictiveness” aka how much people eat, and by decreasing its cost. HFCS is the best example of this, having heightened addictive properties via increased satiety suppression and dopamine response compared to other sugars, while being heavily subsidized to the point that final prices see a 15% reduction. As a result, HFCS is added to many products it has no business being in, because it increases sales (and so consumption, of processed foods).
Have you considered that those experts might have perverse incentives? It’s not a secret that the very regulators whose job it is to make sure we don’t eat poison are the same people who sell the food. But sure feel free to “trust the experts”, I’ll be over here doing my best to not eat things made out of coal tar (even if someone in a lab coat says it’s okie dokie).
Every single thing in our society has perverse incentives. Every single person who ever sells you something has incentive to sell you as little as possible for as much money as possible. Every single employer has incentive to pay you as little as possible for as much labor as possible. But that's not how things end up happening, because other forces are at play.
People who worked their entire life in an industry and became experts on it, then become regulators for the same industry, have incentives to favor their industry, sure. But who else should be regulating the industry if not the expert in that industry? If you get someone who is not an insider, wouldn't they just fail at regulating, because they have no idea how it works? Also, the people who put someone in that position, isn't there a chain of accountability there? There are many people working side by side with the "evil person trying to enrich themselves". Bad acts come out. Incentives tend to balance each other out. It's not wrong that part of a regulator's job is to find a balance as to not destroy an industry while regulating it.
> But that's not how things end up happening, because other forces are at play.
Is it really not how things end up happening? We must be living in two different realities. The greater the power, the higher the likelihood it becomes corrupted. With such a high incentive to give into corruption, you can’t just hand-wave it away with “but I’m sure it gets balanced out by something”. Your local family doctor might be a good enough person to help you get better without expensive drugs, but the head of a large institution? Fat chance.
That feeling you just expressed of higher trust to your local doctor than to a head of a large institution: it came from having a pretty good idea what your local doctor does, and no idea what a head of an institution does. The growing problem with cynicism in our society is not because there's evidence of corruption, it's because nobody knows how anything works, but everybody gets fed "look at these bad incentives" by pundits (especially alternative media ones) all day. Everything is complex. Just because it is doesn't make it nefarious.
An institution's whole point is to be a system where you don't have to trust individuals. It's a way to deal with complex nature of our reality. People should really learn what institutions are, how they function, what accountability mechanisms they contain, instead of blaming them based on conjecture. "Look, this bad thing happened. And this person has this bad incentive. Now we know the whole story." We don't.
No not really, trust in my local doctor comes from having a personal relationship with him and trusting his character enough to trust his word. There are things that are going to be beyond my understanding, but if I can trust his character enough to believe he’d rather see me healthy even at the expense of a bigger paycheck, then I’ll do it. How people place that same trust in faceless institutions is beyond me. Again - what forces exist to prevent them from being corrupted? Absolutely the growing cynicism in institutions is because of evidence of corruption. We gave them undeserved trust, they abused it, and now we see the effect of that.
I think relying on your judgement of character to determine trust is a decent tactic in personal life and interactions, but it doesn't work at scale.
People place trust in faceless institutions all the time. That's why you sit in a box that produces about 50 explosions per second when you drive a car. I don't think you would've gained much by being comfortable with the character of your car designer. If you think building cars is complex, laws and regulations are just as complex. And it takes teams of lawyers, hundreds of pages of documents, and a lot of data to figure out what makes sense. But it's easy to armchair-judge all of that as "just some faceless institution".
> what forces exist to prevent them from being corrupted?
Why are you right now not stealing from your work, or vulnerable people around you? Why are you not trying to screw over everybody you meet? Those forces and more. There's a lot of scrutiny built into most institutions.
> the growing cynicism in institutions is because of evidence of corruption
I don't think we use the word "evidence" the same way. Having perverse incentives is not evidence.
Someone you have a personal relationship with and that you trust your character never crossed you? Never fucked you over? Never pulled a fast one? Never lied? You’re either gullible or incredibly lucky.
Oh come off it. The United States has the highest rate of obesity in the WORLD (excluding some small Pacific islands). The US also has some of the most overengineered food. It doesn't take much to see the connection.
We are well past the point of carefully reasoning about food. It is time to start killing off additives first and asking questions later. "Freaking out" is the reasonable stance when everything in the grocery store is poison.
You are blaming the wrong thing though. America isn't obese because of red dye 40 or food additives, it's obese because Americans eat too much ultra processed foods that are high in calories and low in nutritional value. Along with minimal exercise and walking.
Banning red dye 40 isn't going to solve anything, companies are just going to find another food dye, natural or synthetic. There needs to be major changes in the average American diet to incorporate more whole foods, fiber, vegetables, fruits, etc... Once that is done then take a harder look at the dyes and additives.
People eat maraschino cherries on ice cream sundaes in many countries where people claim the dye is banned, yet the cherries still contain the die. Maybe you should reevaluate your position.
The issue isn't that it's a health risk directly, it's just the result of some very reasonable principals. The "Delaney Clause" in the Food Additives Amendment of 1958 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is why it's getting banned. If something is known to cause cancer in animals, and it isn't necessary for the production of the food, then it shouldn't be included.
This is simply an application of the Precautionary Principle to things already associated with harm. Since we can't know all the goods or harms that can come from a substance, if something is known to cause potential harm and it's unnecessary, then we shouldn't consume it. The human body is an absurdly complex multi-variate system, and throwing a bunch of unnecessary random shit at it not a great idea in general, but is generally reasonable when we don't know whether it's producing harms or benefits or neither. However, when we know these additives can produce harms, and it is wildly impractical to do repeated, controlled longitudinal studies with large sample sizes on humans, all at various levels of exposure. So, since the substances are entirely unnecessary we might as well just avoid them unless they are essential to creating products.
As a benzene-handling professional for decades who never intends to cease entering environments subject to exposure, I've never considered intentionally ingesting non-food ingredients or contamination to be the least bit safe. Especially dyes and pesticides, if you study the chemistry of these you can see that very good characterization and identification of complex, unique, undesired impurities has not really been very comprehensive at all. Beside the possibility that the dye molecule itself may be the most toxic component anyway.
With industrial hazards there is at least one layer of PPE, and I can do anything I see fit to further mitigate exposure in any way.
I don't even know which dye is in things like Flamin Hot pop culture materials, but they sure look fake to me. And if the only PPE between me and the potentially-hazardous substance is the bag that the Cheetos come in, I'm always going to be highly dismayed when the integrity of the PPE is compromised for any reason :)
As non-food ingredients have proliferated over the decades, all I can say is why even bother?
Give me a break, they couldn't have used very good strawberries if they had to make them pink artificially.
I am a lifelong science dude myself, studied dyes quite a bit and even synthesized some in the lab. So on this I trust the judgment of young mothers who are avoiding junk food for their kids more so than other scientists who propose that dyes are completely harmless for some reason.
I also talked with people who are experts, and they assured me banning Red Dye 3, among other things, is necessary and it will improve population health in the long term.
Great, but I can actually back it up. That's the difference here. I can point you to experts who agree with what I am saying and who I have chatted with.
If you are actually interested then Dr. Jessica Knurick. She is accessible on different social media platforms and has a website where you can contact her.
Or, maybe some of us have lived experience where artificial food dyes have detrimental effects to our children. I don't need science to tell me what my own two eyes and lived experience says. Do I really need a double blind study to tell me that when one of my kids eats food laced with these dyes, he's crazy for a week, but when he eats candy w/o these dyes, he just is a normal kid with a sugar rush?
My sibling comment goes into more detail, but claiming that anyone who has a lived experience is stupid (aka, falling for a logical fallacy) is just accelerating the distrust of "authority" at a time when we need it most.
> Do I really need a double blind study to tell me that when one of my kids eats food laced with these dyes, he's crazy for a week, but when he eats candy w/o these dyes, he just is a normal kid with a sugar rush?
TBH this sounds like exactly the kind of things double blind studies are invented for.
But even if there were none that showed a link, I should just continue to feed my child something that would cause adverse reactions?
What’s crazy to me is … we are talking about a totally unnecessary food additive. It’s not like I’m arguing against some critical public health intervention to prevent a deadly virus. It’s a dye to make food turn a color.
Someone with one (1) anecdote is not an authority and shouldn't be trusted like one. Eroding trust in authorities by equating actual experts with somebody who has a half baked opinion based on an anecdote seems like the real issue to me.
Going around and assuming every opinion is based on objective reality instead of subjective experience filtered through human perception with all it's quirks is not a good way to arrive at truth.
I'm not asking to be treated or trusted like an authority. I'm just asking not to treat people, when sharing a lived experience shared with others (making this n>1), is told that their experience is "half baked". My lived experience is by definition my objective reality.
Arguing with me that I could not possibly have experienced a cause and effect because some people didn't hold enough large enough placebo controlled double blind studies (I say this because double blind studies have studied this exact phenomenon, and triggered the retraction of some of these dyes in other countries) is just insulting after a while.
We know so little about nutrition and how different individuals process different nutrients that the scientific consensus on healthy food habits, weight loss, etc have shifted dramatically over the years. We are facing an obesity epidemic in the US. A little humility would be nice in the face of what clearly is not working for the majority of the population.
I mean, it's just food dye for God's sake, what's the "scientific" argument that foods must contain artificial colors?
> My lived experience is by definition my objective reality.
Just glossing over your complete misuse of objective here btw. There is nothing objective about your subjective* "lived realiy".
*Definition of subjective: 1. Dependent on or taking place in a person's mind rather than the external world. / 2. Based on a given person's experience, understanding, and feelings; personal or individual.
Please don't misunderstand me, I'm against unnecessary additives too. But you surely agree that anecdotes are bad source to inform your understanding on a subject where countless actual experts are available.
What can the actual experts tell me about my child's reaction to the food dye? One of my children has an adverse reaction to the dyes, my other children do not. What is the expert going to tell me? How does one get access to one of these experts? What about the studies that do show a link between behavior issues and artificial dyes? Are those studies not to be trusted?
Edit: curious about your first sentence: what makes you against unnecessary food additives? Is it a double blind study? If so, can you name it or an expert opinion on the matter that you trust?
I'm not telling you to personally change your belief. What I was trying to say is that you're propping up the value of your individual opinion as if it should rival experts to the reader.
> [...] claiming that anyone who has a lived experience is stupid (aka, falling for a logical fallacy) is just accelerating the distrust of "authority" at a time when we need it most.
I'm saying that you making a mountain out of a belief does directly translate to a distrust in experts, in a way that telling somebody they might just be wrong/it was a coincidence/whatever couldn't do.
At the end of the day most people just see what the want or expect to see, when there isn't a strong enough correlation in another direction. That's why, a reader, one should not value any anecdote too highly.
> curious about your first sentence: what makes you against unnecessary food additives? Is it a double blind study?
The question reads like a gotcha, but I'll answer anyway: The fact that there aren't enough studies about many such ingredients, and that I don't have time to check which are definitely vs. lack data.
Lots of parents probably follow similar lines of thinking about the effect of sugar on their kids' behaviour, and I think it's worth deferring to experts on that.
For anyone wondering why it takes so long to actually switch this stuff out, and the available alternatives to Red 3, I thought this piece from a food dyes company (no relation) was fascinating: https://na.sensientfoodcolors.com/confection/replacing-red-3...
You have to figure that if these guys had a drop-in replacement, they'd be offering it for sale at a high price, so this probably is the best you can do. The process changes and requalification looks like no fun at all. But it also looks pretty doable for a company in this line of business, so maybe you won't see too many color changes on the shelf with this ban.
> For anyone wondering why it takes so long to actually switch this stuff out
One counterpoint is do we really NEED to have brightly colored foods? It's a hard problem if you need a food to be bright red. But, that has to boil down to strictly to improving sales, right? Hypothetically, if all the artificial food dyes were banned, then all food companies would be on the same level playing field.
Color is definitely something that catches a person's eye, so if you have a "food product" that needs extra to convince someone to buy it, color is a way to do it. You can't taste it before purchasing. You can see and smell it, so they push those levers as much as they can.
Mandate big font "contains carcinogens" label when your food contains this colour. Then let the buyer choose whether s/he finds this shade of bright red attractive or not.
Maybe, and I see your point, but there are few alternatives to having them on a cig pack, whereas you could not dye your food and remove this label. As a consumer, the choice is rather simple (for me at least)
Simple has nothing to do with it. The point is that people ignore warnings all of the time for various reasons. Some people look at the risk/reward factor and decide the risk isn’t that bad. Some people have no idea what the risk means and ignore it. People go sky diving even after having to sign all of the liability release forms, make a video recording while reading a release statement, etc. in Hawaii, there are signs that suggest people to not travel any further due to safety reasons and by proceeding further you do accept all liability. Nobody stops there, and the vast majority don’t even stop long enough to read the sign.
The point being that humans are bad at weighing risk/reward and make bad decisions all of the time.
That may be true and I'm not against legislation to rule dangerous things out. I think however that big red warnings can be useful sometimes. Well, maybe not red in this case.
Visuals have a pretty big impact on food. I wonder how many foods would just look disgusting without any food dyes. Reminds me of butter companies trying to pass legislation to make margerine companies unable to dye their product to look like butter
There are a bunch of no-artificial-dye candies and whatnot on the market already, and they actually look better to me - they're not absurd unnatural colors.
> The way that FD&C Red No. 3 causes cancer in male rats does not occur in humans. Relevant exposure levels to FD&C Red No. 3 for humans are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats. Studies in other animals and in humans did not show these effects; claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.
if "these sort of things" aren't actually harmful, and what we see in Europe is mostly governments reacting to unscientific panic among their citizens, then I'd say it's other countries that are wild, not the United States.
The European approach is: if it doesn't look on your plate the way it looked on the hoof or on the plant, it's probably not good to consume. This is a much better heuristic than "we haven't found any adverse effects yet, so call it GRAS". Science is great at determining the presence of specific effects. It's not so good at finding an absence of effect.
> The European approach is: if it doesn't look on your plate the way it looked on the hoof or on the plant, it's probably not good to consume.
I mean, that's just not true. Fruit Loops are sold in Europe as well (albeit with slightly different colors), and there's no hoof or plant that produces anything that looks like Fruit Loops. Food coloring is a worldwide phenomenon.
Well, if you read the quote in my comment (or clicked on the source link I included), you would see that the FDA evaluated it for health risks all-up, not just cancer.
Your comment violates the following hacker news guideline:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
The prize to win is public health. There is absolutely no benefit in putting all this crap into food. Maybe some things are harmful and others are not but they are absolutely useless.
Things like Veggie Libel Laws are very much against the public interest but farm owners have managed to somehow be both rich and adored by the populace so here we are
If they're competing to ban dangerous things in our food supply then the "prize" is a longer healthier life for everyone who lives in any nation that engages in such competition? :shrug:
Lead chromate is a really great color that's not in the food supply (except occasionally illicitly in Bangladesh) largely because it's illegal. Regulation is why food is safe.
Go to Italy or France, or any EU state. The food is better and often cheaper in almost every case.
Even a McDonald's hamburger is good, and not dominated by the fake chemical garlic substitute. In the US, McDonald's french fries contain: Potatoes, Vegetable Oil (canola Oil, Corn Oil, Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Natural Beef Flavor [wheat And Milk Derivatives]), Dextrose, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate (maintain Color), Salt. natural Beef Flavor Contains Hydrolyzed Wheat And Hydrolyzed Milk As Starting Ingredients.
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of that difference comes down to labeling and disclosure requirements. If the Italian fries don't even have to disclose what type of oil they use, they probably also don't have to disclose the oil stabilizers and seasonings they use.
Let's not forget that Europe had massive epidemic of horse meat being snuck into the supply chain with no one catching on.
I think your cultural palate is showing. The marketing of a few simple ingredients sounds good except it's not like American McDonalds is putting them in for no reason. You can make the case that fillers are used to cut cost but for french fries all that stuff costs extra. To Americans that shit tastes great.
* The beef flavor is mimicking frying in beef tallow. If you use Marmite in your brown gravy you're using the same trick.
* Americans, being flushed with corn and corn syrup which is sweeter than granulated sugar, developed a sweeter tooth than other places which is why the dextrose.
* Potatoes once cut and exposed to air get that gross dark color. Most home cooks usually solve that by keeping them submerged in water until frying but Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate works the same.
But what does the EU consider an ingredient? Apparently you can just say oil and call it a day. The U.S. is clearly requiring that everything that composes the oil is listed individually. Surely you can see as clear as day that "oil" is not very specific?
I didn't say there was no world beyond the EU. I'm not personally acquainted with every nation's food regulatory regime. I was just struck by the obvious qualitative difference between even the lowest quality food.
Feel free to regail someone who cares about the food regulations of the world.
The FDA factoid is cool -- they just didn't ban the dye that causes cancer.
Have you been to a farmer's market in the US? Potatoes are potatoes. In fact, potatoes are native to this continent and we have more potato cultivars to choose from. You can get very high quality meat there.
Saying all US food is lower quality is kind of a wild opinion.
> Feel free to regail someone who cares about the food regulations of the world.
You're the one that responded to my comment about comparing the US to the rest of the world by saying I needed to compare it to the EU. I didn't hop into your comment chain with random factoids.
> I'm not personally acquainted with every nation's food regulatory regime.
Didn't stop you from providing uninformed commentary tho.
Not to be “that guy” but you did reply to someone saying “most other countries” with a counter argument citing three, then waved away the fact you’re unaware of most other countries. That’s where the pushback is coming from. The US tends to be a little more progressive than the middle of the pack in this space and set the global standard for food safety regulation where none existed before. The cherry picking of a few examples when discussing global comparisons is fraught and the US always exists in this world where whatever topic there’s always some other place doing better on some metric used as some argument the US is a steaming pile of refuse with wandering zombies laden with cancer and illiteracy. It’s not intellectually honest or particularly helpful in discussion of the actual problems. Anyway - that’s where the pushback came from, not that these three countries regulate food dye additives better or not.
I love all kinds of world cuisine, but I did not find the food in France to be better or cheaper than the food in the US, on average (and I love French cuisine). The pastries and wine though... different story!
Not sure on food dyes but my understanding is the FDA is leagues behind the EU on regulation when it comes to food.
My experience in Italy with foods that normally cause some issues (dairy/cheese) really opened my eyes to that. My sister who doesn’t eat cheese/dairy at all here in the US was able to eat it there without issue because of how they process dairy over there or something.
It is more complicated than this, the US has much more rigorous food safety standards in a number of dimensions.
For example, the US has much stricter standards for preventing bacterial contamination than Europe, outside of the Nordics which share similar food safety regulations as the US. The US prohibits a lot of food importation from Europe because of lower food safety standards related to contamination.
Europe makes a lot of food safety exceptions on the basis of a process being "traditional" in some sense, nominally preserving culture. The US is a bit more technocratic less prone to the naturalistic fallacy; the FDA doesn't care that something is cultural or traditional, if there is scientific evidence of material risk then it will be banned.
If I had to summarize their food safety perspectives, the EU tends to focus more on allowable ingredients, the US tends to focus more on the uncontaminated and sterile handling of the food supply chain.
There are some differences between dairy in the US and elsewhere. US dairy cows produce milk containing A1 beta-casein, a protein that some studies suggest may cause digestive discomfort. In Europe, cows often produce A2 beta-casein milk, which some people find easier to digest.
Dairy products in the US tend to contain more lactose, and French/Italian dairy products have less due to the prevalence of aged cheeses and fermentation.
There are many other differences, and none of these seem related to some sort of mystery-makes-you-shit-yourself additive.
<selfpromotion>We sell uncolored raw milk cheddar cheese made with A2 milk, if someone has an issue with cheese in the US give ours a try!</selfpromotion>
Similar thing with my wife and bread. In the US she developed/discovered/exposed a gluten intolerance, to the point that she removed it from her diet entirely, but bread in France is ok for her.
In that case it's not a gluten intolerance; there is gluten in bread in France. Might be a sugar thing? Bread in the US is more likely to contain added sugar and/or HFCS than in most countries.
Quinoline Yellow (E 104), Sunset Yellow FCF/Orange Yellow S (E 110), Azorubine/Carmoisine (E 122), Amaranth (E 123), Ponceau 4R/Cochineal Red A (E 124), Erythrosine/Red No. 3 (E 127), Allura Red AC (E 129), Patent Blue V (E 131), Indigotine/Indigo carmine (E 132), Brilliant Blue FCF (E 133), Green S (E 142), Brilliant Black PN (E 151), Brown HT (E 155), Litholrubine BK (E 180)
Some of these names may be confusing since their names imply they're natural when in fact they are synthetic (e.g. Amaranth, Cochineal Red A, Indigo carmine).
We already have the FDA (most foods and drugs), the USDA (produce, animal products besides milk), and TTB (alcohol). Each one sets its own safety and labeling standards, which is why, for example, mixed drinks containing alcohol don't have to list allergens(!). Another level of fragmentation would be a disaster IMO. We could split the FDA, but we'd need to merge the food regulator half into one of those other existing agencies.
To be honest, I could see an argument for separating the handling of raw agricultural product from the rest of the food system. The health effects of Oreos vs. making sure our eggs don’t have bird flu are quite different regulatory concerns.
Bans add a lot of overhead to both the agencies responsible for enforcing them and industry. Those agencies are only so large and are spread thin, sometimes there are 'bigger fish' they need to focus on.
I can understand waiting until there's sufficient evidence before starting that process.
Lots of other countries other than the US banned this dye years ago. So what changed in the US? Logically speaking we didn't just come to our collective senses. Did government lobbying budgets dry up? Or did the cost just increase where it wasn't worth paying anymore?
Technically it appears red dye no 3 was banned due to cancer and Delaney clause, however, keep in mind that I think the primary reason it was banned in California last year was all the studies correlating it to deleterious cognitive impacts on children
What other things does the US need to ban to catch up with Europe? Who is "right vs wrong" here? Is Europe wrong for having too many things banned, is US wrong for not having parity with what is banned in Europe?
Is Europe being overly cautious, is America being unsafe?
Admittedly to a fault, I tend to be quick to trust institutions and don't tend to be quick to believe conspiracies (not claiming that this is). With most of the additives to products that people seem to be worried about, I default to thinking it's not the most important thing I need to be concerned with in my daily life.
But the FDA making this ruling is validating for my friends who seem to go way out of their way to find product ingredients to be afraid of. I know people have been claiming for years that Red3 being allowed in the US is crazy.
I'm genuinely here to listen: how would someone who believes that the US allows far too many dangerous ingredients in consumer goods and believes the consumer needs to actively screen and research what is in their products convince me that I need to be more serious about screening the products I use for dangerous ingredients?
We don’t need to convince you of anything. If you care, you’ll look and do your own research about the ingredients. If you think you’re safe, then you’ll eat them,.
Is it not enough to know that the federal regulatory agencies are captured? Why wouldn’t they poison you if it increases their bottom line and they can get away with it?
It's specifically a type of cancer in rats with no human equivalent. But the FDA rules state they can ban an ingredient if it causes cancer in humans or animals.
For anyone that pushes back on the government currently elected, well, far from optimal imagine that so many before them allowed a cancerous substance like this to be in so many foods
They’re considerably more expensive and their kids prefer the others?
Look, there are plenty of things in our diets that won’t cause harm in small amounts just because a large amount causes harm to a rat. Some people (somewhat rationally) extended that to food dyes and additives.
If you or I want to choose differently that’s great, but denigrating people who don’t make the same choices you do is condescending and unhelpful.
My intention wasn't to be condescending.
We actually buy organic but I mean we buy the ingredients like oats, some nuts, some grains and then we bake it or we make it into a porridge. Our toddler loves it, and I don't think it costs that much.
My kids won't eat the healthy cereal so for me the number one reason is taste. The organic ones also cost more so price conscious people have a second reason.
> My kids won't eat the healthy cereal so for me the number one reason is taste.
This is one of those things where "taste" is basically sweetness. I used to love cereal. Ate bowls of it all the time. I've been on a basic oatmeal with blueberries kick for the last couple years, though, and whenever I try cereals I used to like again I'm disgusted by how sweet they are. You really can only taste sweetness. Kids love that sweetness, though, and brands are extremely focused on marketing candy to children as "healthy" breakfast staples. Lots of kids think stuff tastes bad because it doesn't taste like candy.
The price of "organic" cereals is an issue though.
Drastically more expensive. This adds up way too high for most people who make average income. I do think its also lack of information.
Edit:
The only people I've ever heard of whining about cereals having bad ingredients are the people everyone calls conspiracy nuts, this is my issue with calling things "conspiracy theories" and dismissing people, when someone brings forth valid information, you miss out because you're blindly dismissing them based on bias not fact.
Great, now ban Red 40 and the other synthetic dyes. You can't avoid them in anything marketed toward children. I have children and I know others who also have children that are highly sensitive to these dyes, causing major behavioral issues that last for 5-7 days after ingesting food/medicine/drinks that contain these dyes.
As a parent, if I notice a correlation between an action and subsequent behavior, are you saying that my lived experience is irrelevant because... nobody bothered to include me in a specific double blind study? How many things do you do every day that have not been studied through exhaustive scientific research?
From my own lived experience, when one of my my kids eats a red velvet cake or a bag of Skittles or M&Ms that he's violent and crazy for a week, but if he has a few Oreos he's fine. If one of my other kids does the same thing, she doesn't have the same reaction. If I knew the exact chemical pathway that made this happen, I'd be thrilled. I am just living my life trying to parent kids in this world, and you know what, stupid bright dyes that do nothing other than make food appear unnaturally incandescent are practically impossible to avoid. So it's just one more thing that's piled on as a parent that you have to deal with.
If you ask me, this aggressive "well, you're stupid and you shouldn't trust your own eyes because science" attitude that has triggered the strong anti-authority sentiments globally. It's why objectively crazy people like RFK Jr get huge followings- I vehemently disagree with 99% of his rhetoric, especially his anti-vax viewpoints, but I totally agree with his stance on food additives such as these synthetic dyes.
I see the effects with my own eyes. Telling me I'm stupid doesn't help science, it just serves to further diminish the trust in the very institutions we need more now than ever.
> As a parent, if I notice a correlation between an action and subsequent behavior, are you saying that my lived experience is irrelevant because... nobody bothered to include me in a specific double blind study? How many things do you do every day that have not been studied through exhaustive scientific research?
"Noticing a correlation" could very well just be confirmation bias. For decades, parents thought that giving kids sugar made them more energetic, but the scientific consensus is that there is no link between the two.
I guess I don't know what proof you require me to provide. I have several children. Only one has a visible correlation between artificial food dyes and abnormal behavior. The others do not. If I had confirmation bias because of food dyes alone, then wouldn't I have the same observation across all my children?
At some point, as the adage says, "Doctor, when I do this, it hurts! What do I do?" ... "Treatment is simple. Don't do that"
I assume that you would agree that allergies are real and afflict some people but not others -- if your son or daughter entered anaphylaxis shock after eating a PB&J sandwich, would you sit there and scold the child- "but double blind studies show, Chunky Skippy is a safe food! This is just confirmation bias!" Why is it so hard to believe that, in this case, artificial food dyes could cause adverse reactions in some people and not others?
It took £750k back in 2007 to administer a double blind study to explore the link between hyperactive behavior in children and artificial food dyes [0] - a study that included Red 40. I don't have an extra $1MM+ burning a hole in my pocket just to prove what I already know with my own kids. Believe what you want, but if consuming neon red food is that important to you, God speed. I will not be feeding it to my one child who has a reaction to it. I avoid it for the others, because.... even though I know they won't have an adverse reaction, what's the point? The dye doesn't make the food taste any different/better.
> The dye doesn't make the food taste any different/better.
Taste is a subjective experience and the color definitely makes the food taste different/better, there are plenty of studies on the topic. I agree fully with the rest of your comment though.
Now that we have good quality studies (see meta-analysis[0]) that prove the causal link between food dyes in general and the consequences in the behavior of children, the risk-benefit analysis tilts heavily against them. While we don't necessarily have certainty about which ones are bad, we know that on aggregate they are bad.
This fact alone should be enough to either start state-funded studies to clear this situation out, or ban them entirely and only re-introduce them on a case-by-case basis as they are proven safe by RCTs.
I remain sceptical about the influence RFK has in this administration anyway, in comparison with corporate interests. Why would this time be any better than the previous Trump administration?
Might as well get some credit for the one or two good ideas he has before the antivaccine rhetoric begins and measles/mumps/whooping cough kills a few tens of thousands of people and the GQP goes "oops" and fires him and puts the old policies back in place.
No libertarians feel that people will likely get sick or die from bad products, and will sue the company/quit buying the product; aka let the market and survival of the fittest decide what people put in their bodies.
I think that Trump doesn't care one way or another about food coloring or Americans getting cancer, and as such his administration will likely leave such things alone and untouched for the most part unless the food lobby asks him to cancel or defund the FDA for campaign contributions or similar.
Harris blatantly copying the No Tax on Tips was particularly funny this election season. You could see on her face that she didn’t believe in it at all.
that is 99% of all politicians though. Her policies were generally much better aligned with the health and well being of the average American vs the average billionaire.
My favorite is the matrix-like maneuvering about taxes. Now excise taxes and tariffs are cool. But "death tax", income tax, social security tax -- that's communist.
How, exactly, are they causing that to come about? I find this is just a scaremongering tactic that everyone with some ties or ideological adherence to institutional science resorts to, on the other hand, with no sound argument whatsoever. It's just a mindless knee-jerk reaction.
People affiliated with RFK's orbit are advocating for removing approval for the polio vaccine because it wasn't validated with double-blind studies. There's some obvious reasons why that is problematic.
It's really obvious how poorly this stuff plays out, you look at New York. When you read a news story about polio/measles/whopping cough etc, from New York, it will say "it was detected in New York City (or Brooklyn), Orange, Rockland and Sullivan counties".
That's often indiciative of a specific sect of orthodox Jewish communities whose charismatic leader is against vaccination. It's a tight-knit community that tends to live in densely populated environments. (So more viral spread than similar relgious sects like the Amish) People tend to follow the guidance and don't vaccinate. Fortunately, while polio virus has been detected in samples, as far as I know there are not any cases. Measles and whopping cough cases are fairly common.
This isn't a "left" and "right" issue. It's an authoritarian issue where seeding mistrust of institutions is important. Polio hasn't been eradicated to the point that eliminating vaccination is smart. Smallpox was -- and we don't vaccinate the general public anymore. (We do vaccinate soliders as the Soviets/Russians/USA weaponized it)
While the US uses an inactivated polio vaccine, many countries still use a polio vaccine created using an attenuated virus. This virus can revert to a dangerous form. This happens if you have a partially vaccinated population.
This means that unvaccinated people can be infected with a strain of polio that can cause paralysis. This is extremely rare in the US (there was one case of one affected person in 2022).
Currently, the polio vaccine is recommended in the US, and vaccination rates in different US States are between 86% (Idaho) and 99% (Mississippi). If the vaccination rate decreases, it is possible that polio cases will become more common, or even that polio might become endemic again.
RFK has said conflicting things about the polio vaccine. Aaron Siri, a lawyer affiliated with Kennedy, petitioned the FDA to revoke polio vaccine's approval, but RFK said that he supports the polio vaccine in response. I think it's fair to be skeptical, though, given his general position on vaccines.
If RFK's actions cause polio vaccination rates to fall, there is a real reason to be concerned. I don't think this is scaremongering, this is a plausible possibility based on what we know about polio, and about RFK's position on vaccination.
> Kennedy has insisted that he is not anti-vaccine, saying he only wants vaccines to be rigorously tested, but he also has shown opposition to a wide range of immunizations. Kennedy said in a 2023 podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told Fox News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.
> “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.
> That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”
"There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective."
RFK on Lex Fridman's podcast.
We do have long-term studies on vaccines. Vaccines are some of the best-studied medical intervention. There is plenty of data about their efficacy and side-effects. Implying that we "need more studies" before we can be sure about vaccines is, in my opinion, dishonest and misleading.
I read about this right before covid in Wired magazine. Now, they lick the assholes of all the big pharma companies and anyone wanting more science are 'deniers', turning it into a relgion.
That looks like a successfully investigated case? With an appropriate mitigation found and implemented? And a worst-case scenario of “still 12x fewer hospitalizations than without the vaccine”?
No it's not - the topic is healthier food. If someone said "I bet Hitler[0] will reverse this thing that makes trains run on time" and someone said "actually Hitler loves trains running on time", that would be a fair response.
This is the old "the person my news sources repeatedly tell me to dislike is like Hitler".
Okay, but that seems irrelevant to this thread. What you're getting is RFK, and he doesn't like dyes in food. So as I understand it the original claim is false, and that's all this thread is trying to address.
> Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic who may become the secretary of health and human services, has said the idea that vaccination has nearly eradicated polio is “a mythology.”
> The virus that paralyzed the young man had been circulating for months, and it was later detected in the sewage of multiple New York counties with vaccination rates hovering around 60 percent, prompting the state to declare an emergency.
Between all the snarkyness (is that a word? I'm not a native speaker :-D) I think there's a point here. With all the regulations the EU has put up, and the bureaucracy that came with them, I'm really happy that we got food and its ingredients pretty tightly under control and locked down. Glad to see that other countries are prioritizing consumer safety, too.
But Musk, RFK Jr. and others were precisely the kind of people that were advocating for this kind of regulation to take place. Remember the thing about replacing seed oils (eugh) with beef tallow? I really don't think they are against this kind of regulation--on the contrary.
Just do some research on what seed oils where used for just some decades ago, and the extreme processes they go through to make them somewhat edible and not too unpalatable. It's just a byproduct of corporations trying to reduce costs at the expense of our health. They'd do it with literal shit if they could find the way.
There is enough research linking saturated fat (beef tallow has a lot) to heart disease. Not saying seed oils are better. But claiming beef tallow is better doesn't cut it.
>There is enough research linking saturated fat (beef tallow has a lot) to heart disease
Find me one where saturated fat is isolated from every confounding factor. There is none. They are epidemiological studies linking saturated fat from junk food (itself mostly comprised of processed carbs with a myriad of artificial ingredients) to heart disease. That's akin to claiming that dairy protein alone is bad for health because almost every junk dessert has some form of dairy in it as an ingredient.
Find me one where it debunks saturated fat does not contribute, and has not been funded by the relevant industry. No study in history is free of confounding factors, because we are talking about people.
"according to claude" makes it hard for my mind to give much credence to the post in a way very different from "according to Wikipedia" with a link. I intend this politely, but if I wanted to know what claude would output I would ask it myself, during the phase of the moon when the way I've chosen to word the prompt has the best chance of working.
FD&C Red 40 (Allura Red AC): Linked to hyperactivity in children in some studies, although evidence is mixed. Theoretical concerns regarding disruption of cell membrane integrity, potentially leading to increased permeability and toxicity.
FD&C Yellow 5 (Tartrazine): Some in vitro studies suggest potential neurotoxic effects, though human evidence is lacking. Theoretical concerns regarding modulation of neurotransmitters, potentially leading to behavioral changes.
FD&C Yellow 6 (Sunset Yellow FCF): Similar to Yellow 5, some in vitro studies raise concerns, but human evidence is limited. Theoretical concerns regarding binding to DNA, potentially leading to mutagenic effects.
FD&C Blue 1 (Brilliant Blue FCF): Theoretical concerns regarding exacerbation of respiratory conditions like asthma. Theoretical concerns regarding increased cell membrane permeability, potentially leading to toxicity.
FD&C Blue 2 (Indigo Carmine): Limited human studies, but some animal research suggests potential neurological impacts. Theoretical concerns regarding triggering or exacerbating immunological reactions.
It'd be great if people stopped just copy-pasting stuff from LLMs and then responding to that instead of other real human people.
It's not a foregone conclusion that just because people haven't ingested things before doesn't inherently mean that ingesting them is bad. Saying it is is itself a pretty obvious logical fallacy. Now I'm not saying at all that ingesting oil, even byproducts after multiple rounds of synthesis, is a good idea. But it's not impossible to synthesize something edible out of something inedible, so the fact that oil is inedible doesn't mean that all oil derivatives are as well.
Meanwhile cigarettes, which are also cancer linked, are legal with a warning and some picture on them.
And alcohol, which is also linked to cancer, is legal, with a warning on it.
And (non-self driving) automobiles, which kills tens of thousands of Americans yearly, with no warning or pictures, are legal.
Activities that reward being sedentary - a known factor in lethal cancers and disease - have no warning labels. When is my PS5 gonna warn me about playing video games?
While Americans are dying from a range of cardiovascular disease and cancers it's comforting to know that red M&Ms or red fruit punch won't be one of the causes.
Why’s there no avenue for receiving risk appropriate compensation funds for having increased personal risk of death by consuming something a reasonable expert in the industry could consider dangerous?
If I skirt the law on technicalities to cause harm to an employer for example, such as knowingly implementing trivial security encryption on critical transactions, I feel I could be liable for damages. Why is this a game of spot the problem and then get off with a warning before going to the next preplanned technicality workaround that usually also causes cancer but will buy them a few years until the process repeats?
Shouldn’t mass risk of life be considered a terror level charge? Or rather, instead of saying no to that question because it didn’t appear to meet X criteria, why aren’t we finding ways it could meet that criteria? For example if it needs a political reason, we should ask how this could be a politically motivated decision rather than saying this doesn’t appear to meet any political agenda. That’s how the laws are always completely one sided abused against normal people anyway in a more extreme stretch than my example. I think it’s reasonable to do a reasonable-amount of application back.
Because the people en masse have not successfully come together to demand this.
What makes companies more powerful than the people is not that companies actually have more power. They don't. It's that they concentrate the power they do have into the hands of a small group of decision-makers, which allows it to be deployed effectively. By comparison, the people are divided, disjointed, disorganized, and distracted, and as such typically fail to come together to demand specific changes they agree on.
Idk I think there is a ton of overlap between industry and the highest levels of government. They wouldn’t want pesky things like human well-being to get in the way of profit so they get their hands on some of the levers of power and mitigate their liability one way or the other. It’d probably take a class action lawsuit in the kind of case you describe to be brought to justice.
Most people wont like this, but the answer is because courts care about if the harm actually occurred in fact, not if there is risk that harm might occur.
You cant sue another driver because they risked crashing into your car.
Fun fact - this is how blue raspberry was created as a flavor. Raspberry flavored things were purple, made from a combination of red and blue dye. The red dye (red no 2) was banned. So companies making raspberry flavored stuff just left the red dye out and said "raspberry is blue now" and we all went "shit yeah it is, always has been! why would raspberry be anything other than blue?"
I think your story is half-right.
Common varieties of raspberries aren't purple, and I've never heard of raspberry flavor being purple.
So they didn't remove the red to leave blue, because there was never blue in the first place -- they just switched from red to blue, as this lengthy history explains:
https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/pop-culture/ar...
And it was seen as a benefit because blue stood out more from the other red flavors -- cherry, strawberry, watermelon...
I said "raspberry-flavored things" and I guess in the most inclusive sense raspberries are raspberry-flavored so well done there for making me put one finger in the air in outrage and then silently pull it back down while adopting a thoughtful expression. In a less-inclusive sense, raspberry-flavored things are flavored with "mostly esters of the banana, cherry, and pineapple variety" according to the article so it could be argued that there are a lot of raspberry flavored things (including a dust cloud in space, https://next.voxcreative.com/ad/20726659/space-taste-like-ra...) but funnily enough raspberries aren't one of them.
Mindblowing. More details and photos:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_raspberry_flavor
> Food products labeled as blue raspberry flavor are commonly dyed with a bright blue synthetic food coloring, such as brilliant blue FCF (also called Blue #1) having European food coloring number E133. The blue color was used to differentiate raspberry-flavored foods from cherry-, watermelon-, and strawberry-flavored foods, each of which is typically red. The use of blue dye also partially is due to the FDA's 1976 banning of amaranth-based Red Dye No. 2, which had previously been heavily used in raspberry-flavored products.
And we have always been at war with Eurasia.
My heart raced for a few seconds, thank you!!!
Eurasia -> Eastasia
And it all started because a harmful dye was banned
Good god that’s awful. Like really? And people go along with this? Have they not ever had and actual raspberry?
Two things:
- it's usually sold as "blue raspberry", not "raspberry"; so you know that it's nothing natural here
- it's mostly used in soft-drinks or other foods that are ~~nothing~~ anything but natural
So my guess is that nobody was thinking they were buying something made of actual rasperries; they knew that they were buying something 100% artificial like "mango madness" or "knockout fruit punch"
So nothing but natural, eh? Maybe you meant anything but natural. :)
Oups, you're right; thanks for pointing out my mistake!
Have you had blue raspberry? It's better than actual raspberry, which is why people go along with it.
Do raspberries not taste like raspberries?
What product has "blue raspberry"?
I can only think of one raspberry product I buy, and it doesn't have any dye, and is deep red colored (from the raspberries)
> "What product has "blue raspberry"?
Blue raspberry is a standard slushie colour the world over, in my experience.
https://www.7-eleven.com/products/slurpee/blue-raspberry
Never seen it as a slushie in Italy but we do have azure ice cream. It used to be called "puffo" (=Smurf) but smurfs aren't popular anymore, so now they usually sell it as "marshmallow" or "cotton candy".
But it tastes nothing like raspberry?
>But it tastes nothing like raspberry?
It's not like most ice-cream flavors taste anything like the real thing...
Especially in the US (not Italian artisanal gelato)
In the U.K. I remember it being a novelty flavour for a brief period in the 90s.
I’ve not seen or heard of the idea since then, although this may reflect my own consumer preferences.
Surely no visit to a UK chain cinema (Odeon/Vue) in summer is complete without a refreshing and sugar-free Tango Ice Blast?! It's the "UK’S N0.1 FROZEN DRINK BRAND", according to their own marketing.
And the two original, traditional flavours of Tango Ice Blast are Red (Cherry) and Blue (Raspberry).
In fact, I can't remember ever seeing any other flavours, although according to their website there are others:
https://www.lovetangoiceblast.com/flavours
I have never seen this product or heard the term "blue raspberry" in my life, so probably not around the world.
Blue raspberry is a candy only flavor. It doesn't really taste like raspberry. Its pretty common as a flavor in the us at least, it's one of my favorite candy flavors.
If you eat a bowl of mixed blueberries and raspberries, it actually does taste like blue raspberry. It's a mixture of the two flavors.
Also known as the flavor of Queen's jam (from Sweden), which looks nicer as instead of blueberries, it uses bilberries (whose flesh is deep red).
You're thinking of snozzberries.
I have it on good authority that the snozzberries taste like snozzberries.
You need to be squeezed. Off to the juicing room you go!
>What product has "blue raspberry"?
Berry Blue Jell-o[0].
There are a bunch of others as well, but that's the first one that came to mind.
[0] https://www.kraftheinz.com/jell-o/products/00043000200407-be...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_raspberry_flavor
I guess you're one of today's 10,000: https://xkcd.com/1053/
I feel like you might run into it at a carnival or theme park. It's found in things like candy, Kona ice, extremely artificially flavored drinks, etc. Junk food.
Jello.
Jolly rancher
Gatorade cool blue used to be blue raspberry
[dead]
From the CNN article:
> There don’t appear to be any studies establishing links between red dye No. 3 and cancer in humans, and “relevant exposure levels to FD&C Red No. 3 for humans are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats,” the FDA said in its constituent update posted Wednesday. “Claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.”
> But “it doesn’t matter, because the FDA mandate under the Delaney Clause says that if it shows cancer in animals or humans, they’re supposed to keep it from the food supply,” said Dr. Jennifer Pomeranz, associate professor of public health policy and management at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.
Even more confusing - the FDA still doesn't believe there's a cancer link with humans. But they are banning it anyway on a technicality.
Serious question: If there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing color, why risk it? What is the benefit?
The problem with that premise is that almost every substance has a remote chance of causing cancer in some way or another. Just ask the state of California. So you would have to ban everything if that is really your stance.
The correct (and scientifically valid) thing to do is to only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done. Otherwise, anyone can simply say X is harmful and pass regulations to get their pet bogeyman pulled off the market, and that is basically what is happening here.
> only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done
I agree with most of what you are saying. However, I think it's valid to also apply heavy scrutiny on new chemicals being added to the food chain. The default being to not allow it if it's not proven safe.
Red dye 3 probably shouldn't have been added to the food supply chain with that criteria but since it's already been there for decades with no strong link to negative outcomes there's little reason to ban it now.
You really don't want to know about GRAS (Generally recognized as safe) then. 700 food substances were grandfathered into the food supply chain and most new things are self-affirmed by the company selling them.
This is like the whole bugs in food thing.
Sometimes no bugs are allowed at all, people be getting upset if their pop tarts have bugs in them.
Sometimes it's like some bugs are allowed and just part of it like when I buy organic broccoli at the farmers market and need to soak it to get whatever those things are in there out. Or when I get those little mummified bugs in the bottom of oatmeal tins.
Sometimes it's like the food is literally coated in bugs like all that stuff that's coated on schellac. Which, finally to bring it back to a callback to your point, is both GRAS and also made of bugs.
Shellac isn't made of bugs - it's made by bugs. Specifically, it's the resin secreted by a female lac beetle onto the branch of the trees that they live and feed on.
Yes, thank you.
I also learned today that the harvesting process kills the lac beetles.
I don't disagree with you, but we don't have heavy scrutiny on the existing and natural chemicals that are in the food chain from all of the plants that we eat.
You could build a heuristic risk score against each molecule:
- What functional groups does it have?
- How many functional groups does it have?
- How much electron delocalization does it have?
- How much of that electron delocalization is PAHs?
- Does the molecule participate in redox reactions?
Etc.
Basically check to see which molecules can generate free radicals, strip DNA, convert to dangerous metabolites, etc.
It's call QSAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_structure%E2%80%9... They may use a hundred of properties to guess the effect of the molecule.
Once you have that trained, you'll be able to publish it and dramatically improve the current SoTA!
I wish it was as easy as this - while there are known toxicophores/no-go functional groups in medchem, there is going to be a big dearth of data on non-acute (e.g. not hERG, hepatotoxicity, etc) toxicity, which is really what the question is here: what are the marginal risks/rewards from eating existing food X (since we know it's probably not acutely toxic).
> The correct (and scientifically valid) thing to do is to only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done.
Because we're talking about food I would actually like to see the opposite. Provide peer reviewed, gold standard studies showing that what you want to put in food is in fact safe.
There is no such thing as proving something "safe". Go back and re-read the parent comment. The important point you are missing is that basically anything can be "linked" to cancer, and if you adopt the argument you are making, there would be nothing left.
Proving something safe is logically equivalent to proving that it is not unsafe, which is the same thing as proving a negative, which cannot be done. I cannot prove there is not a teapot circling Mars, and I cannot prove that even the most inert ingredient, at some dose, will not harm you.
Anyone who has lived in California knows this absurdity more intuitively than most people, because California's stupid laws adopt the logic you are proposing, and basically everything in daily life is labeled as cancer-causing.
A lot of folks in child comments are echoing your sentiment that something “cannot be proved safe”. Your argument that proving something is “not unsafe” is proving a negative is fallacious; the same can literally be said about anything (proving something is X is the same as proving it is not not-X). Proving drugs are safe and effective is literally one of the jobs of the FDA. If you do not believe that is possible, then we may as well tear down the entire drug regulatory apparatus. I imagine you and many other commenters will sing a different tune when posed with that suggestion.
So, let’s stop pretending it’s not possible. We require drug companies show their products are safe and efficacious, and there is both a scientific and a legal framework by which we do this. Let’s debate whether or not the same framework should be applied to food additives (I would argue it should) rather than claim it is not possible.
We require drug companies show their products are safe and efficacious, and there is both a scientific and a legal framework by which we do this.
We don’t do this.
What the FDA requires is acceptable safety in light of the benefit provided.
The FDA approves highly toxic drugs all the time. Including ones with the risk of death. I don’t think anyone would call chemotherapy “safe”.
"Safe" for the FDA means the benefits outweigh the potential risks, not safe in absolute terms.
If the FDA actually required every drug to be proven safe at any dose for everyone, we'd have no modern drugs.
> There is no such thing as proving something "safe".
Is that not what NCAP does?
Or what NTSB and FAA do with aviation?
You can prove that some things are safe. Does not mean infallible, means safe.
>There is no such thing as proving something "safe". Go back and re-read the parent comment. The important point you are missing is that basically anything can be "linked" to cancer, and if you adopt the argument you are making, there would be nothing left.
Really? You have some studies linking wheat and whole grains to cancer? And I don't mean wheat crops sprayed with glyphosate, just straight up wheat? Raspberries? Strawberries?
The reality is, very little of the actual natural food in our food chain is directly linked to cancer. All the additives we pile on top, on the other hand, are.
I would argue if we can't show a direct benefit to the consumer, it shouldn't be in the food chain. So, what is the direct benefit to a human consuming red-5? "It looks better on store shelves" isn't a direct benefit.
A shelf stabilizer? Sure, plenty of instances that makes a lot of sense. Food coloring that happens to be cheaper than natural alternatives? Just... no.
Yes, whole grains cause cancer if you make them into bread and toast the bread. The evidence is much stronger than for Red dye No. 3.
https://www.fda.gov/food/process-contaminants-food/acrylamid...
Strawberries are also linked to cancer, because they contain sugar.
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/62/15/4339/508983...
Almost all natural foods are linked to cancer. The important question is, how large is the risk?
Dark toast is obviously much riskier than Red dye No. 3. We should think about that when we consider what to ban.
Food isn't sold burnt from store shelves. Of course people may 'toast' it to unsafe levels. That's an educational issue.
Untrue, you can buy burnt bread at most grocery stores. Go to the bakery, look at the ends. Many will have burnt tips.
Also: I've never bought this, but I just found this premade product, which is sold in my grocery store and is known to the state of California to cause cancer.
https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.197151007.html?...
A good example is the cancer causing aflatoxin on peanuts.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
You could be enjoying some all natural peanuts and be exposing yourself to a highly carcinogenic byproduct of a fungus that grows on them.
Hell, people were doing that for millennia until some scientists actually discovered it.
Acrylamide is in all baked bread. It's formed during high temperature cooking - like baking.
Toasting just increases the amount present.
I sure can get it in a restaurant.
> The reality is, very little of the actual natural food in our food chain is directly linked to cancer.
Natural things aren't inherently safer. Are alcohol and red meat both considered natural? Alcohol is a group 1 carcinogen (same as tobacco and asbestos) and red meat is group 2A (probably linked to cancer). A cursory search shows some studies linking fish consumption to cancer, though I have no idea how accurate those studies are.
Fun fact - some things that cause cancer can help prevent cancer. Several studies have concluded that marinading meat in beer significantly reduces the carcinogenic compounds developed by frying or grilling meat.
> Natural things aren't inherently safer.
Yes they are.
We have been exposed to, and made adjustments for, things in our environments.
Novel chemicals have novel effects.
There are plenty of dangerous natural things, and there are safe artificial things (I suppose).
But there is a clear basis for eating food that your great grandparents would recognise.
There is also a slowly mounting volume of evidence that there is something wrong with ultra processed foods, hard to say what, but it is becoming clear they are bad for us.
So natural things are inherently safer, all else equal
Ultra processed foods are usually unhealthy because of the relative high amount of additives that are 'needed' to proloung their conservation. Those additives can be natural, like sugar and salt, but still are unhealthy in large quantities. Also heating, which can be seen as natural, can proloung conservation, but often have the side effect of chemical reactions into unhealthy molecules.
The better alternative is to eat non processed food, but only early after reaping. Otherwise the natural (!) chemical reactions like oxidation makes them unhealthy.
The plants in my garden are all natural. I don't use chemicals. Still half of them contain poison like blueacid.
Just to say, natural doesn't mean healthy. Processed doesn't mean unhealthy.
> But there is a clear basis for eating food that your great grandparents would recognise.
I’m quite confident every health metric is better for the Red-3-eating cohort than the great grandparent cohort. Being a great grandparent is associated with cancer, dementia, and near-unity death rate.
Sugar and simple carbs are natural, but are probably the cause of the majority of the world’s healthcare problems.
Sugar is a highly refined product. It is "natural" for a not very useful definition of natural.
Also I agree that not every thing natural is good. It is a rule of thumb, not a strict rule.
Mēh! The hippies were right (again): Eat food. Mostly plants. As unprocessed as you can.
I’ll ignore for a second you completely avoided the point to move the goal posts.
Alcohol isn’t a natural food, it’s a result of food rotting. Much like rotten meat, you can naturally assume negative side effects
Red meat has positive benefits from its consumption, as does fish.
What is the benefit of red5? If aren’t going to address that, I’ll assume you aren’t interested in anything but whataboutism and aren’t actually engaging in a good faith discussion.
> I’ll ignore for a second you completely avoided the point to move the goal posts.
Which goal posts did I move? Directly addressing a foundational claim isn't moving goal posts. You said that very few natural foods are directly linked to cancer. That's demonstrably false, as red meat almost certainly is. To your next point:
> Alcohol isn’t a natural food, it’s a result of food rotting.
I genuinely have no idea what you mean by natural then. At what point does something become unnatural? Alcohol certainly occurs in nature quite a bit, and I don't know that I'd call all the instances "rotting". Leavening bread with yeast produces noticeable amounts of alcohol. Orange juice famously contains a surprisingly high level of alcohol.
> Red meat has positive benefits from its consumption, as does fish.
Of course they do and that's why I never claimed they didn't. I would assume all foods have health benefits (beyond the obvious one of course). However, you claimed that most natural foods don't have links to cancer in particular.
> What is the benefit of red5?
I only just realized you said "red 5" earlier. I assume you're referring to red 3 (erythrosine), though I don't think the specific dye matters here.
> If aren’t going to address that, I’ll assume you aren’t interested in anything but whataboutism and aren’t actually engaging in a good faith discussion.
I'm not an expert on the dye in question and know little about it so I purposely didn't comment on it. I don't think I need to do so in order to address your central claim, which seems to be--and correct me if I'm wrong--that to lower our cancer risk we shouldn't add things to our food chain which aren't naturally in our food chain. That claim relies on 1) being able to distinguish what is natural to our food chain, and 2) for natural things being less likely to cause cancer than unnatural things. I believe 2 is flawed for the reasons I already gave. 1 is a famously thorny subject. Even pre-history human diets were varied enough for adaptations for different regions to evolve.
Anyway, I'm an idiot on the subject of dyes but if you want my argument: adding regulations isn't a zero-cost thing. We shouldn't add them without solid justification. I don't have enough knowledge about this subject to know whether or not such justification exists for the red dye in question here. However, your proposed alternative doesn't sound well-defined enough to be argued without you being clearer about what you mean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
There is no way to establish a food as "safe".
Health outcomes are noisy, especially if taken over a long time. Peer reviewed studies are often flawed in various ways and most scientific studies lack the statistical power to be inconclusive.
The fear based approach to human diets can not work. We have to accept risks in our lives if we want to eat at all.
"lack the statistical power to be inconclusive" is that right?
Natural food is not safe. Many natural foods that people eat, specifically plants, contain natural toxins and carcinogens that would probably not pass your threshold for "safe".[1]
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2217210/
I don't know about "peer-reviewed gold-standard studies," but what you've described is basically how the EU does it – what goes in food must be proven safe.
It's the opposite of the US approach, which is to ban (only) proven-harmful ingredients.
I don't expect US food-safety laws to become more strict in the next four years, but who knows, maybe the dead-worm guy will surprise us.
It’s impossible to prove a negative.
and that's also completely and totally irrelevant to the problem at hand.
Proofs don't apply in biology. Nothing in biology is a truly logical system that can be proved or disproved. That's true for chemistry and physics too- the only system where anything can be proved is math.
In science, instead we gather evidence and evaluate it, and often come to the conclusion that it is so unlikely something is dangerous (given the data) that we presume it's safe. People use the term "scientific proof", but I'm not aware of any in biology that would truly be classified as proof.
Why wouldn't you be able to prove a negative link?
It is logically and practically impossible to prove things to be untrue. We can only prove things that are true.
The thing we could prove is “no detectable increase versus control, in our test data”. There is no way to prove “x does not cause cancer” any more than there is a way to prove “x does not cause meteors” or “x does not cause spontaneous human resurrections” or “x does not cause humans to turn into unicorns”.
There is no distinction in logic between a positive statement and a negative statement. Every proof of a proposition P is also a proof of !Q where Q = !P.
Proof by contradiction is just that, assume P -> get contradiction, therefore proof that !P.
People really need to retire this canard.
Practically impossible, not logically impossible. "For all" proofs do exist in mathematics, but obviously it's very unlikely that you could do such a proof for physical reality.
How does “no detectable increase versus control, in our test data” not prove there is no connection (errors in the study aside). And why does that not prove anything, but "yes detectable increase versus control, in our test data” does?
Because, sure there can be errors either way. But a study produces new knowledge, not just knowledge or "just as much a mystery"
It is certainly possible to show that there is no positive correlation with a certain statistical significance. Pretending we're talking about such high standards as "no human future or presently alive could ever be harmed by any quantity of x" completely misses the point and borders on bad faith.
Let's set workable standards for when something can be called safe and enforce them.
No, you assign a risk score as well as a cost score to all the industrial inputs that you can use. In this case, there are readily available red food dyes (eg cochineal from industrially farmed insects) that have much lower risk scores (as they are from plant and animal sources) and not significantly different cost scores.
You also need to ask, what is the cost of not having this substance? In this case, the cost would be - you have food that isn't red. Is that a substantial problem for society?
To treat these as irrelevant and boil it down to "prove it is harmful or shut up" is needlessly reductive.
Have those other been proven safe? Is it possible they too cause cancer?
I'd like to point out that eating charred meat has a clear link with colon cancer, so we can't simply appeal to nature for safety.
> that have much lower risk scores (as they are from plant and animal sources)
This is a fallacy. If anything, there's more reason to expect that a substance evolved to serve a biological function (that happens to be red) would have biological effects in humans than a substance developed specifically to be red and be biologically inert.
You didn't address the part that it adds nothing useful to the food other than color.
That's an argument against all food dyes including natural ones.
Given color improves the enjoyment of food, I'd argue it is useful though.
So let's ban all artificial food dyes. Natural ones work fine. Artificial dyes lead to a race of food manufacturers adding more dye to make their junk food products more appealing.
"Presentation of food" is not "nothing useful". People who see basically eat with eyes. Like plate/food ratio can make you overeat. Or some food can be totally fine, but if it is just made to look bad for example rotten/expired it can be vomit inducing. Just like if someone says you just ate something bad, if you think what you eat is harmful the body will react
If there is no food coloring at all would we eat better? I bet yes. But we can't get there now. It will not pass any vote
Color is important for appeal and flavor. Otherwise we would never color food.
No you would only have to ban things with no nutritional benefit. The comment you replied to specified the case in question: it only lends the food a color.
I'm not really pro-bureaucrat, but perhaps the standard for food should be slightly different. Just maybe, (novel) food (additives/preservatives/ingredients) should first be proven safe, rather than waiting until they're proven unsafe to prohibit them. It's not as if this was a substance humans regularly ingested for centuries and people are only now wigging out... look at the wikipedia entry for this. The only halogen that's not part of this thing is apparently bromine, the IUPAC name for the chemical's about as long as my comment here.
Proven safe against what though?
I'm a big proponent of food safety regulation, but we have to acknowledge that there's no way to prove something is safe against all possible harms it might do. There will always be a risk in food. The question is how much risk will we tolerate?
Proof can take a while to get together.
I prefer the EUs precautionary principle that enables action to be taken when there is uncertainty over something.
Well, I guess you should start by banning all fruits and vegetables, because there's evidence that they contain toxins and carcinogens, and we're not sure if they're "safe"[1].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2217210/
That is not how precautions work. If unsure, you ban the mostly unnecessary things.
"Hmm, there is an unknown risk with it, do I really need this unhealthy candy" no
"Do i really need this vegetable" yes
For an analogy, if your neighborhood is unsafe, you don't stop going to school altogether, you probably just won't go out for a night stroll.
This kind of absolute logical statement is very stupid.
Also, consider that when faced with unsure studies, the fact that fruits and vegetables are part of healthy human diet for centuries longer than a dye has been, is a major factor.
> That is not how precautions work. If unsure, you ban the mostly unnecessary things.
Yes - which includes vegetables. Humans can generally survive indefinitely on an all-meat diet.
> "Do i really need this vegetable" yes
No.
So, your general statement is correct, but you missed the basic fact that vegetables also fall into the category of "mostly unnecessary" things - so, my point stands.
You're just being obtuse now. Surely you understand the dietary difference between a vegetable and a dye that exists purely for aesthetic purposes? If not, there is no point continuing this.
I think you need to familiarize yourself with the precautionary principle, since i believe it applies here
PP Paper :
https://fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf
> The problem with that premise is that almost every substance has a remote chance of causing cancer in some way or another.
What is the scientific basis of this claim ?
It's pretty extraordinary that every single thing we eat is carcinogenic.
It's not extraordinary to state that every single thing we eat[0] can have a study designed around it to show that it might cause cancer -- that is how studies and chemicals (things we eat) work.
[0]Except water, maybe. I'd bet if you shoved enough water into a rat at minimum you could observe an increase in tumor growth rate though.
Sorry, IARC already labeled hot water a “possible carcinogen” a decade ago [0]. That puts water into the same risk category as RoundUp
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/panel-s-advice-cance...
It's a strawman argument often brought up to argue against banning potentially cancer causing foods.
It's also not true, since many foods - most vegetables, for example, or many types of fiber - do the complete opposite, and reduce your risk of cancer.
> The correct (and scientifically valid) thing to do is to only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done.
How about only put things in food that are contributing to the actual food? It's not just nutritional value, it's absolutely taste and texture as well. But visuals? Surely you can agree the balance of "is it worth it" is different for the color of a fruity loop than for nutritional value and taste.
You're correct that the "acceptable" line needs to be somewhere because risk isn't absolute, but that line can be in different places for different purposes. (And you can't just write off all cancer concerns because some of them probably aren't legitimate.)
I'm not sure why you're getting downvotes for this because it seems to me a highly valid stance. Why do we allow mostly unchecked, highly processed junk food in our society, only banning items that have a high level of risk of being poisonous, if at all? Especially since the main target of a lot of it is children.
Shouldn't we take the opposite approach? Make it very hard to use highly processed unnatural products, to the point where it's cheaper and easier for companies to fall back on less processed "clean label" ingredients.
I work in (well, adjacent to) the F&B sector and I can tell you that every large company knows exactly what clean food means, why it's healthier, and where to source the ingredients, and that they have equivalent food products using these either already on shelves, or waiting to be produced if there's a shift in consumer desires.
The reason that they don't already use them - the reason you mostly only see advertising for processed foods - is because the more highly processed a food is, the higher the profit margins for companies. I've seen it stated as a rule that every level of processing gives a 2x profit margin. So if you can process an item 3 times, you'll 6x your profit margins (obviously a rule of thumb rather than law).
In my experience if something is even slightly enjoyable it has a chance of causing cancer.
> Just ask the state of California
I've see the labels at Starbucks, by the chocolate at the grocery store, and by the balsamic vinegar.
Anyone can say X is harmful, just not on X…
> only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done.
Sounds like a good way to kill a lot of people
I would rather go other direction. When introducing new chemical or additive it has to be proven that is not harmful to humans before using it
Alcohol causes cancer, should we reenact prohibition? Water is poisonous in large enough doses. Should we ban water?
Nothing in this world is truly free of all risk. We have to make judgement calls with every single substance. Yes, coloring food is a legitimate use with real benefits that we need to weigh against the risks. And we also need to consider the very real costs of enforcement and burden of compliance. Bans are an extreme option that does not come without costs for the government and society.
Obviously the problem is that Red no3 is so prevalent and completely unregulated. Alcohol is sold separately and ID is needed to purchase and isn't added to children's food. If the dye was only sold separately in bottles this debate wouldn't be happening.
The water thing is even more unserious so I'll ignore it.
This is a silly argument that is often made.
Everyone knows alcohol is a toxin. It is regulated. You have to be of certain age to buy it. It isn't normally in things you consume daily as a secondary ingredient in doses that would be harmful. You can taste it if it is. If you cannot taste it, you can recognize the effects from drinking it.
The dose makes the poison with any substance, that is a base tenant of toxicology. Not many people are unintentionally poisoning themselves with water.
Food and drug regulations save lives. If you want to argue against them, please at least do so in a manner that doesn't rely on absurdist examples.
Its regulation has nothing to do with its cancer causing properties. Why are you even bringing that irrelevant point here?
Who is being absurd now?
I am not sure you understood my comment. I wasn't calling anyone absurd, and I was using the fact that it is regulated to reinforce the idea that it is a known toxin.
> Its regulation has nothing to do with its cancer causing properties.
Only because that's so far down on the list of immediate issues it causes.
The difference, I think, is that alcohol is a choice. But having a potentially dangerous dye in a pill you're forced to take is not.
> alcohol is a choice.
Thousands of ppl die every year from being other end of DUI. I didn't choose to be on the road with ppl who choose to drink. It was forced on me.
We (humans) don't subsist on some Matrix-like slop that provides all of our nutrients for no pleasure. Eating is a weird combination of necessity and pleasure activity. You could ask: if there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing taste, why risk it? You'd ban most spices with this line of reasoning.
At the end of the day, the safest thing (in terms of avoiding cancer) is probably to plant some potatoes in your backyard and eat them unspiced and unbuttered for the rest of your life. Most of us prefer food that is a bit more appealing than that, however. Appealing in all aspects - taste, texture, and appearance.
Other than bakery items, what foods do you regularly eat that depend on having a specific color? I don't see how that's anything other than a marketing tool to make them stand out on store shelves. When you order something in a restaurant, you typically don't even know what their version will look like until it gets to your table. I've never, not once, added dyes to home cooking outside of cake icings and things like that.
There've been ridiculous attempts to get rid of perfectly innocent flavor enhancers before, like the fight against MSG. Take out MSG, and food tastes less good. But take out a borderline red dye, and what's the worst that happens? Factories have to sell soda that's slightly less pretty in the bottle?
> what foods do you regularly eat that depend on having a specific color?
Probably all of them. We are super sensitive to colors.
Red meat and fish like tuna and salmon have carbon monoxide and sodium nitrate treatment just to keep them red because that's how people think they can judge quality.
> Consumers will pay up to $1 per pound more for darker colored salmon compared to salmon with lighter hues, according to research by DSM, a company that supplies pigmenting compounds to the salmon feed industry.
> according to research by DSM, a company that supplies pigmenting compounds to the salmon feed industry
Seriously?
Alternatively, if we stopped dyeing fish, a year later people will have totally recalibrated what they think fresh, healthy fish looks like.
Only for farmed salmon.
Wild salmon eat krill and other smaller organisms, many of which provide the components to turn the salmon meat a shade of pink.
Farmed salmon don't get the same components in their feed, so their meat isn't the same colour. So the farmers add some of those components into the salmon feed, et voila - pink salmon meat.
see https://www.dal.ca/news/2023/03/21/farmed-salmon-colour-heal...
We feed chickens, Merigold flowers to make their yolks darker
Cheese
Tuna
Pickles
Oranges (apples as well, but I can't find an old article)
Wasabi
Apricots
Ginger
Salmon
https://www.treehugger.com/foods-youd-never-guess-were-artif...
Don't forget red meat either.
In many cases[0][1][2] it's treated with carbon monoxide to make it look redder.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5848116/
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=3801706&page=1
[2] https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2005/11/17/FDA-ask...
Cheetos, skittles, Froot Loops, Gatorade, salsa, salad dressing
To paraphrase Shakespeare, “Would a Cheeto by any other color taste as savory?”
Very off-topic but I can't wait to read in the news about some kids school report about Shakespeare being written by some LLM which has training data that includes this quote ;)
Those are dyed, but they don't depend on the dye for nutrition or taste. Wasabi isn't less delicious if it's a lighter or different hue.
The saying goes you eat with your eyes. These things depend on dye as they rot on the shelf otherwise.
A paper on it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...
They rot on the shelves ... when competitors can make their alternatives more flamboyant to stand out. Not if everyone stops needlessly coloring those foods.
I mean … the pickled ginger served by my local Japanese sushi place is … well, the color of ginger (same shade as like a ginger beer) and it tastes fine to me?
Nope, eating nothing but potatoes for the rest of your life is a fantastic way to ensure that you end up with severe macro/micronutrient deficiencies, which will be a very effective way of generating disease, including cancer.
> Hyperbole.
> 1. A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect, as in I could sleep for a year or This book weighs a ton.
> 2. A figure of speech in which the expression is an evident exaggeration of the meaning intended to be conveyed, or by which things are represented as much greater or less, better or worse, than they really are; a statement exaggerated fancifully, through excitement, or for effect.
> 3. Extreme exaggeration or overstatement; especially as a literary or rhetorical device.
From DuckDuckGo, quoting Wordnik, quoting The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
For fun, you could grow your own seasoning (besides herbs, easy too) for those potatoes. I recently learned about the plant Salicornia - you can dehydrate them and grind them to make a green salt. I'm going to try to grow some this year.
>We (humans) don't subsist on some Matrix-like slop that provides all of our nutrients for no pleasure. Eating is a weird combination of necessity and pleasure activity. You could ask: if there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing taste, why risk it? You'd ban most spices with this line of reasoning.
I mean, we absolutely do that already. There's plenty of folks on a low sodium diet because while the salt tastes great, it's bad for them.
In this case we aren't talking about eliminating the color red entirely, we're arguing about a slightly different color. You can get red from a strawberry, raspberry, cherry skin, etc. which will work just as well. It just won't be the neon-red that red-5 produces.
Yup, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of dyes one could use to get red that are completely harmless. Although they may be more expensive, I have no clue.
I don't think anyone really cares or thinks there's some benefit. The problem is (I think) that this leads to some people believing that the dye causes cancer, when there's been no direct link in humans.
The studies that show cancer in rats involve the equivalent of you eating like a pound of the substance a day or more when the dosage you’re exposed to is in milligrams for food.
Plenty of things you eat would kill you if you ate thousands of times as much per day. Most spices. 100 cups of coffee will likely kill you.
Seems more like a problem with uneven application of bans.
Red dye 3 might cause cancer (maybe) but it's admittedly such a weak effect that studies aren't finding a link in humans.
Meanwhile, there are carcinogenic things like alcohol which anyone can buy (over 21).
Heck, we can't even mandate that alcohol must contain B12, which would absolutely save lives and prevent some of the serious injuries of alcoholism.
But we can ban this dye that may or may not in some very small percentage of people cause cancer.
But red dye has little to no value to consumers and there are equally viable alternatives. No one is going to start bootlegging red dye 3 if it is banned. Alcohol has huge value and is basically impossible to ban.
What does B12 in alcohol do?
B1 and B12 it should be.
As for what that does [1], wet brain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke_encephalopathy
If someone you know is an alcoholic, try and get them to take b vitamins.
But have those dye alternatives been proven safe assuming an equally rigour test of "well, this might cause cancer but we can't actually prove it"?
If you are asking what would putting B12 (or B1) in alcohol do: prevent serious irreversible deficiencies that are not only horrible for the person themselves, but people as a whole, one way or another.
Call it risk reduction.
Well, we did TRY banning alcohol, but it didn't go that well. We do at least generally attempt to prevent children from consuming alcohol, though.
Should we ban alcohol? I think people should stop drinking it, but in general I don't think the sale of things that may be harmful in some ways should be entirely prohibited, it would just be good if we minimized the amount of potentially harmful ingredients in our general food supply. e.g. if someone wanted to buy/sell Red Dye No. 3 on its own I don't think that would be a big concern.
Both alcohol and tobacco are regulated by the ATF. The FDA would ban cigarettes if they had the authority.
Yeah, B12 AND B1 in alchohol alike. There are lots of people around age 50 who get admitted to social home and have irreversible B1 deficiency, labeled as "alcohol-induced B1 deficiency".
Follow-on serious question: who gets to decide what risk is too much and what reward isn't enough for me and my body? Why should that be anyone other than me?
Because that's what we tried for a hundred years and its how we ended up with innumerable wildly dangerous products on the market. The amount of research to vet all the products in your daily life would be astronomical and that's even assuming the companies making them are honest about the ingredients. Here's the context of why the FDA was founded:
> By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products that had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, mascara that could cause blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law did not get through the Congress of the United States for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_Drug_Administration
A combination of economists, epidemiologists, public health officials, governments, and individuals.
Why other than you? Because you have an impact on society. Your actions affect others.
But this is to do with food I eat. I don't feed it to other people.
Here's a better question, then: what health and safety decisions do I get to make on your behalf. What can I dictate to you that you can't do, or have to do? Can I mandate that you have to run 5 miles every day? It will be good for you to do, and it will impact others by increasing your productivity and lowering the cost of your healthcare on society. Is it reasonable that I should be able to use the threat of violence to induce you to exercise? Because that's all that regulation is: it's an outline of behaviors for which the threat of violence is a legitimate response.
Would you be upset if you ate something every day and didn't understand the risks fully and then developed a disease because of it? What if no one understood the risks aside from the entity that sold it to you? Would you be upset if someone you cared about deeply, say a child, made a mistake of never understanding there was a risk to consuming something, say, baby food, and then developed a life ending disease because of it? Would you feel responsible if you facilitated giving that person you cared about the food you chose to buy and there by aided in ending their life prematurely?
Any of these scenarios should make it obvious there has to be some sort of regulation around these things, as no one individual is an encyclopedia of toxic substances, and we exist in a bazaar of choices.
There could be a compromise, much like there is with alcohol and tobacco, that if you absolutely wanted to buy something toxic, you could do so. However, that wouldn't really necessitate that you couldn't use it to harm someone else.
I'm surprised they're banning Red 3 instead of Red 40. Red 40 is a very common allergen.
Yes one member of my family would be thrilled if Red 40 was banned. They don't have an anaphylactic reaction, they "just" barf it back up shortly.
I suppose it boils down to freedom of expression. Analog is a type of red plastic does nothing to humans, but can cause cancer if rats eat it. Do we ban it? What if we're actually trying to kill rats in our area?
Humans do not eat plastic, this argument doesn't make sense.
I think it's more about overextending risk assessments
Yes, of course. Humans do not directly eat plastic. At least nobody I know chews on plastic plates or cups.
But that does not mean that humans don't eat any plastic. Tiny pieces of plastic gets transferred to the food by contact with plastic containers. Some processes like microwave ovens, radically increase the amount transferred as well. Previously it was thought that these microplastics would just be eliminated from the body through typical waste functions, but evidence is increasingly mounting that The microplastics actually stay in the body long term and destroy cells they come in contact with. Given we have found nontrivial levels of microplastics in all of our vital organs (including testicals!), that's a scary proposition.
A crude analogy might be germs. Humans don't eat germs directly either, but by nature of their size and invisibility to us, we end up consuming plenty of them.
Don't forget about drinking it. Plastic water bottles are insanely profitable. And nobody really knows how many people daily a hot coffee that came from a Keurig pod and went into a styrofoam cup.
Humans constantly consume microplastic. This is a bad faith argument.
Just because an argument is wrong (and in this case gp is very wrong), does not mean it is in bad faith. Arguing in bad faith requires intent. I see no evidence of intent in gp's message. Ironically, if it didn't then one could say that dismissing arguments as bad faith (without evidence) of such is itself a form of bad faith, meaning your dismissal would be in bad faith. However, I see no evidence that you intended to argue in bad faith.
I will disagree. Stating an obviously empirically false, easily observed statement immediately does set the table for a bad faith argument IMHO.
It's only in bad faith if the poster knows the statement to be false. You can't prove that they do, therefore it's pretty rude (to say the least) to accuse them of bad faith. It's also not remotely "easily observable" that humans constantly consume microplastic.
> It's also not remotely "easily observable" that humans constantly consume microplastic.
https://www.google.com/search?q=do+humans+eat+plastic
Less than 500ms on my end. This is turning into a knock-on bad faith argument. I'll end it here, before I need to defend that the earth isn't flat
The FDA does believe there's strong evidence for its carcinogenicity. Literally the very first paragraph points that out and links to the 2012 publication
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23026007/
It's been banned from cosmetics since the 1990s and its restricted in food in European Union, China, and the United Kingdom and limited in Australia, and New Zealand. California was also banning it starting in 2027. The FDA is behind on this
You’re linking to a publication that has nothing to do with the FDA.
They are banning it now so that the incoming administration can't claim credit for banning it in a few months.
> They are banning it now so that the incoming administration can't claim credit for banning it in a few months.
The incoming administration won't be banning things from our food. It will be removing regulations and allowing corporations to put whatever they want into their products no matter what the harms are. I wouldn't be surprised if the incoming administration actually reverses the Red Dye No. 3 ban outright or just guts/weakens the FDA to the point where they can't do anything about it.
We're talking about an administration that previously pulled USDA inspectors out of slaughterhouses and allowed the corporations to police themselves. It killed a rule that forced poultry processors to dispose of chickens with lesions potentially caused by a cancer-causing virus and allowed them to just cut off the tumors (assuming they catch them, they also allowed chicken and pork processors to speed up their production lines, reducing the time workers have to spot problems). It reversed bans on harmful pesticides. It cut back regulations on foods that claim to be "organic". It waived nutrition/calorie label requirements for restaurants, and it allowed food companies to make substitutions and omissions in their products without updating ingredient labels.
I expect we'll be hearing about a lot of listeria salmonella and E. Coli illnesses/deaths in the near future, and much later on we'll be here commenting on articles talking about how deregulation of the food industry and regulatory capture by the food industry have resulted in a lot of preventable deaths from cancers and illnesses.
>The incoming administration won't be banning things from our food. It will be removing regulations and allowing corporations to put whatever they want into their products no matter what the harms are.
But RFK was also complaining about all the additives added to foods in the US, and wanted to get rid of everything from ultra processed foods to seed oils?
It will be interesting to see the conflict between the industry lobbyists stuffing trump's pockets with cash and RFK Jr. who is extremely opinionated. My guess is that either RFK Jr. folds and makes compromises whenever trump asks him to in order to stay in his position or he gets thrown out on his ass for standing up for what he believes. I really don't know how firmly RFK Jr will hold to his convictions, but I do know that Trump has no problems getting rid of anyone who refuses to be blindly loyal to him.
Then why appoint RFK in the first place? Seems like a dumb move to appoint someone who you know is going to cause conflict later.
Why does he appoint any of the disastrously unqualified people that he does? He seems to enjoy creating chaos. Maybe he even hopes to put the food industry in a position where they have to beg him to rein in RFK Jr's plans.
Probably to get the votes of those who had been backing RFK Jr in the election.
But... they will anyway, if public sentiment favors it. If not, they'll blame the predecessor. This seems predestined to be.
From AP, seems like this has been in the works for over 2 years:
> Food and Drug Administration officials granted a 2022 petition filed by two dozen food safety and health advocates, who urged the agency to revoke authorization for the substance that gives some candies, snack cakes and maraschino cherries a bright red hue.
These regulations fit pretty well with the Democrats platform but until now they would have been near impossible to pass.
Historically I would agree, but we are in a new world. RFK Jr is the face of increased FDA regulation and banning of potentially toxic materials, and he is coming under the Trump administration. For the vast majority of his life, he was a Democrat Fighting frequently Republican administrations purposes of environment and health, but he is now very much rejected by The Democratic party. The Republican party seems to be welcoming him fairly warmly, although it will be interesting to see how long that persists as soon as he has some disagreement with Trump or starts making a real impact.
Personally I really hope many Democrats can put The health of our people ahead of other things and work together to make meaningful changes, because something really needs to be done. Chronic health issues have exploded and it may already be too late for multiple generations who will suffer from chronic disease their entire life as a result of this. If those of us alive and aware of these problems now don't do something to correct this course, we will be guilty of criminal negligence to our descendants in my opinion.
Increased food regulation is only one part of his platform. And it's something that Democrats have wanted for a long time.
He has a ton of other stuff much more aligned with the right
They never would have banned it if RFK Jr. wasn't the HHS nominee.
Incorrect.
https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-00830.pdf
Scroll down to "I. Introduction".
> In the Federal Register of February 17, 2023 (88 FR 10245), we announced that we filed a color additive petition (CAP 3C0323) jointly submitted by
RFK was not the HHS nominee in February 2023.
But it appears this process has been going even earlier than that: November 15, 2022 [0]
[0]: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/17/2023-03...
Where did you read that?
Doesn’t that make perfect sense? First test in animals. If carcinogenic in animals then don’t move to humans. A lack of studies in human is hardly a basis for ruling it safe.
That was a sensible simplified version of the logic during my training for regulation in drugs and medical devices, at least.
I think the primary reason it was banned in California last year was all the studies correlating it to deleterious cognitive impacts on children
https://www.additudemag.com/red-dye-3-ban-adhd-news/amp/
https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/potential-impact...
If a food additive is banned in the EU, it should be banned here IMO. The EU has a good track record on what should or should not be included in food
EU law works a bit different. EU law bans everything that has not been shown to be safe (or grandfathered in) while US allows everything that has not been shown to be dangerous. Neither system is perfect.
For example, Chia seeds where illegal in EU before 2020 (but you could still buy them). Not because it was dangerous but because no company had paid money to fund studies to prove that Chia seeds are not dangerous.
Strictly speaking it isn't banned in the EU, it is banned in the EU _with the exception of processed cherries_. Quite why the cocktail cherry industry was considered so critical that it received a specific exception is unclear.
I think it would mean at the time of the ban, the alternative red dyes that were available didn't work well with processed cherries.
cherry lobby
You do know the US bans more food colors then the EU, right? You can't just say LGTM and go with what the EU does.
I don't know whether that's literally true, but I can certainly tell you that there is no point in banning stuff nobody in the EU is thinking of using anyway. US companies are way more "adventurous" with their additives, which makes regulation here even more important.
There are in fact several food dyes in the EU that are "banned" in the US.
Using the word "banned" though is misleading. Most things are not approved because no one has petitioned for approval, not because they were found harmful. This happens more in Europe than the US though because the US has GRAS.
This, exactly.
And to clarify, since it appears to not be well known even in the US, that GRAS = Generally Recognized As Safe[0], which isn't necessarily all that safe given the "testing" required to meet that "standard."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe
Its not just that. Different ideas on how to regulate.
To add something to food in the EU, you need to prove FIRST it causes no harm. It follows the precautionary principle.
In the US, the FDA allows "similar compounds" rapid approval, allowing for the expansion of what's allowed without testing.
Here is the probably not too bad chatGPT summary
United States: Risk-Benefit Approach
General Approach:
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) operates under a risk-benefit analysis framework. This means additives can be approved if the benefits (e.g., preserving food, enhancing flavor) outweigh the potential risks when used as intended.
In some cases, manufacturers can self-certify an additive as "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS) without requiring FDA pre-approval. This system relies heavily on the manufacturer's responsibility and scientific consensus among qualified experts. Approval Process:
Data Submission: Manufacturers submit safety data for new additives, but the level of evidence required can vary. For GRAS substances, companies may use existing studies or published research instead of conducting new, comprehensive tests.
Rapid Approvals: The GRAS system allows additives to be introduced more quickly, provided there is no immediate evidence of harm. This has led to criticism that some substances enter the market without sufficient independent oversight.
The differing approaches to food additive regulation in the EU and the US stem from distinct legal frameworks, principles, and processes for evaluating food safety. Here's a breakdown of how it works:
European Union: Precautionary Principle
General Approach:
The EU adheres to the Precautionary Principle, which means a substance must be proven safe before it is approved for use.
Manufacturers or entities seeking approval for a food additive must provide comprehensive scientific evidence to demonstrate that the additive is harmless to humans. Approval Process:
Scientific Evaluation: The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) conducts a detailed risk assessment. Applicants must submit robust toxicological and safety data, including studies on metabolism, potential toxic effects, and exposure assessments.
Re-Evaluation: Even after approval, all additives are subject to periodic re-evaluation to ensure ongoing safety as new scientific evidence emerges.
It is.
Approved in EU* but not US:
Quinoline yellow (E104), Azorubine/Carmoisine (E122), Ponceau 4R (E124), Patent blue V (E131), Green S (E142), Brilliant Black BN (E151), Vegetable Carbon (E153), Amaranth (E123), Brown FK (E154), Brown HT (E155) and now Red Dye No 3 (E127)
Approved in US, but not in EU:
Orange B**, Citrus Red No. 2 and FD&C Green No. 3.
* Some individual EU countries ban some of these
** Not used despite approval
All the additives you mention are permitted only for specific uses and/or highly regulated quantities. None are simply "approved in EU but not in US".
You can get more information on each of them here: https://ec.europa.eu/food/food-feed-portal/screen/food-addit...
By what measurement is their track record good?
The main export of the EU is bureaucracy
look at the health of average person in EU vs US particularly related to food related disorders.
Include obesity, diabetes. Then move onto the GMOs and Roundup and how GMOs enabled mass use of Roundup. Roundup is now being looked into as a potential source of the increase in autism, dementia and other neurorelated conditions.
Keep digging.
"Glyphosate has been assessed 3 times in the EU. The first assessment resulted in initial approval of glyphosate in the EU in July 2002. The second assessment, which was carried out between 2012 and 2017, led to the first renewal of approval.
The most recent assessment was carried out between 2019 and 2023 by Member State Competent Authorities, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), and showed that there is currently no scientific or legal justification for a ban. This led to the renewal of approval of glyphosate in 2023.
Under the conditions of approval and by following good agricultural practices, glyphosate is considered not to pose any harmful effects on human health or unacceptable effects on the environment."
https://food.ec.europa.eu/plants/pesticides/approval-active-...
If you keep digging you’ll find some countries have banned it.
And because Roundup ready GMO are not in use, the usage is lower in the EU vs US.
Roundup (glyphosate) is in wide use in Europe.
Not to the same extent apparently because of GMO.
One category of GMO is called “Roundup ready”
It means crops that can take Roundup and survive at high concentrations of glyphosate while natural crops have some limit of concentration. That means higher usage in the US.
It's the old "better safe than sorry" routine. Very popular with politicians and managers, who are incentivized to take action on extremely minor issues and hold them up as heroic accomplishments while avoiding all the work and mess involved with fixing _actual_ systemic and cultural problems.
Banning all chemical that does exactly nothing except to absorb spectrum of light and make fake food look more like the real analog
Why some harmful substances are banned swiftly while others linger and whether this is about public health or legal optics.
Would it be better for them to just ignore the rules if they don't feel that the rules make sense?
How about the idea that it serves absolutely zero purpose, and could cause cancer?
Maybe that is reason enough to remove it from food? “Some people here” love Europe so much, they banned it for that reason. But, during this election, conservatives pushed for the same so now it’s strange how “some people here” are “pro food dyes”.
>>>How about the idea that it serves absolutely zero purpose, and could cause cancer?
I'm not going to bat for Red Dye specifically (I'd be perfectly happy for it to never be added to food), but I generally like a society that's default-allow more than default-deny. A lot of people will argue that certain things serve "zero purpose" because it's not something they personally care about. But presumably somebody wants their food to be red, or why would anyone be adding it?
I agree - except - we have a purchased and lobbied FDA that is not serving the people.
There is poison in our food.
So until there isn’t poison in our food, I think we reform the agency and go a little harder on the MBA led organizations that got us here.
"conservatives pushed for the same"
RFK Jr is basically the polar opposite of a conservative, even though he hitched his wagon to Trump after Harris refused to return his calls. Seeing the Trump base adopt RFK's positions is...super weird. Trump is extremely pro Corporation and anti-regulation. RFK is anti-corporation and super pro regulation, and believes that fast food should be banned and the government should provide every American with three organic meals a day, which isn't really a Republican platform. And there's a good chance RFK Jr has served his purpose to the MAGA group and he'll start facing opposition that leads to his elimination from the administration.
Indeed, it's normal on HN to see endless attacks on California (which had already banned both red dye #3 and 40, among others, to the extent that they can as a state) for banning potential carcinogens, making this a rather hilarious turn of events.
And FWIW, the FDA started the process for this months ago, and months earlier received a petition (from a Democrat, if it matters) to ban the dye.
RFK Jr is MAGA where it counts: Anti-vaccine, vaccines cause autism, HPV vaccine doesn't work, Covid attacks whites/black but spares jews/chinese by design.
> Trump is extremely pro Corporation and anti-regulation
Trump is actually very, very anti-corporation. It's a very prominent part of his stump speeches and campaigning. He's accusing corporations of everything.
His fortune was made from real-estate speculation and the Trump corporation is basically run like a family business. If you were try to attach a label - he is pro-aristocracy. He believes wealth tied to land and inheritance is "legitimate", and wealth tried to trade and commerce as illegitimate.
> family business
In the organised crime meaning of the word family
Trump is actually very, very whatever will get Trump elected or whatever was last whispered in his ear.
Trying to find a coherent philosophy from Donald Trump is impossible.
Right. Michelle Obama pushed for a lot of things that RFK wants. Now that the Republicans suddenly want what the Democrats have always wanted of course they're going to pass those laws
It's not a technicality, it's the law.
The comparison between American and Canadian Froot Loop cereal is illuminating:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/uc265y/a...
It's the same from most things, I wonder why americans are ok with that
mcdonalds fries: https://boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/McDonalds-...
fanta: https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/ab2mWVvJ_Tp7.UWQpFd.pQ--/Y...
oats: https://foodbabe.com/app/uploads/2019/02/U.S.-vs.-Uk-quaker-...
chips: https://foodbabe.com/app/uploads/2019/02/U.S.-vs.-Uk-doritos...
I agree with you until you bring foodbabe into this. She’s notorious for hand-picking things that meet the MAHA agenda. For example, the oats argument, yes there is a ton of crap in the ultra processed Quaker oats, but that’s an old recipe. Here’s what they sell at target:
https://www.target.com/p/quaker-fruit-38-cream-instant-oatme...
STRAWBERRIES & CREAM INGREDIENTS: Whole grain oats, sugar, dried strawberries, salt, dried cream, natural flavor, nonfat dry milk, sea salt, dried vegetable juice concentrate (color), tocopherols (to preserve freshness).
There’s not always a one-to-one comparison, and I agree shady companies in the US have free rein over what crap they add to our foods, but this has already been debunked.
It wasn’t debunked, it worked.
They changed the recipe after it received significant attention. Before then the company was happy to use food coloring on Apples to pretend it had strawberries while actually providing strawberries in another country.
The thing is you can’t bring attention to every single product, which is the point of regulations around deceptive packaging.
One ingredient, oats. https://www.quakeroats.com/products/hot-cereals/old-fashione...
I don’t know for sure but it looks like in the image the oh so simple is a different product line. Seemingly similar to all of Lays chips which come in normal and the healthier line.
> that’s an old recipe
It's also an old image from 2019. What was the recipe like in 2019? (I don't know the answer, genuine question)
The McDonald's fries are the exact same ingredients, the FDA just requires more granular specifications which look "scary". Those are the bracketed "sub"-ingredients you see versus just "Vegetable Oil" for the other side.
As to the additional anti-caking ingredient, I can't tell you. No idea if it's omitted from the UK side due to regulatory reasons or it's actually included but has no requirement to be listed, since it's included in a plethora of British foods in the same places that it's used in the US (things like powdered/confectioner's sugar):
https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/j.efsa.2020...
Either way, it's not particularly nefarious (despite her scary red highlight added to it).
As an aside, saying this as someone who's tried McDonald's in probably 60+ countries. It's all the same thing (except a few countries in Asia; Korea and Japan notably), especially like for like (Double Cheeseburger for Double Cheeseburger). I have no idea where this "European McDonald's is healthier/better" idea sprang up, outside of European superiority complexes (probably due to the need to self-justify how insanely busy McDonald's are in Europe). Especially in a country who's most famous takeaway item is overgreased fried chicken/fish and fries/chips tossed together in a bag, then covered and shaken in even more salt and condiments; possibly with a handful of cheese tossed on for good measure.
The "scary red" polydimethylsiloxane is in basically everything, and it's inert, non-toxic and non-flammable. It's permitted in the EU as E900. It's an anti-foaming agent used in trace quantities to prevent oil from splattering on the employees.
There were no negative effects on rats at over 2g/kg. [1]
[1] https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/j.efsa.2020...
Also: canola oil is a rapeseed oil. You can imagine why a lot of people are more comfortable calling it "canola" than "rapeseed" (and hence why it's written that way on US packaging).
Canola was also originally a trademark (name comes from "Canada oil low acid") - it's made from rapeseed that was specifically bred for low erucic acid. It definitely made it easier to market.
They are not the exact same ingredients in the fries. Why are you claiming this as it's clearly untrue?
Because I can read.
I’m wondering, what are we seeing here? Actual difference in ingredients used, or a difference in regulations requiring listing all ingredients?
Yeah, take the Doritos as an example: the UK bag lists "Cheese Powder", the US bag lists "Cheddar Cheese" with sub-ingredients in parentheses (plus Whey and Skim Milk).
What is in the UK Doritos' "Cool Original Flavour" (read: Ranch) ingredient? Maybe something like Tomato Powder, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Buttermilk, Natural and Artificial Flavors?
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Whoa, hold on. RFK may be right about this one thing in the same way a broken clock happens to occasionally be right, but let's not rush to take away his nutcase title. He has some truly messed up opinions about a variety of topics.
The dude literally got a brainworm from eating roadkill.
The idea that people want to take him seriously as a food safety crusader is wild.
The idea that he got brainworm from roadkill is literally a lie.
I'm being flip, but it's not a lie. He doesn't know where the brainworm came from, and it was revealed later that he has been eating roadkill meat his whole life.
Exotic parasites is a known risk when eating roadkill. It's not a difficult connection to make.
More lies. He didn't eat roadkill. You need to stop.
https://apnews.com/article/rfk-new-york-ballot-access-lawsui...
Speaking to reporters in a hallway after court ended Wednesday, Kennedy was asked whether he picked up other roadkill.
“I’ve been picking up roadkill my whole life. I have a freezer full of it,” he said, eliciting laughter.
Kennedy campaign spokesperson Stefanie Spear later said by text that he wasn’t joking. She said that’s how Kennedy — a falconer who trains ravens — feeds his birds. She added that he no longer has the 21 cubic foot (0.59 cubic meter) refrigerator, which had been in New York’s Westchester County suburbs.
How's that a lie? It came from his own mouth! It's his PR person who walked it back and cooked up an explanation.
RFK Jr is not a child. He's in full control of the narrative he wants to portray about himself. If he wants to go say kooky things to reporters, he can't be upset if people think he is a kook. And he clearly seems to personally enjoy the reputation of being a kook, based on willingly he throws out jokes about it.
I have no problem with him being a kook! It's just ironic how many criticisms and conspiracy theories he throws out there about others and yet how seriously people want to take him.
He explained it was for his birds. If you don't believe the words from his mouth, now you're in conspiracy theory territory and believing what you want to believe instead of what is documented. You're free to do that, but understand that it's a lie.
Where did he say he actually eats the roadkill? One source?
Eating roadkill is not that uncommon in the US. So it's not a crazy connection to make. He admitted to having a walk-in size freezer of the stuff and that he's a redneck.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/08/12/robert-f-kenne...
> He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)
Now this is clearly a joke. But the important thing is, he clearly enjoys trolling reporters. If you are not happy with the way RFK Jr. is treated in the media, take it up with RFK Jr.
> If you are not happy with the way RFK Jr. is treated in the media,
To be fair, he didn't say that. He cited "the media" as a source. He was talking about you, who's said a few things now that the media didn't say with the justification of "not a crazy connection to make."
I understand where you're coming from, but I'd be more accurate to say e.g. "If you are not happy with RFK Jr.'s image," as opposed to trying to make that person out as an anti-media crusader.
He's not even really a food safety crusader, he's just a vocal proponent of the "whole foods movement". Other than that, he's a former heroin addict Kennedy dynasty failson.
>truly messed up opinions about a variety of topics.
I would actually really like to hear what the messed up opinions are, when I've watched interviews with him they've seemed pretty reasonable. He cites sources for basically all the claims he makes.
I hesitate to dive into this because I'm really not interested in arguing the nuances of RFK with people on the internet (not you, others). RFK Jr. has a long history of controversial statements regarding COVID, COVID vaccines and being anti-vaccine, or vaccine-skeptical as his supporters like to frame him.
For me, one of his most controversial statements in recent memory had to be during a press conference he gave in 2023 when he stated that COVID might have been "ethnically targeted" to "attack Caucasians and Black people" and that "the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."
He tried to defend the statement by citing scientific studies, which is a habit of his that his supporters admire about him. However, actual experts in the field pointed out that his interpretation of the studies was flawed and there was no credible evidence to support the idea that COVID was engineered or had evolved to target or spare certain groups.
Sources:
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-f-kennedy-jr-false-claim...
2. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jul/19/robert-f-k...
3. https://nypost.com/2024/11/15/media/jake-tapper-rips-rfk-jr-...
https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-selec...
>COVID-19 ORIGIN: COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
>Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research
So the US government has concluded that the virus almost certainly came from a lab conducting gain of function research.
What is gain of function? Making a virus more lethal.
RFKs words:
>There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately
It DOES impact some races more than others.
This is a completely plausible theory. I don’t understand why it’s a crazy idea at all.
Why wouldn’t a country trying to make a virus more lethal also try to curve its lethality away from its own people?
Yeah, this shit is why I was hesitant to dive into the topic. You've made several leaps of logic here that I don't feel like debunking or discussing further, and I'll note that you've conveniently forgotten to defend the most controversial part of his statement – that the engineered virus supposedly curves its lethality away from Ashkenazi Jews as well, which would imply that that group also had something to do with its manufacture.
It’s entirely possible that it’s a coincidence, groups of people share genes in common. It’s actually rather unlikely that a gene, especially one that seems to confer some resistance to the effects of a virus, would exist for only one group of people in the entire world.
I would love to hear about my leaps in logic honestly.
Nobody is saying that it was definitely ethnically targeted, but it IS plausible. Just because the ethnicity involved makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean that it’s not possible.
Your comment suggests it’s an outrageous notion, but if that’s true then just give a decent argument why it’s actually outrageous.
Chinese leadership have specifically mentioned ethnically targeted bio weapons:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_bioweapon
>In 2017, a textbook published by the People's Liberation Army National Defence University called the Science of Military Strategy debuted the potential for biological warfare to include "specific ethnic genetic attacks."[10][11] The same year, former People's Liberation Army general Zhang Shibo authored a book that concluded that "modern biotechnology development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability," including "specific ethnic genetic attacks" (特定种族基因攻击).[10] In 2020, a professor at the same PLA university spoke of the "huge war effectiveness" of a "targeted attack that destroys a race, or a specific group of people."
Like what? are you sure you understand his opinions?
Many who finally talk to him directly who thought like you do find out maybe not so crazy.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/01/14/los_angel...
RFK Jr is not a good person, is not a smart person, and we should not attempt to whitewash or legitimize him. He has a complex early life, but his actions today are his own choices.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
LLM summary for your damning information:
Based on the provided transcript, the accusations and criticisms against RFK Jr. focus primarily on: 1. Allegations of Sexual Assault: • Multiple allegations have been reported, including by Vanity Fair. His response to these allegations has been a mixture of acknowledgment and apologizing directly to at least one accuser. 2. Acknowledgment of Past Wrongdoings: • RFK Jr. himself has admitted to having a problematic past, described as “skeletons in the closet,” though these have not been exhaustively detailed in the transcript. 3. Entitlement and Privilege: • Growing up as part of the Kennedy dynasty, RFK Jr. is characterized as having displayed behaviors shaped by immense privilege and a sense of entitlement, including unruly and eccentric conduct during his youth. 4. Controversial Political Views: • While not explicitly detailed in this transcript, RFK Jr.’s political stances (e.g., vaccine skepticism and other fringe views) have been controversial and polarizing, drawing criticism from various quarters.
There is no mention in the transcript of more serious accusations, such as criminal activity beyond the sexual assault allegations, nor evidence of deeper scandals. However, the discussion also suggests that there may be more allegations or controversies not covered explicitly in the transcript.
I fail to see how your link supports your questioning or your statement, could you explain it? It looks like it's just the opinion of the owner of the Los Angeles Times, a person that some might feel is heavily biased.
I’ll quote from another comment in this thread:
> LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is a doctor and transplant surgeon and invented drugs to fight pancreatic and other forms of cancer. He ACTUALLY talked to RFK Jr. and after listening to him talk and what he had to say instead of relying on mainstream media propaganda, he changed his opinion on him.
RFK Jr has frequently and publicly claimed that the side effects and dangers of most all vaccines are worse than the diseases they prevent. There is no legitimate data that even suggests that is true. You can get into the minutia of potential dangers and health effects of vaccines all you want. But when you look at the actual outcomes, like with COVID, the public is far, far better off having taken them and RFK's fear mongering endangers the public health.
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Dr Oz is a licensed doctor as well. You need to do better than "but but the mainstream media!!!!1"
Yeah we are not talking about Dr Oz, he has nothing to do with the conversation about food dyes or RFK's policy ideas.
Whataboutism isn't an actual defense. I don't know who Dr. Oz is and it has nothing to do with the issue above.
They’re all talking rubbish. Trump said he will finish the war in UA within 24 hours. They are just talking stuff angry people swallow like pelicans.
You have elected a bunch of ego driven loonies. Just accept it and hopefully you still get to vote in four years time. What a great time for this planet.
> LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong
Billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong who prevented the LA Times staff from publishing their endorsement of Kamala Harris?
I agree, the news coverage of what he says vs what he actually says in interviews is very different.
Someone can be a nutcase but be right about some things.
Also, seeing photo of him slurping up McDonald’s on the plane, guess healthy food isn’t the highest priority for him? Just the one he’s loudest about
Moderation matters. If you eat mostly whole, nutritious foods, it’s totally fine to eat processed food occasionally.
No food is inherently unhealthy or bad, so I don’t think there’s any issue with him eating McDonalds on a plane. Maybe he was in a hurry, or just wanted to be social and stopped there with someone else who wanted it.
What is unhealthy is when the majority of your food is not nutritious, which is currently the case for most Americans. So why not try to make common American foods more nutritious by default, as they are in most other wealthy countries?
It was awesome living in a European country for a couple of years as an American. You learn that ingredient lists at the grocery store really are shorter in ways you don’t expect. It’s easy to buy a fruit yogurt that is just yogurt and fruit, for example. Not “yogurt, sugar, artificial and natural flavors” as you’ll find in many popular foods in the US. It was noticeable with a lot of different food choices.
Also, whenever we would come back to visit the US, after living there for a year or so, we would always have mild digestion issues and stomach cramps for a week or so. This was common among many expats that we talked to. We visited over a dozen countries while we lived there, and the US was the only one that had that issue.
I totally agree that moderation matters.
But when you say "whenever we would come back to visit the US ... we would always have mild digestion issues and stomach cramps for a week or so" this does imply that there's something wrong with American processed food, and this isn't an issue of moderation.
Despite not liking the man, I actually agree with RFK on the healthy eating and think it's good that he has raised awareness of it. Red dye has finally been banned, this is good! Heck, I'm very liberal, this kind of regulation is what the US should have been doing a long time ago and happy to see it happening.
My point about RFK was not that he eats processed food sometimes and therefore he's a hypocrite, it's that he's willing to compromise his values for access to power. But hopefully it's just that one time to get on Trumps good side and he actually makes some good regulation about poisonous foods! The market is good at a lot of things, but not at keeping things healthy, so I'm glad republicans are seeing the value of regulation over unwavering belief in the free market.
Every time I see this, I don't get it.
It only make sense as a "gotcha" if you believe in absolutist purity tests. He looks fit and healthy.
Is there a video somewhere of him swearing on a bible that he will die before eating McDonalds?
Instead there are many videos of him talking about that McDonalds incident and how terrible Trump’s food choices are and he had nothing else to eat!
Also there are memes from that picture of him grimacing and how frustrated he was.
Let me be more explicit about my point. I believe RFK genuinely wants to promote healthy living, and I agree with that. But Trump requires loyalty to be part of his inner circle and forcing RFK to eat mcds is getting RFK to prove that loyalty. RFK obviously hated eating that burger. My point is, if he’s willing to compromise his values for access to power does he really prioritize his values or does he prioritize access to power?
No “gotcha”, I’m not a partisan. I don’t like Trump but there are a few things he’s done I like, but even with those I often don’t like HOW he did it. For example Greenland, I think that’s great for USs long term prospects (shipping routes), but to say military action is on the table is reckless. Not every criticism is a gotcha, and just because I disagree with 90% of what RFK believes doesn’t mean I don’t think his commitment to healthy eating is good. Maybe that you read a criticism as an absolute indictment of someone shows you have more purity tests than what you criticize.
Hope someday you get it
I just don't see the rationale in framing it as a morality and value test in the first place that is worth reading into.
I have a diet I try to follow in general. I break it all the time and it's not a big deal at all. Sometimes I'll eat a cheeseburger with my coworkers. What does that say about my character? Should it say anything?
How much can one hate a burger? It's not like he is a Hindu or the burger contained his first born child.
I mean, he says "Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes onto that airplane is, like, just poison" on a podcast, and a couple of days later he's looking unhappy eating a mcds burger with trump in a very publicized photo.
Eating a cheeseburger is one thing, but he literally calls it poison.
Anyway, I hope he does succeed in pushing more regulation on what chemicals we have in food. I'm pro regulation for things like this - the market's always going to go to what's cheaper so regulation is needed to prevent companies poisoning consumers. I'm glad the republican party has come around to this point.
A broken clock is right once a day. RFK Jr. is not the nutcase we're told he is, he's a very slight different kind of nutcase that's just as bad because he mixes legitimate concerns with his absolutely insane point of view, and uses the same spurious arguments for both, muddying the water for everyone.
What is insane?
His belief that vaccines cause autism.
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It's been throughly studied and debunked. Are you aware that there are countries other than the US where they have researched those claims?
Are you against the FDA releasing all the data from the pharmaceutical companies so that others can conduct their own studies from full data? Right now every single head of the HHS, FDA and CDC want to protect pharma companies and let them hide all their data. RFK Jr. is the first candidate that isn't looking for a job in industry afterwards and wants to actually free the data for the sake of the American people. For that alone I think he should be head of HHS.
As far as I've seen the only debunking has been done on single vaccines like MMR, not on the full schedule of vaccines. And it's a lie to say that they have been thoroughly debunked. Studies have shown that some vaccines can cause allergic reactions. Autistic children have over a 3X rate of food allergies or neurotypical children. Doesn't that warrant studying that maybe adjuvants are causing an immune response and the immune response causes autism?
My money is on the neurological development of autism involving some form of hyper-connectedness which also expresses itself in the gut in over-sensitivity, causing the allergies.
That, and perhaps the reason there are so many forms of autism is that the actual development of the brain is impacted so much by environment. If the children are given healthy, constructive environments to learn to interface with the world on their own terms, they'll have a better chance of benefiting others than if they're treated poorly and allowed to practice maladaptive patterns.
The covid vaccine nearly killed my father (which means covid itself probably would have) due to activating previously undiagnosed sarcoidosis, but subsequent vaccinations mediated by immunological awareness were safe and effective for him as with others.
Anyway, don't expect net positives out of RFK. He might be "independent" but you need many independent experts to reach a good understanding. Trump's administration isn't going to end corruption, it's just going to streamline it.
I respect your speculation and I think that by studying with the full data we can get closer to a real answer, rather than everyone throwing their hands up and saying "there's nothing we can do!"
If all we get from RFK Jr. is releasing of all the data that the FDA and CDC have, that is a win for society. Autism is a huge problem and no one is talking about it. The autistic kids from the 90s and 2000s are still being supported by their parents, but what's going to happen in another 20 years when their parents are dead? Will we have millions of autistic homeless people on the streets? It's going to be overwhelming and we need to fully study this. One in 34 kids in the US have autism, what are we going to do in 50-60 years?
I mean, he's still a nutcase. He can be right about some things for the wrong reasons.
If you hit upon a scientifically accurate conclusion through an unrigorous process, basically by pure chance, this doesn't make you a good scientist.
Except he isn’t a nutcase. They twist his words incredibly.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/01/14/los_angel...
So many people who opposed him and then take the time to understand what is actually saying, not what they have been told he is saying, come to realize he is completely sane. Bernie Sanders is on that list fwiw.
The proof here seems to be an interview with someone (owner of the LA Times) who talked with RFK for a few hours came away believing he knows more than doctors. Is that right?
Yes, the owner of the LA times is an actual doctor and transplant surgeon.
Ben Carson was a respected neurosurgeon before he publicly stated that, quote, "Joseph built the pyramids to store grain."
You can be brilliant in one field and an idiot in everything else.
That doesn't make him an idiot, it just means he watched some TV.
A lot of people think the Jews in Egypt built the pyramids, but they didn't.
This doesn't make them idiots.
(For anyone who doesn't know, the pyramids were there before Josef arrived.)
People aren't required to know everything, and when they don't that doesn't make them idiots.
Not knowing something isn't what makes them idiots. Spouting off about it as though they do is what ruins their credibility. At the very least it demonstrates that they're bad at vetting their sources.
Speaking without knowing something also doesn't make you an idiot. (If that was the rule the entire planet is nothing but idiots.)
The general issue is that people don't realize when they don't know something correctly, and it's impossible to vet every single thing you hear.
You can call him an idiot if he was corrected, and despite evidence he refuses to change his position. Has he done that?
I was talking about Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong not Dr. Ben Carson. Care to show any evidence that Soon-Shiong is an idiot?
Just because one doctor is stupid doesn't invalidate all doctors, does it? In that case, Dr. Ben Carson would be proof that Dr. Fauci is also an idiot.
Of course not, but it highlights the risk of Appeal to Authority: one's expertise in a specific field does not make them experts in others, even ones adjacent to their own. For a more local example, I have a lot of experience writing Python. Someone outside the field might mistakenly think my opinions on, say, Java, are equally informed. They're not.
Dr. Soon-Shiong was responsible for developing oncology drugs. Does that give him enough authority for him to evaluate RFK Jr's stance on drug safety?
You haven't researched him at all, have you?
Of course not. That would make him an expert on developing oncology drugs, not on the ethics of drug safety and especially not on communicable disease control.
If chemotherapy meds had the incredibly low adverse reaction rates of common vaccines with the same typically high effectiveness, I bet his general opinions on the subject would be different. No, of course we shouldn't require school children to get preventative chemotherapy because the risk-reward ratio would be awful. And of course we should vaccinate them against polio because there's trivial risk in the prevention compared to the life-altering effects of the illness.
Also an expert on drug safety and how to get drugs approved because he would need to go through the FDA to get it approved for chemotherapy.
He filed to get the FDA to revoke the polio vaccine. He’s rabidly anti-vax, routinely spewing lies that have been debunked repeatedly. He is absolutely a nut case that happens to have some points of view that many could agree with.
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My wife's a doctor, and had patients begging her for leftover Vioxx samples after Merck pulled it from the market, preferring to take their chances with heart issues rather than living in agonizing pain that Vioxx was especially good at treating.
Turns out medicine's complicated, who knew?
Just because a drug works well doesn't mean that it's moral to release a drug that knowingly kills tens of thousands of people a year and then hide that data.
I agree. In my opinion, hiding the risk was the sin, not releasing the drug. Many, many people with chronic pain conditions would gladly accept the risk.
It's kind of the same with any treatment: chemotherapy may make you incredibly sick before it saves you. Willow tree bark may fix your headache but cause you to bleed profusely. Homeopathy may make you die of whatever you were sick with before it cures your dehydration. Everything has its tradeoffs.
We need to the full information in order to make our own choices. Right now pharma companies hide a lot of the information, including from clinical trials from drugs. All the data should be released and not hidden so that people can make their own choices on what medications they take and if they want to risk taking it, that's fine because they have all the information and they can make their own risk/reward judgement.
Looks like you, me and RFK Jr. are perfectly aligned.
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RFK Jr. is very wrong about some very important things and those already make him a dangerous nutcase.
You’re told he is wrong but I strongly suspect what you’re told he believes or says about those very important things is not what he actually does.
Orange fanta is not really a good example because they are totally different flavored drinks. It’s less about chemical rules than the flavor design
Protip: neither of those are oats.
protip: do not drink fanta, do not eat mcdonalds fries, do eat oats (but just buy real oats and throw in raspberrys or whatever), do not eat chips. Doesn't matter whether you are in the US or UK :)
Food Babe is a terrible source with an agenda. If you actually look at the safety profile of the things involved the differences are minimal. The real risk comes from all the sugar and simple carbs in both.
- The fry ingredients are exactly the same, the US just requires more granular labelling. PDMS is used in oils in Europe too. Maybe in McDonalds oil maybe not, unclear. It's authorized for use in the EU as E900, and it is inert, non-toxic and non-flammable. It's added to stop the fryer oil from spraying on the employees.
- Both Fantas are bad.
- The oats are comparing two different products. 1/4 the label in the US is mandatory breakdowns not required in the UK. 1/4 of the label is the "creaming agent" (starch, whey protein, casein protein, some oil -- nothing a bodybuilder wouldn't consume) and 1/4 is the added vitamins and minerals not present on the UK label. The only meaningful difference appears to be using strawberry-flavored apple chunks. Does it make a difference? Probably none.
- The doritos in the UK list an ingredient that's just "Cool Original Flavour" lmao that FB somehow decides not to highlight. The US requires a breakdown of the components of said "flavor." And the use of annatto vs FD&C dyes which there's really very little conclusive evidence one way or the other. But fine, I guess we can stop using Azo dyes.
The real question is: does swapping Azo dyes for anatto make Doritos measurably healthier or is the problem that you are eating Doritos.
As an oatmeal connoisseur, I'd be remiss not to point out that the two oatmeal products being compared there are not the same. The American product is specifically "Strawberries and Cream," which looks like it was deliberately picked because it adds a few extra scary-looking ingredients from the creaming agent; whereas the UK product is just "Heaps of Fruit," sans cream.
The UK product contains freeze dried strawberries and raspberries. The USA market "strawberries and cream" contains no strawberry, instead it has freeze dried apple dyed red with added strawberry flavor.
I don't believe natural is inherently good nor artificial inherently bad but the USA product is objectively lower quality. IMHO it is cheaply made crap to fool people that do not read the ingredients.
to fool people that do not read the ingredients?
I say if your product mentions strawberries and you get dyed apples instead the problem is not the person failing to read the ingredients list, something has gone wrong at the legislative level.
Here's the American version of "heaps of fruit," "fruit fusion."
https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/quaker-oats-instant-oatmea...
Ingredients
Whole grain oats,sugar,dried raspberries,dried strawberries,natural flavor,tricalcium phosphate,salt,beet juice concentrate (color),iron,vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol).
The American version is identical to the UK version until "natural flavor." The US version then adds some vitamins plus tricalcium phosphate, salt, and beet juice concentrate. The only "scary" ingredient is tricalcium phosphate, which appears to be an anti-caking agent.
Edit: on Quaker's website
https://www.quakeroats.com/products/hot-cereals/instant-oatm...
It says "Tricalcium Phosphate is a source of phosphorus that also provides the essential mineral calcium." Which is actually what I suspected, it's another added vitamin that has the benefit of also being an anti caking agent.
Why does our version need an anti-caking agent when theirs doesn't? And why do we need to get calcium from checks notes oat meal (the non-cream version, mind you) when people in other countries can get it from things it's in naturally, like milk?
There may be ostensible reasons why some of the extras we get are theoretically useful, but I'd still wonder why we're the only ones who go to all the trouble (when we don't seem to come out ahead for it, health-wise).
The UK versions all seem to have calcium phosphate in them too.
https://www.britishcornershop.co.uk/quaker-oat-so-simple-hea...
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/quaker-oats-high...
For some reason, the quaker oats uk website doesn't list it though, perhaps they're new formulations.
I imagine it's used to keep the fine powders (powdered salt or milk powder depending on the product) from caking. If the previous version didn't have any salt, then it might not have needed it.
I find this particularly interesting because it is due to market conditions, not legislation, that many Canadian foods have switched to colors from natural ingredients.
These companies appear to believe that Canadians prefer fewer artificial ingredients, and that Americans don't seem to care. Very curious.
It is happening, albeit slowly, here in the USA as well. Trader Joe’s generally has no added artificial dyes, fruit by the foot now is naturally colored, Whole Foods of course, and Wegmans bakery products.
Its just that there still are so many products you don’t expect- marshmallows with blue dye to make them more “bright white”, candies/sprinkles, any children’s medicine in syrup form (although you can now get some in dye free form finally)
I don't think Froot Loops ever used red 3. They use red 40.
It's more of a commentary about how food in the US is overly colored for no other reason than it looks cool, sometimes at the detriment of the health of the consumer.
Are you sure that Canadian version is less detrimental to the health of the consumer? It too looks artificial color-loaded to me.
I wouldn't consider Froot Loops a health food, but the Canadian version have all natural flavour and colour-
"Concentrated carrot juice (for colour), Anthocyanin, Annatto, Turmeric, Natural flavour, Concentrated watermelon juice (for colour), Concentrated blueberry juice (for colour), Concentrated huito juice (for colour)" etc
From their ingredients.
> food in the US is overly colored for no other reason than it looks cool
My understanding is that a lot of food is colored to look "natural" for uniformity. A good example of this is applesauce.
Another item is sprayed for coloring is ORANGES (Citrus Red No. 2 is the color)
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
Neither color of Fruit Loops is natural. American food is colored to look cool, because cool sells better with Americans. Canadian food is colored to look dull, because dull sells better with Canadians.
Is that your guess or were you in the marketing research department at Kellogs?
It's just how cereal is made. Before fruit loops are loops, they are grain mash. That grain mash is mostly uniform in color and brown-ish. In order to have a bowl filled with loops where some of the loops are yellow and others are green and others are blue, they add different colors of dye. It's the same whether it's neon green or organic green - the dye is added at the end for appeal to the consumer.
Why would they not just use less dye to reduce the colors in Canada then? Surely its more effective to produce them in one way instead of two.
It's colored so some set of people can make more money.
Hot Cheetos, outside the US and parts of LATAM, aren't red:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDOFPuy33m4
It's kinda jarring having grown up with that association.
The Canadian cereal was the same colour as in the US until a few years ago. I'm not sure what prompted the change.
Working towards getting the Canada European-Union Comprehensive Trade Agreement (CETA) ratified perhaps?
Those companies ought to be sued. They know that their die is cancer-linked and they still use it in the US even though they don't do it in Canada/EU.
We, as humanity, should sue all this big companies (nestle, coca-cola, etc.) for poisoning our lives for profit.
I looked into it, and from what I can tell the only link to cancer they've found so far is in male rats exposed to high levels of it, but they haven't found evidence that it causes cancer in humans or other animals.
What's odd to me is that it's still fine to sell food like bacon, where the link to cancer in humans appears to be much, much stronger.
…or cigarettes, which are available for sale everywhere.
If unhealthy foods are to be banned, we must also ban cigarettes and alcohol. If we are to let people be bodybuilders, or body destroyers, then all of these things should be available for purchase.
Ultimately it is a special kind of arrogance to tell people what they are or are not allowed to do to the one thing they unambiguously own and control: their own body.
the difference is that you are aware and are told about tobaco (which I would ban) and alcohol, food you are not told.
Keep in mind that the negative effects (beyond the coughing and diminished lung capacity) of cigarettes have only been publicly admitted to and explicitly taught only very recently in the history of tobacco.
The tobacco industry fought tooth and nail against any suggestion that tobacco products are linked to cancer and even advertised cigarettes as healthy.
I agree with you in principle. I would caution against taking for granted what we know today to be very clearly unhealthy and cancer-causing. It is often an up-hill decades long battle against incredibly wealthy interests to get to the truth.
Ok, well then, I’m sure no Americans are eating high levels of foods that contain dyes. So, surely there are long term 20 year plus studies on cumulative effects, right?
The only rats that developed cancer more than baseline in the study had a diet that was 4% red #3. Pretty sure no Americans are approaching that lol
Depends on the definition of high level. Was the amount given to the rats equivalent of 5x fruit loop bowls, or 5,000,000x?
in the US, priority #1 is fiduciary duty to shareholders. if customers are buying, and we make it more expensive to make, then shareholders will be mad!
Not causing cancer falls under fiduciary duty.
Azo dyes, in the quantities used in food, do not cause cancer. What causes diabetes and cancer is obesity which you're likely getting from consuming the food -- dyed naturally or artificially. The dye is ancillary. People need to eat less of the Doritos, the azo dyes aren't the problem.
The credibility of the food industry is so low that I think people would support bans on most additives on general principle. We look back at things like putting lead and radium in paint or using asbestos in insulation and say "they should have known better, how could they be so stupid". Well, good additives have a lengthy history of containing harmful additives and I think future generations will say the same about many of these currently in use. What's interesting is that from our current time we can see just how easily it happens, even with the amount of information available to average person.
I realized a long time ago that lack of information isn’t the problem. We’re basically living in a Brave New World now; most people are too distracted to realize they’re being poisoned and would only accept it if the very institutions doing it told them they were doing it. But IMO it’s more of an emotional thing - once you realize it it’s hard to go back to the comfy world of “actually the bureaucrats and shareholders are looking out for my well-being”.
Sometimes they just don't need to lie to us or hide some info, when it was proven and made public that cured meats cause different cancers nobody batted an eye.
> We look back at things like putting lead and radium in paint or using asbestos in insulation and say "they should have known better, how could they be so stupid"
The main thing is: they did know better. They lied to us. They spent a lot of time, money, and effort to lie to us.
And this has happened time and time again in many different industries. Just the other day there was a story on the HN front-page about the PFAS industry has been copying the tobacco playbook for in disinformation campaign.
Also on other topics. For example canned tuna with "Dolphin friendly" logos. Looks good, right? And then people look into it to see what it means, and turns out it has no value, is something the company simply invented themselves, and has done zero-effort to make anything more "dolphin friendly". The entire thing is a basically just a lie.
Many additives are probably entirely safe. Things like vitamin C and caramel are "an E number", and those are fine. But I sure don't trust things, and I don't have the resources to see what is and isn't safe myself, so best to just avoid most of it.
Labeling is the big one imo.
What gets tracked gets improved. I think we need to update the ingredient requirements for food (wtf is seasoning) but also update the fields on Nutritional Facts.
Having a drink like Oreo Coca-Cola read 0’s down the board is illustrative of my point. There’s lots of crap in our food but it’s been selected specifically for its ability to not be captured in the dozen or so categories deemed important back when legislation passed on food transparency.
Relevant news story from a few years ago in the UK, where a bakery was using US sprinkles on cakes, that aren't legal to use in the UK, due to Red #3 :
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1046348573/sprinklegate-sinks...
A moment's silence for the baker's daughter who couldn't go to Disneyland because of this regulatory overreach:
https://x.com/hausofvee/status/1448032811798175747
"British sprinkles just aren't the same, they're totally s*** and I hate them."
"I am extremely passionate about sprinkles."
Honestly hilarious. I feel his pain.
My goodness, for a website full of techincal individuals a lot of you are falling for the appeal to nature fallacy hard. Also, it looks like no one here knows how to defer to experts. I don't know much about food safety standards, chemical compositions, additives, etc. so I've talked with people who are experts instead. And from what I have gotten, most people are freaking out because they lack an understanding of what is really safe or not. People believe that since a certain scary sounding chemical was added that the food is now less safe when that's not the case.
> appeal to nature fallacy
Appeal to nature isn't a fallacy, it is a rhetorical device and can be a completely logical razor.
The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past. If we want a yellow food dye should we:
A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
Who the hell would take B? Unless we believe that our studies are infallible, all encompassing and perfectly established and executed the first will always be a better option. Time and time again we see that things previously thought safe are not but I would argue it is far far rarer to see that on the more naturally derived side of food.
>derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years
This one stands out to me because, as they say, “the dose makes the poison”. Taking some trace element from something “natural” and highly concentrating it is basically as novel as something new. Consuming a gram of something over a lifetime is different than consuming a gram of something every day.
Also, eating something for hundreds of thousands of years only means that most people will live several decades while eating it. It doesn’t mean people won’t be killed by it. It doesn’t mean people wont get cancer from it in 30-40 years. Killing 1% of the people that eat something would be a perfectly acceptable evolutionary loss, depending on the amount of nutrition and calories provided.
That’s why it is an appeal to nature fallacy. Because it says absolutely nothing about population level long term health effects.
> doesn’t mean people won’t be killed by it. It doesn’t mean people wont get cancer from it in 30-40 years. Killing 1% of the people that eat something would be a perfectly acceptable evolutionary loss
But it would be an evolutionary loss, unlike a synthetic compound that has been equally as well studied scientifically - this odds on would make the natural compound safer to consume… not sure why this is so complicated to understand
> The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past.
Okay, where in the evolutionary past did we eat Doritos colored with annatto?
> A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
A lot of things we have historically eaten are carcinogenic. Natural flavoring for root beer is flavored with sarsaparilla root. Fun fact, it contains safrole, a known carcinogen.
Carrots, bananas, parsley, black pepper, clove, anise contain alkenylbenzene compounds which cause cancer in rodents.
We've historically eaten coumarin-containing plants (tonka beans, cassia) -- carcinogenic.
Furoanocoumarins in parsnips, celery root, grapefruit, etc, can cause skin burns and prevent many drugs from working (or make them work too fast).
Cassava, sorghum, stone fruits, bamboo shoots and almonds contain cyanogenic glycosides which turn into cyanide when eaten.
Undercooked beans contain lectins, and 4-5 kidney beans are enough to cause somachache, vomiting and diarrhea.
Nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants) contain solanine which is toxic.
Various fruits like pineapples have raphides which are sharp spikes made of oxalic acid. If you eat particularly aggressive ones they can even cause bleeding.
The pawpaw fruit that has been eaten for generations contains annonacin, a neurotoxin.
People have been eating (prepared) mushrooms like gyromitra that have gyromitrin (metabolized to monomethylhydrazine, rocket fuel, a neurotoxin) for generations too. It can actually cause ALS over time.
Castor beans contain ricin.
The difference is apparently God doesn't have to publish this information on an ingredients list.
> B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
"A couple studies" is wildly disingenuous. A quick search will tell you as much.
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> Appeal to nature isn't a fallacy
It most certainly is.
> The appeal is to have a diet more in line with our evolutionary past.
Our evolutionary past is full of death and disease from what we ate. Humans have been drinking alcohol for centuries and there is strong scientific consensus that it causes cancer. Just because it's what humans have been doing doesn't mean it is safe and we should continue it.
> A) derive it from something humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and that a couple studies have confirmed is probably safe...
> B) derive it from petroleum (as current US yellow food dye is) that a couple studies say is probably safe.
You say "derive it from petroleum" like they pump it directly from the well into your food. Petroleum is composed of hydrocarbons, it's very useful and is used in a lot of different applications. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it is dangerous.
If it's a fallacy then it's one I plan to keep falling for because it's useful.
No one inhales six apples in a sitting but I sure have eaten 200g of chocolate in an hour before.
It's useful to go for more "natural" foods because they aren't designed to make me eat as much of it as possible. Even if fruit loops were as healthy as an apple the apple still wins because the fruit loops are deliberately engineered to encourage you to eat more of them.
> No one inhales six apples in a sitting
If hard ciders count then I sure have.
> It's useful to go for more "natural" foods because they aren't designed to make me eat as much of it as possible.
I'm not saying that fruits, vegetables, legumes, and other foods you get from nature aren't healthy, of course they are. The fallacy is to say that because it's natural it's inherently better then an artificial or synthetic counterpart. Instead of worrying about if the food dye in your fruit loops uses red bell peppers or is synthetically extracted from petroleum, how about we worry about people consuming too much ultra-processed, high calorie, and low nutrional foods. That will make a greater impact on the general populations health here in America. Banning additives and food dyes won't stop people from eating 2000 calories of fried oreos.
I think an important note is that regulatory agencies in other countries have cracked down on some of those scary-sounding chemicals, due to them being unnecessary for food with no real benefit for the person eating it, and possible evidence of negative affects.
I mentioned this in another comment, but as someone who has lived for multiple years in the US and Europe, it is a drastic difference in food quality between the two. Much easier to eat foods made of whole ingredients where I lived in Europe - even many prepackaged foods that we’d buy at the grocery store.
I came across this link yesterday[1] on a health-focused HN thread[2]. The study split a group of overweight people up into low-carb and low-fat diets, to see which produced better weight loss. The group that lost the most weight was actually neither - it was just whoever ended up eating less processed foods and more whole foods.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/health/to-lose-weight-focus...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42668123
> other countries have cracked down on some of those scary-sounding chemicals, due to them being unnecessary for food with no real benefit for the person eating it, and possible evidence of negative affects
Just because another country bans something does not make that thing harmful. Politicians banning food products and additives with no real scientific evidence is not unusual. They bend to public will, they are politicians after all. Also, studies that show "possible evidence of negative affects" in mice ingested at higher dosages then a human would ever eat or drink does not show they are harmful in humans. Humans are not mice after all.
> as someone who has lived for multiple years in the US and Europe, it is a drastic difference in food quality between the two
This is purely subjective, I've been to Europe and the Middle East, both have great food. But food in America is no worse in quality. The main difference is when I visited those area's I mostly ate out, at nicer restaurants where food would of course feel/taste/look better then the average meal at home or from fast food. But when eating at friends homes, the food quality (vegetables, fruits, meats) was no different than what I could get here in America.
> it was just whoever ended up eating less processed foods and more whole foods
I'm not arguing that we don't eat more ultra-processed foods. We do eat too many highly refined foods with little nutritional value. My argument is against blaming food additives, dyes, GMOs, HFCS, etc... Eating more whole foods, vegetables, and fruits would make you healthier, but that's due to the nutritional value, fiber, feeling more full for longer leading to reduced caloric intake, etc... Not because you got rid of food dyes.
> I'm not arguing that we don't eat more ultra-processed foods. We do eat too many highly refined foods with little nutritional value. My argument is against blaming food additives, dyes, GMOs, HFCS, etc... Eating more whole foods, vegetables, and fruits would make you healthier, but that's due to the nutritional value, fiber, feeling more full for longer leading to reduced caloric intake, etc... Not because you got rid of food dyes.
But the prevalence of the above ingredients serves to increase consumption of processed foods relative to whole foods, both by increasing “addictiveness” aka how much people eat, and by decreasing its cost. HFCS is the best example of this, having heightened addictive properties via increased satiety suppression and dopamine response compared to other sugars, while being heavily subsidized to the point that final prices see a 15% reduction. As a result, HFCS is added to many products it has no business being in, because it increases sales (and so consumption, of processed foods).
https://pastebin.com/VpeCJw3D
Have you considered that those experts might have perverse incentives? It’s not a secret that the very regulators whose job it is to make sure we don’t eat poison are the same people who sell the food. But sure feel free to “trust the experts”, I’ll be over here doing my best to not eat things made out of coal tar (even if someone in a lab coat says it’s okie dokie).
Every single thing in our society has perverse incentives. Every single person who ever sells you something has incentive to sell you as little as possible for as much money as possible. Every single employer has incentive to pay you as little as possible for as much labor as possible. But that's not how things end up happening, because other forces are at play.
People who worked their entire life in an industry and became experts on it, then become regulators for the same industry, have incentives to favor their industry, sure. But who else should be regulating the industry if not the expert in that industry? If you get someone who is not an insider, wouldn't they just fail at regulating, because they have no idea how it works? Also, the people who put someone in that position, isn't there a chain of accountability there? There are many people working side by side with the "evil person trying to enrich themselves". Bad acts come out. Incentives tend to balance each other out. It's not wrong that part of a regulator's job is to find a balance as to not destroy an industry while regulating it.
> But that's not how things end up happening, because other forces are at play.
Is it really not how things end up happening? We must be living in two different realities. The greater the power, the higher the likelihood it becomes corrupted. With such a high incentive to give into corruption, you can’t just hand-wave it away with “but I’m sure it gets balanced out by something”. Your local family doctor might be a good enough person to help you get better without expensive drugs, but the head of a large institution? Fat chance.
That feeling you just expressed of higher trust to your local doctor than to a head of a large institution: it came from having a pretty good idea what your local doctor does, and no idea what a head of an institution does. The growing problem with cynicism in our society is not because there's evidence of corruption, it's because nobody knows how anything works, but everybody gets fed "look at these bad incentives" by pundits (especially alternative media ones) all day. Everything is complex. Just because it is doesn't make it nefarious.
An institution's whole point is to be a system where you don't have to trust individuals. It's a way to deal with complex nature of our reality. People should really learn what institutions are, how they function, what accountability mechanisms they contain, instead of blaming them based on conjecture. "Look, this bad thing happened. And this person has this bad incentive. Now we know the whole story." We don't.
No not really, trust in my local doctor comes from having a personal relationship with him and trusting his character enough to trust his word. There are things that are going to be beyond my understanding, but if I can trust his character enough to believe he’d rather see me healthy even at the expense of a bigger paycheck, then I’ll do it. How people place that same trust in faceless institutions is beyond me. Again - what forces exist to prevent them from being corrupted? Absolutely the growing cynicism in institutions is because of evidence of corruption. We gave them undeserved trust, they abused it, and now we see the effect of that.
I think relying on your judgement of character to determine trust is a decent tactic in personal life and interactions, but it doesn't work at scale.
People place trust in faceless institutions all the time. That's why you sit in a box that produces about 50 explosions per second when you drive a car. I don't think you would've gained much by being comfortable with the character of your car designer. If you think building cars is complex, laws and regulations are just as complex. And it takes teams of lawyers, hundreds of pages of documents, and a lot of data to figure out what makes sense. But it's easy to armchair-judge all of that as "just some faceless institution".
> what forces exist to prevent them from being corrupted?
Why are you right now not stealing from your work, or vulnerable people around you? Why are you not trying to screw over everybody you meet? Those forces and more. There's a lot of scrutiny built into most institutions.
> the growing cynicism in institutions is because of evidence of corruption
I don't think we use the word "evidence" the same way. Having perverse incentives is not evidence.
Someone you have a personal relationship with and that you trust your character never crossed you? Never fucked you over? Never pulled a fast one? Never lied? You’re either gullible or incredibly lucky.
Oh come off it. The United States has the highest rate of obesity in the WORLD (excluding some small Pacific islands). The US also has some of the most overengineered food. It doesn't take much to see the connection.
We are well past the point of carefully reasoning about food. It is time to start killing off additives first and asking questions later. "Freaking out" is the reasonable stance when everything in the grocery store is poison.
You are blaming the wrong thing though. America isn't obese because of red dye 40 or food additives, it's obese because Americans eat too much ultra processed foods that are high in calories and low in nutritional value. Along with minimal exercise and walking.
Banning red dye 40 isn't going to solve anything, companies are just going to find another food dye, natural or synthetic. There needs to be major changes in the average American diet to incorporate more whole foods, fiber, vegetables, fruits, etc... Once that is done then take a harder look at the dyes and additives.
This isn't even that surprising. It's been a controversial food additive banned in various countries basically my entire life, and I'm in my 40s.
People eat maraschino cherries on ice cream sundaes in many countries where people claim the dye is banned, yet the cherries still contain the die. Maybe you should reevaluate your position.
The issue isn't that it's a health risk directly, it's just the result of some very reasonable principals. The "Delaney Clause" in the Food Additives Amendment of 1958 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is why it's getting banned. If something is known to cause cancer in animals, and it isn't necessary for the production of the food, then it shouldn't be included.
This is simply an application of the Precautionary Principle to things already associated with harm. Since we can't know all the goods or harms that can come from a substance, if something is known to cause potential harm and it's unnecessary, then we shouldn't consume it. The human body is an absurdly complex multi-variate system, and throwing a bunch of unnecessary random shit at it not a great idea in general, but is generally reasonable when we don't know whether it's producing harms or benefits or neither. However, when we know these additives can produce harms, and it is wildly impractical to do repeated, controlled longitudinal studies with large sample sizes on humans, all at various levels of exposure. So, since the substances are entirely unnecessary we might as well just avoid them unless they are essential to creating products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Additives_Amendment_of_19...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food,_Drug,_and_Cosmet...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
As a benzene-handling professional for decades who never intends to cease entering environments subject to exposure, I've never considered intentionally ingesting non-food ingredients or contamination to be the least bit safe. Especially dyes and pesticides, if you study the chemistry of these you can see that very good characterization and identification of complex, unique, undesired impurities has not really been very comprehensive at all. Beside the possibility that the dye molecule itself may be the most toxic component anyway.
With industrial hazards there is at least one layer of PPE, and I can do anything I see fit to further mitigate exposure in any way.
I don't even know which dye is in things like Flamin Hot pop culture materials, but they sure look fake to me. And if the only PPE between me and the potentially-hazardous substance is the bag that the Cheetos come in, I'm always going to be highly dismayed when the integrity of the PPE is compromised for any reason :)
As non-food ingredients have proliferated over the decades, all I can say is why even bother?
Give me a break, they couldn't have used very good strawberries if they had to make them pink artificially.
I am a lifelong science dude myself, studied dyes quite a bit and even synthesized some in the lab. So on this I trust the judgment of young mothers who are avoiding junk food for their kids more so than other scientists who propose that dyes are completely harmless for some reason.
I also talked with people who are experts, and they assured me banning Red Dye 3, among other things, is necessary and it will improve population health in the long term.
See, I can also make shit up.
Great, but I can actually back it up. That's the difference here. I can point you to experts who agree with what I am saying and who I have chatted with.
Sure, that would be interesting to see. Point me to the experts :)
If you are actually interested then Dr. Jessica Knurick. She is accessible on different social media platforms and has a website where you can contact her.
Or, maybe some of us have lived experience where artificial food dyes have detrimental effects to our children. I don't need science to tell me what my own two eyes and lived experience says. Do I really need a double blind study to tell me that when one of my kids eats food laced with these dyes, he's crazy for a week, but when he eats candy w/o these dyes, he just is a normal kid with a sugar rush?
My sibling comment goes into more detail, but claiming that anyone who has a lived experience is stupid (aka, falling for a logical fallacy) is just accelerating the distrust of "authority" at a time when we need it most.
> Do I really need a double blind study to tell me that when one of my kids eats food laced with these dyes, he's crazy for a week, but when he eats candy w/o these dyes, he just is a normal kid with a sugar rush?
TBH this sounds like exactly the kind of things double blind studies are invented for.
Ok - here’s one. https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2007/09/hyperactivity-in-...
But even if there were none that showed a link, I should just continue to feed my child something that would cause adverse reactions?
What’s crazy to me is … we are talking about a totally unnecessary food additive. It’s not like I’m arguing against some critical public health intervention to prevent a deadly virus. It’s a dye to make food turn a color.
Someone with one (1) anecdote is not an authority and shouldn't be trusted like one. Eroding trust in authorities by equating actual experts with somebody who has a half baked opinion based on an anecdote seems like the real issue to me.
Going around and assuming every opinion is based on objective reality instead of subjective experience filtered through human perception with all it's quirks is not a good way to arrive at truth.
I'm not asking to be treated or trusted like an authority. I'm just asking not to treat people, when sharing a lived experience shared with others (making this n>1), is told that their experience is "half baked". My lived experience is by definition my objective reality.
Arguing with me that I could not possibly have experienced a cause and effect because some people didn't hold enough large enough placebo controlled double blind studies (I say this because double blind studies have studied this exact phenomenon, and triggered the retraction of some of these dyes in other countries) is just insulting after a while.
We know so little about nutrition and how different individuals process different nutrients that the scientific consensus on healthy food habits, weight loss, etc have shifted dramatically over the years. We are facing an obesity epidemic in the US. A little humility would be nice in the face of what clearly is not working for the majority of the population.
I mean, it's just food dye for God's sake, what's the "scientific" argument that foods must contain artificial colors?
> My lived experience is by definition my objective reality.
Just glossing over your complete misuse of objective here btw. There is nothing objective about your subjective* "lived realiy".
*Definition of subjective: 1. Dependent on or taking place in a person's mind rather than the external world. / 2. Based on a given person's experience, understanding, and feelings; personal or individual.
Source: https://www.wordnik.com/words/subjective
Please don't misunderstand me, I'm against unnecessary additives too. But you surely agree that anecdotes are bad source to inform your understanding on a subject where countless actual experts are available.
What can the actual experts tell me about my child's reaction to the food dye? One of my children has an adverse reaction to the dyes, my other children do not. What is the expert going to tell me? How does one get access to one of these experts? What about the studies that do show a link between behavior issues and artificial dyes? Are those studies not to be trusted?
Edit: curious about your first sentence: what makes you against unnecessary food additives? Is it a double blind study? If so, can you name it or an expert opinion on the matter that you trust?
I'm not telling you to personally change your belief. What I was trying to say is that you're propping up the value of your individual opinion as if it should rival experts to the reader.
> [...] claiming that anyone who has a lived experience is stupid (aka, falling for a logical fallacy) is just accelerating the distrust of "authority" at a time when we need it most.
I'm saying that you making a mountain out of a belief does directly translate to a distrust in experts, in a way that telling somebody they might just be wrong/it was a coincidence/whatever couldn't do.
At the end of the day most people just see what the want or expect to see, when there isn't a strong enough correlation in another direction. That's why, a reader, one should not value any anecdote too highly.
> curious about your first sentence: what makes you against unnecessary food additives? Is it a double blind study?
The question reads like a gotcha, but I'll answer anyway: The fact that there aren't enough studies about many such ingredients, and that I don't have time to check which are definitely vs. lack data.
Lots of parents probably follow similar lines of thinking about the effect of sugar on their kids' behaviour, and I think it's worth deferring to experts on that.
> What can the actual experts tell me about my child
That's the exact sort of distrust in authorities you purport yourself to be against.
For anyone wondering why it takes so long to actually switch this stuff out, and the available alternatives to Red 3, I thought this piece from a food dyes company (no relation) was fascinating: https://na.sensientfoodcolors.com/confection/replacing-red-3...
You have to figure that if these guys had a drop-in replacement, they'd be offering it for sale at a high price, so this probably is the best you can do. The process changes and requalification looks like no fun at all. But it also looks pretty doable for a company in this line of business, so maybe you won't see too many color changes on the shelf with this ban.
> For anyone wondering why it takes so long to actually switch this stuff out
One counterpoint is do we really NEED to have brightly colored foods? It's a hard problem if you need a food to be bright red. But, that has to boil down to strictly to improving sales, right? Hypothetically, if all the artificial food dyes were banned, then all food companies would be on the same level playing field.
Color is definitely something that catches a person's eye, so if you have a "food product" that needs extra to convince someone to buy it, color is a way to do it. You can't taste it before purchasing. You can see and smell it, so they push those levers as much as they can.
Mandate big font "contains carcinogens" label when your food contains this colour. Then let the buyer choose whether s/he finds this shade of bright red attractive or not.
Multiplied by the hundreds of decisions people make every day and now you know why we have the FDA.
People cannot become experts for every decision they must make.
You mean like the big ugly boxes on cigarettes?
Maybe, and I see your point, but there are few alternatives to having them on a cig pack, whereas you could not dye your food and remove this label. As a consumer, the choice is rather simple (for me at least)
Simple has nothing to do with it. The point is that people ignore warnings all of the time for various reasons. Some people look at the risk/reward factor and decide the risk isn’t that bad. Some people have no idea what the risk means and ignore it. People go sky diving even after having to sign all of the liability release forms, make a video recording while reading a release statement, etc. in Hawaii, there are signs that suggest people to not travel any further due to safety reasons and by proceeding further you do accept all liability. Nobody stops there, and the vast majority don’t even stop long enough to read the sign.
The point being that humans are bad at weighing risk/reward and make bad decisions all of the time.
That may be true and I'm not against legislation to rule dangerous things out. I think however that big red warnings can be useful sometimes. Well, maybe not red in this case.
So in other words: no, we don't need it, particularly since people need to consume less ultraprocessed foods, not more.
Visuals have a pretty big impact on food. I wonder how many foods would just look disgusting without any food dyes. Reminds me of butter companies trying to pass legislation to make margerine companies unable to dye their product to look like butter
Thanks, that article was fascinating. I wasn't aware of how complex swapping it out could be, its continued use makes a lot more sense now.
I'm very curious on what's going to happen with cocktail cherries - I believe they use Red #3 (it's one of the only permitted uses in the UK).
There are a bunch of no-artificial-dye candies and whatnot on the market already, and they actually look better to me - they're not absurd unnatural colors.
https://archive.today/O00Tr
https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-00830.pdf
Related:
FDA weighing ban on red dye No. 3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42542951 - Dec 2024
FDA may ban artificial red dye from beverages, candy and other foods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42382676 - Dec 2024
US Food and Drug Administration moves to ban red food dye - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42352983 - Dec 2024
The data and puzzling history behind California's new red food dye ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857175 - Oct 2023
California becomes first US state to ban 4 potentially harmful chemicals in food - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37838521 - Oct 2023
Pretty wild how far the US is behind in banning these sort of things compared to other countries.
Only if they actually cause cancer. The FDA's statement (https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-revoke-...) says:
> The way that FD&C Red No. 3 causes cancer in male rats does not occur in humans. Relevant exposure levels to FD&C Red No. 3 for humans are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats. Studies in other animals and in humans did not show these effects; claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.
if "these sort of things" aren't actually harmful, and what we see in Europe is mostly governments reacting to unscientific panic among their citizens, then I'd say it's other countries that are wild, not the United States.
The European approach is: if it doesn't look on your plate the way it looked on the hoof or on the plant, it's probably not good to consume. This is a much better heuristic than "we haven't found any adverse effects yet, so call it GRAS". Science is great at determining the presence of specific effects. It's not so good at finding an absence of effect.
> The European approach is: if it doesn't look on your plate the way it looked on the hoof or on the plant, it's probably not good to consume.
I mean, that's just not true. Fruit Loops are sold in Europe as well (albeit with slightly different colors), and there's no hoof or plant that produces anything that looks like Fruit Loops. Food coloring is a worldwide phenomenon.
The fruit loops in Europe have natural food coloring which isn't known to cause cancer like red #3 (for instance)
>The fruit loops in Europe have natural food coloring which isn't known to cause cancer
Same for the fruit loops in the US.
I think I care about more than cancer. What if I cared about genetic defects, ADHD, mental health, water contamination, obesity…
Maybe if the dye served ANY purpose besides getting people to eat more of it, I could find a bit of care to not remove it from foods.
Well, if you read the quote in my comment (or clicked on the source link I included), you would see that the FDA evaluated it for health risks all-up, not just cancer.
Your comment violates the following hacker news guideline:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for the full set.
Should all things that have only benefits that you don't care about and which aren't proven to have no downsides you care about be banned?
Cancer is a genetic defect.
> behind
Is it really a competition to see who can ban the most things? What's the prize if you win?
The prize to win is public health. There is absolutely no benefit in putting all this crap into food. Maybe some things are harmful and others are not but they are absolutely useless.
Unless you sell that crap.
Things like Veggie Libel Laws are very much against the public interest but farm owners have managed to somehow be both rich and adored by the populace so here we are
If they're competing to ban dangerous things in our food supply then the "prize" is a longer healthier life for everyone who lives in any nation that engages in such competition? :shrug:
Go for a walk each day and eat more vegetables. You’ll have far outweighed any cancer risk from all the food dies in the world.
Lead chromate is a really great color that's not in the food supply (except occasionally illicitly in Bangladesh) largely because it's illegal. Regulation is why food is safe.
Less cancer, mostly.
For that to be true, people would need to be consuming 4g/kg body weight of red dye 3.
Possibly while being a rat.
So the US is winning considering they allow less food dyes?
Well, we might be winning when it comes to food dyes but I don't think it's a clear victory overall.
Average life span there is a bit longer overall than the USA, but much like the USA it can vary quite a bit from region to region
Source? The last time I checked the FDA bans more food dyes than most other countries.
Go to Italy or France, or any EU state. The food is better and often cheaper in almost every case.
Even a McDonald's hamburger is good, and not dominated by the fake chemical garlic substitute. In the US, McDonald's french fries contain: Potatoes, Vegetable Oil (canola Oil, Corn Oil, Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Natural Beef Flavor [wheat And Milk Derivatives]), Dextrose, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate (maintain Color), Salt. natural Beef Flavor Contains Hydrolyzed Wheat And Hydrolyzed Milk As Starting Ingredients.
In Italy, the ingredients are: Potato, Oil, Salt.
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of that difference comes down to labeling and disclosure requirements. If the Italian fries don't even have to disclose what type of oil they use, they probably also don't have to disclose the oil stabilizers and seasonings they use.
Let's not forget that Europe had massive epidemic of horse meat being snuck into the supply chain with no one catching on.
I think your cultural palate is showing. The marketing of a few simple ingredients sounds good except it's not like American McDonalds is putting them in for no reason. You can make the case that fillers are used to cut cost but for french fries all that stuff costs extra. To Americans that shit tastes great.
* The beef flavor is mimicking frying in beef tallow. If you use Marmite in your brown gravy you're using the same trick.
* Americans, being flushed with corn and corn syrup which is sweeter than granulated sugar, developed a sweeter tooth than other places which is why the dextrose.
* Potatoes once cut and exposed to air get that gross dark color. Most home cooks usually solve that by keeping them submerged in water until frying but Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate works the same.
Mate, that is labelling requirements. I guarantee most/all of those ""horrible"" ingredients are present in Italian McDonalds.
EU law mandates listing all the ingredients in the food, you can't pick and choose:
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-requirements/f...
But what does the EU consider an ingredient? Apparently you can just say oil and call it a day. The U.S. is clearly requiring that everything that composes the oil is listed individually. Surely you can see as clear as day that "oil" is not very specific?
>The U.S. is clearly requiring that everything that composes the oil is listed individually.
Unless you can put it under "natural and artificial flavors and colors" which covers all the things you should actually care about.
I hate to break this news to you but there are countries outside of the EU.
The FDA also bans more food dyes than the EU.
I didn't say there was no world beyond the EU. I'm not personally acquainted with every nation's food regulatory regime. I was just struck by the obvious qualitative difference between even the lowest quality food.
Feel free to regail someone who cares about the food regulations of the world.
The FDA factoid is cool -- they just didn't ban the dye that causes cancer.
> difference between even the lowest quality food
Have you been to a farmer's market in the US? Potatoes are potatoes. In fact, potatoes are native to this continent and we have more potato cultivars to choose from. You can get very high quality meat there.
Saying all US food is lower quality is kind of a wild opinion.
> Feel free to regail someone who cares about the food regulations of the world.
You're the one that responded to my comment about comparing the US to the rest of the world by saying I needed to compare it to the EU. I didn't hop into your comment chain with random factoids.
> I'm not personally acquainted with every nation's food regulatory regime.
Didn't stop you from providing uninformed commentary tho.
Not to be “that guy” but you did reply to someone saying “most other countries” with a counter argument citing three, then waved away the fact you’re unaware of most other countries. That’s where the pushback is coming from. The US tends to be a little more progressive than the middle of the pack in this space and set the global standard for food safety regulation where none existed before. The cherry picking of a few examples when discussing global comparisons is fraught and the US always exists in this world where whatever topic there’s always some other place doing better on some metric used as some argument the US is a steaming pile of refuse with wandering zombies laden with cancer and illiteracy. It’s not intellectually honest or particularly helpful in discussion of the actual problems. Anyway - that’s where the pushback came from, not that these three countries regulate food dye additives better or not.
I love all kinds of world cuisine, but I did not find the food in France to be better or cheaper than the food in the US, on average (and I love French cuisine). The pastries and wine though... different story!
This is CLEARLY due to less strict labelling. I mean they just say "oil", what kind of oil?!?!
McDonald's hamburger good in Italy? No way.
Not sure on food dyes but my understanding is the FDA is leagues behind the EU on regulation when it comes to food.
My experience in Italy with foods that normally cause some issues (dairy/cheese) really opened my eyes to that. My sister who doesn’t eat cheese/dairy at all here in the US was able to eat it there without issue because of how they process dairy over there or something.
It is more complicated than this, the US has much more rigorous food safety standards in a number of dimensions.
For example, the US has much stricter standards for preventing bacterial contamination than Europe, outside of the Nordics which share similar food safety regulations as the US. The US prohibits a lot of food importation from Europe because of lower food safety standards related to contamination.
Europe makes a lot of food safety exceptions on the basis of a process being "traditional" in some sense, nominally preserving culture. The US is a bit more technocratic less prone to the naturalistic fallacy; the FDA doesn't care that something is cultural or traditional, if there is scientific evidence of material risk then it will be banned.
If I had to summarize their food safety perspectives, the EU tends to focus more on allowable ingredients, the US tends to focus more on the uncontaminated and sterile handling of the food supply chain.
There are some differences between dairy in the US and elsewhere. US dairy cows produce milk containing A1 beta-casein, a protein that some studies suggest may cause digestive discomfort. In Europe, cows often produce A2 beta-casein milk, which some people find easier to digest.
Dairy products in the US tend to contain more lactose, and French/Italian dairy products have less due to the prevalence of aged cheeses and fermentation.
There are many other differences, and none of these seem related to some sort of mystery-makes-you-shit-yourself additive.
A2 is starting to be a thing in the US.
<selfpromotion>We sell uncolored raw milk cheddar cheese made with A2 milk, if someone has an issue with cheese in the US give ours a try!</selfpromotion>
Similar thing with my wife and bread. In the US she developed/discovered/exposed a gluten intolerance, to the point that she removed it from her diet entirely, but bread in France is ok for her.
In that case it's not a gluten intolerance; there is gluten in bread in France. Might be a sugar thing? Bread in the US is more likely to contain added sugar and/or HFCS than in most countries.
That just means that her gluten intolerance is stress related, rather than there being any difference in the gluten in France.
So it might not have anything to do with regulation at all?
Possibly, but dairy processing is heavily regulated.
It's literally written on the article "The EU has a more robust system to review food additives than the US does"
Most other countries, maybe, now compared to the EU...
Sure the US is ahead of the EU. The EU allows 11 [1] synthetic food dyes while the US only allows 9 [2]
[1] https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/food-colours
[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/color-additives-information-consume...
I count 14 for the EU.
Quinoline Yellow (E 104), Sunset Yellow FCF/Orange Yellow S (E 110), Azorubine/Carmoisine (E 122), Amaranth (E 123), Ponceau 4R/Cochineal Red A (E 124), Erythrosine/Red No. 3 (E 127), Allura Red AC (E 129), Patent Blue V (E 131), Indigotine/Indigo carmine (E 132), Brilliant Blue FCF (E 133), Green S (E 142), Brilliant Black PN (E 151), Brown HT (E 155), Litholrubine BK (E 180)
Some of these names may be confusing since their names imply they're natural when in fact they are synthetic (e.g. Amaranth, Cochineal Red A, Indigo carmine).
The FDAs 9 also includes Red 3 which is gonna be banned.
Good thing only the numbers are important and not the health effects!
You are the one that asked for the comparison. Didn't get the numbers you thought you would?
I don't think you replied to who you think you replied to
> I don't think you replied to who you think you replied to
Lost in the woods, are you?
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wnevets#42712332
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wnevets#42713065
Why don’t you do the comparison?
Because people have done it before and we have something named the internet
https://www.tilleydistribution.com/insights/food-regulations...
https://eatwell.uky.edu/sites/default/files/2024-08/foods-us...
Source?
At least one proposed solution I’ve seen is to split the FDA, because regulating food is almost nothing like regulating drugs in 2025.
We already have the FDA (most foods and drugs), the USDA (produce, animal products besides milk), and TTB (alcohol). Each one sets its own safety and labeling standards, which is why, for example, mixed drinks containing alcohol don't have to list allergens(!). Another level of fragmentation would be a disaster IMO. We could split the FDA, but we'd need to merge the food regulator half into one of those other existing agencies.
To be honest, I could see an argument for separating the handling of raw agricultural product from the rest of the food system. The health effects of Oreos vs. making sure our eggs don’t have bird flu are quite different regulatory concerns.
Bans add a lot of overhead to both the agencies responsible for enforcing them and industry. Those agencies are only so large and are spread thin, sometimes there are 'bigger fish' they need to focus on.
I can understand waiting until there's sufficient evidence before starting that process.
Enforcing bans strikes me as a revenue generator, no?
Other countries manage to do this just fine.
A lot of other countries do not have the shear mass of industries and services that the US does.
This trope tends to be wrong.
Why would they have less? They produce food for their people.
Does that mean the US is "ahead" for not allowing bemotrizinol in sunscreen?
Lots of other countries other than the US banned this dye years ago. So what changed in the US? Logically speaking we didn't just come to our collective senses. Did government lobbying budgets dry up? Or did the cost just increase where it wasn't worth paying anymore?
Technically it appears red dye no 3 was banned due to cancer and Delaney clause, however, keep in mind that I think the primary reason it was banned in California last year was all the studies correlating it to deleterious cognitive impacts on children
https://www.additudemag.com/red-dye-3-ban-adhd-news/amp/
https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/potential-impact...
For comparison:
> The European Food Safety Authority only allows erythrosine in processed cherries and pet foods.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythrosine
What other things does the US need to ban to catch up with Europe? Who is "right vs wrong" here? Is Europe wrong for having too many things banned, is US wrong for not having parity with what is banned in Europe?
Is Europe being overly cautious, is America being unsafe?
Admittedly to a fault, I tend to be quick to trust institutions and don't tend to be quick to believe conspiracies (not claiming that this is). With most of the additives to products that people seem to be worried about, I default to thinking it's not the most important thing I need to be concerned with in my daily life.
But the FDA making this ruling is validating for my friends who seem to go way out of their way to find product ingredients to be afraid of. I know people have been claiming for years that Red3 being allowed in the US is crazy.
I'm genuinely here to listen: how would someone who believes that the US allows far too many dangerous ingredients in consumer goods and believes the consumer needs to actively screen and research what is in their products convince me that I need to be more serious about screening the products I use for dangerous ingredients?
We don’t need to convince you of anything. If you care, you’ll look and do your own research about the ingredients. If you think you’re safe, then you’ll eat them,.
Is it not enough to know that the federal regulatory agencies are captured? Why wouldn’t they poison you if it increases their bottom line and they can get away with it?
I remember the concern about and ban of Red No. 2 when I was a kid. I've always been a little suspicous of colored food since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth_(dye)
Great. Hopefully in 50 years we'll have banned most of today's children's cereals.
According to Google:
>Red 3 dye has been banned in the European Union for food use since 1994
Seems pretty reasonable to me.
It's actually approved in EU for candied cherries and cocktail cherries.
The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
Cancer is a very wide category, I assume that it may induce a sub-group of all cancers. I believe the article mentions Thyroid cancer specifically.
It's specifically a type of cancer in rats with no human equivalent. But the FDA rules state they can ban an ingredient if it causes cancer in humans or animals.
2027 feels like a generous timeline for something identified as harmful...
Too late to go long on cochineal insect breeding shares?
Why not just ban every additive that causes cancer?
For anyone that pushes back on the government currently elected, well, far from optimal imagine that so many before them allowed a cancerous substance like this to be in so many foods
What about Red 40?
Now for the important question: which children's cereals will be changing color?
I assume all the really colorful ones, including froot loops. None / less of the organic ones.
Why don't all parents just buy the organic ones to start with? Lack of information?
They’re considerably more expensive and their kids prefer the others?
Look, there are plenty of things in our diets that won’t cause harm in small amounts just because a large amount causes harm to a rat. Some people (somewhat rationally) extended that to food dyes and additives.
If you or I want to choose differently that’s great, but denigrating people who don’t make the same choices you do is condescending and unhelpful.
My intention wasn't to be condescending. We actually buy organic but I mean we buy the ingredients like oats, some nuts, some grains and then we bake it or we make it into a porridge. Our toddler loves it, and I don't think it costs that much.
My kids won't eat the healthy cereal so for me the number one reason is taste. The organic ones also cost more so price conscious people have a second reason.
> My kids won't eat the healthy cereal so for me the number one reason is taste.
This is one of those things where "taste" is basically sweetness. I used to love cereal. Ate bowls of it all the time. I've been on a basic oatmeal with blueberries kick for the last couple years, though, and whenever I try cereals I used to like again I'm disgusted by how sweet they are. You really can only taste sweetness. Kids love that sweetness, though, and brands are extremely focused on marketing candy to children as "healthy" breakfast staples. Lots of kids think stuff tastes bad because it doesn't taste like candy.
The price of "organic" cereals is an issue though.
more likely lack of money
$$$
Drastically more expensive. This adds up way too high for most people who make average income. I do think its also lack of information.
Edit:
The only people I've ever heard of whining about cereals having bad ingredients are the people everyone calls conspiracy nuts, this is my issue with calling things "conspiracy theories" and dismissing people, when someone brings forth valid information, you miss out because you're blindly dismissing them based on bias not fact.
My Doritos will never be the same
Great, now ban Red 40 and the other synthetic dyes. You can't avoid them in anything marketed toward children. I have children and I know others who also have children that are highly sensitive to these dyes, causing major behavioral issues that last for 5-7 days after ingesting food/medicine/drinks that contain these dyes.
There is growing evidence that Red 40 causes IBD: https://www.uhhospitals.org/blog/articles/2023/02/can-red-fo...
That's been proven in double blinded studies, I assume.
Never been asked to participate in one. I am a huge proponent of the scientific method. This argument always interests me, though. (by the way, just a quick search on pubmed: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3441937/; https://www.cspinet.org/page/synthetic-food-dyes-health-risk... the EU bans some of these synthetic dyes: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/food-colours). Also reference the famous "Southampton six" study in 2007 which triggered evaluation of food dyes across Europe: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
As a parent, if I notice a correlation between an action and subsequent behavior, are you saying that my lived experience is irrelevant because... nobody bothered to include me in a specific double blind study? How many things do you do every day that have not been studied through exhaustive scientific research?
From my own lived experience, when one of my my kids eats a red velvet cake or a bag of Skittles or M&Ms that he's violent and crazy for a week, but if he has a few Oreos he's fine. If one of my other kids does the same thing, she doesn't have the same reaction. If I knew the exact chemical pathway that made this happen, I'd be thrilled. I am just living my life trying to parent kids in this world, and you know what, stupid bright dyes that do nothing other than make food appear unnaturally incandescent are practically impossible to avoid. So it's just one more thing that's piled on as a parent that you have to deal with.
If you ask me, this aggressive "well, you're stupid and you shouldn't trust your own eyes because science" attitude that has triggered the strong anti-authority sentiments globally. It's why objectively crazy people like RFK Jr get huge followings- I vehemently disagree with 99% of his rhetoric, especially his anti-vax viewpoints, but I totally agree with his stance on food additives such as these synthetic dyes.
I see the effects with my own eyes. Telling me I'm stupid doesn't help science, it just serves to further diminish the trust in the very institutions we need more now than ever.
The EU allows 11 [1] synthetic food dyes while the US only allows 9 [2]
[1] https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/food-colours
[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/color-additives-information-consume...
> As a parent, if I notice a correlation between an action and subsequent behavior, are you saying that my lived experience is irrelevant because... nobody bothered to include me in a specific double blind study? How many things do you do every day that have not been studied through exhaustive scientific research?
"Noticing a correlation" could very well just be confirmation bias. For decades, parents thought that giving kids sugar made them more energetic, but the scientific consensus is that there is no link between the two.
I guess I don't know what proof you require me to provide. I have several children. Only one has a visible correlation between artificial food dyes and abnormal behavior. The others do not. If I had confirmation bias because of food dyes alone, then wouldn't I have the same observation across all my children?
At some point, as the adage says, "Doctor, when I do this, it hurts! What do I do?" ... "Treatment is simple. Don't do that"
I assume that you would agree that allergies are real and afflict some people but not others -- if your son or daughter entered anaphylaxis shock after eating a PB&J sandwich, would you sit there and scold the child- "but double blind studies show, Chunky Skippy is a safe food! This is just confirmation bias!" Why is it so hard to believe that, in this case, artificial food dyes could cause adverse reactions in some people and not others?
It took £750k back in 2007 to administer a double blind study to explore the link between hyperactive behavior in children and artificial food dyes [0] - a study that included Red 40. I don't have an extra $1MM+ burning a hole in my pocket just to prove what I already know with my own kids. Believe what you want, but if consuming neon red food is that important to you, God speed. I will not be feeding it to my one child who has a reaction to it. I avoid it for the others, because.... even though I know they won't have an adverse reaction, what's the point? The dye doesn't make the food taste any different/better.
[0] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2007/09/hyperactivity-in-...
> The dye doesn't make the food taste any different/better.
Taste is a subjective experience and the color definitely makes the food taste different/better, there are plenty of studies on the topic. I agree fully with the rest of your comment though.
Now that we have good quality studies (see meta-analysis[0]) that prove the causal link between food dyes in general and the consequences in the behavior of children, the risk-benefit analysis tilts heavily against them. While we don't necessarily have certainty about which ones are bad, we know that on aggregate they are bad.
This fact alone should be enough to either start state-funded studies to clear this situation out, or ban them entirely and only re-introduce them on a case-by-case basis as they are proven safe by RCTs.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9573786/
Like in overregulated Europe. Now the US fails!
this is merely a money grab by moneyd interests to ban dyes that are not patented and to force us onto something that is patented.
Finally
Getting it out of the way before RFK can do it, huh?
A comment by redserk in another thread might be enlightening to you, as someone else made the same uninformed remark:
"Incorrect.
https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-00830.pdf
Scroll down to "I. Introduction".
> In the Federal Register of February 17, 2023 (88 FR 10245), we announced that we filed a color additive petition (CAP 3C0323) jointly submitted by
RFK was not the HHS nominee in February 2023.
But it appears this process has been going even earlier than that: November 15, 2022 [0]
[0]: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/17/2023-03..."
I remain sceptical about the influence RFK has in this administration anyway, in comparison with corporate interests. Why would this time be any better than the previous Trump administration?
Might as well get some credit for the one or two good ideas he has before the antivaccine rhetoric begins and measles/mumps/whooping cough kills a few tens of thousands of people and the GQP goes "oops" and fires him and puts the old policies back in place.
Do libertarians support this kind of move?
No libertarians feel that people will likely get sick or die from bad products, and will sue the company/quit buying the product; aka let the market and survival of the fittest decide what people put in their bodies.
aka a system that doesn't work since FDA had to step in and ban this
The Biden admin is trying to take the few sane things the incoming Trump administration wants to do and do them first which has been funny to watch.
I think that Trump doesn't care one way or another about food coloring or Americans getting cancer, and as such his administration will likely leave such things alone and untouched for the most part unless the food lobby asks him to cancel or defund the FDA for campaign contributions or similar.
Harris blatantly copying the No Tax on Tips was particularly funny this election season. You could see on her face that she didn’t believe in it at all.
I don’t think she really has beliefs other than her career.
And you think that her political opponent did? His only goals seem to be either enriching himself or his donors.
Is it ok to criticize both candidates? Or do I have to like the other candidate if I don't like a candidate?
that is 99% of all politicians though. Her policies were generally much better aligned with the health and well being of the average American vs the average billionaire.
Now do Red 40 and the others
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Removing dyes and healthier food in general is one of RFK's stated goals so they'd call this a win. You need better news sources.
It’s not always easy to keep up with the Republicans’ evolving positions.
For the past century, they told everyone that it was none of the government’s business what people choose to eat. Now it suddenly is.
It does have a whiff of trying to mold the citizenry towards a physical ideal. Fitter, happier, more masculine energy.
My favorite is the matrix-like maneuvering about taxes. Now excise taxes and tariffs are cool. But "death tax", income tax, social security tax -- that's communist.
This is the old "at least Hitler made the trains run on time" thing again.
I'm all for removing dyes from food, but if the tradeoff is bringing back polio, no thanks.
Wasn't that said of Benito Mussolini?
Maybe? I wouldn't think that changes the point much.
RFK is absolutely right on a few things, but that doesn't make him an automatic force for good.
>bringing back polio
How, exactly, are they causing that to come about? I find this is just a scaremongering tactic that everyone with some ties or ideological adherence to institutional science resorts to, on the other hand, with no sound argument whatsoever. It's just a mindless knee-jerk reaction.
> How, exactly, are they causing that to come about?
By spreading rumours and falsehoods about vacines. Which reduce vacination rates and leaves an opening for diseases like polio to spread.
Which part of that are you having trouble believing? Just so we can chat about those parts.
People affiliated with RFK's orbit are advocating for removing approval for the polio vaccine because it wasn't validated with double-blind studies. There's some obvious reasons why that is problematic.
It's really obvious how poorly this stuff plays out, you look at New York. When you read a news story about polio/measles/whopping cough etc, from New York, it will say "it was detected in New York City (or Brooklyn), Orange, Rockland and Sullivan counties".
That's often indiciative of a specific sect of orthodox Jewish communities whose charismatic leader is against vaccination. It's a tight-knit community that tends to live in densely populated environments. (So more viral spread than similar relgious sects like the Amish) People tend to follow the guidance and don't vaccinate. Fortunately, while polio virus has been detected in samples, as far as I know there are not any cases. Measles and whopping cough cases are fairly common.
This isn't a "left" and "right" issue. It's an authoritarian issue where seeding mistrust of institutions is important. Polio hasn't been eradicated to the point that eliminating vaccination is smart. Smallpox was -- and we don't vaccinate the general public anymore. (We do vaccinate soliders as the Soviets/Russians/USA weaponized it)
While the US uses an inactivated polio vaccine, many countries still use a polio vaccine created using an attenuated virus. This virus can revert to a dangerous form. This happens if you have a partially vaccinated population.
This means that unvaccinated people can be infected with a strain of polio that can cause paralysis. This is extremely rare in the US (there was one case of one affected person in 2022).
Currently, the polio vaccine is recommended in the US, and vaccination rates in different US States are between 86% (Idaho) and 99% (Mississippi). If the vaccination rate decreases, it is possible that polio cases will become more common, or even that polio might become endemic again.
RFK has said conflicting things about the polio vaccine. Aaron Siri, a lawyer affiliated with Kennedy, petitioned the FDA to revoke polio vaccine's approval, but RFK said that he supports the polio vaccine in response. I think it's fair to be skeptical, though, given his general position on vaccines.
If RFK's actions cause polio vaccination rates to fall, there is a real reason to be concerned. I don't think this is scaremongering, this is a plausible possibility based on what we know about polio, and about RFK's position on vaccination.
It’ll come back like whooping cough has.
Don't forget measles, which is back after being declared eliminated from the United States in 2000.
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html
RFK is anti-vaccine. It's a pretty short, straight line. No conspiracies needed, no mental hoops to jump through.
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https://apnews.com/article/robert-f-kennedy-vaccines-trump-r...
> Kennedy has insisted that he is not anti-vaccine, saying he only wants vaccines to be rigorously tested, but he also has shown opposition to a wide range of immunizations. Kennedy said in a 2023 podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told Fox News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.
> “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.
> That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”
"There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective."
RFK on Lex Fridman's podcast.
We do have long-term studies on vaccines. Vaccines are some of the best-studied medical intervention. There is plenty of data about their efficacy and side-effects. Implying that we "need more studies" before we can be sure about vaccines is, in my opinion, dishonest and misleading.
It seems the group that is 'all about science' doesn't want to investigate big pharma. It's a strange world.
see: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/03/7190377...
I read about this right before covid in Wired magazine. Now, they lick the assholes of all the big pharma companies and anyone wanting more science are 'deniers', turning it into a relgion.
It seems like the Philippine government and WHO are at fault here, rather than Sanofi
That looks like a successfully investigated case? With an appropriate mitigation found and implemented? And a worst-case scenario of “still 12x fewer hospitalizations than without the vaccine”?
No it's not - the topic is healthier food. If someone said "I bet Hitler[0] will reverse this thing that makes trains run on time" and someone said "actually Hitler loves trains running on time", that would be a fair response.
This is the old "the person my news sources repeatedly tell me to dislike is like Hitler".
[0] Mussolini, no?
> No it's not - the topic is healthier food.
The topic is also RFK and his views, which include quite prominent anti-vaccine activism.
I don't see that in the comment chain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42712142
> Removing dyes and healthier food in general is one of RFK's stated goals
Yes, but if it's one of his goals, then bringing him in isn't going to reverse it.
He's both a "no dyes in food" activist and a "vaccines bad" activist. Both are goals of his.
I'd rather have vaccines and dyes than no vaccines and no dyes.
Okay, but that seems irrelevant to this thread. What you're getting is RFK, and he doesn't like dyes in food. So as I understand it the original claim is false, and that's all this thread is trying to address.
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https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9577438/
> On July 21, 2022, the USA witnessed the first case of poliomyelitis after 3 decades of its eradication.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/health/polio-vaccine-outb...
> Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic who may become the secretary of health and human services, has said the idea that vaccination has nearly eradicated polio is “a mythology.”
> The virus that paralyzed the young man had been circulating for months, and it was later detected in the sewage of multiple New York counties with vaccination rates hovering around 60 percent, prompting the state to declare an emergency.
My apologies, I didn't realize RFK was enacting policy in 2022.
RFK has been a prominent voice in the anti-vax world for many years.
Including helping worsen a measles outbreak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Samoa_measles_outbreak
Not the sort of person you want to promote to policy decisions, where he can do more damage.
If they get cancer they will probably die earlier and save us more money on not having to distribute social security checks.
Maybe the FDA will get sued by the health insurance companies due to impacting their profits...
Between all the snarkyness (is that a word? I'm not a native speaker :-D) I think there's a point here. With all the regulations the EU has put up, and the bureaucracy that came with them, I'm really happy that we got food and its ingredients pretty tightly under control and locked down. Glad to see that other countries are prioritizing consumer safety, too.
But Musk, RFK Jr. and others were precisely the kind of people that were advocating for this kind of regulation to take place. Remember the thing about replacing seed oils (eugh) with beef tallow? I really don't think they are against this kind of regulation--on the contrary.
A quick search shows RFK is in favor of replacing seed oils with beef tallow? Is that supposed to be a good thing? What am I missing?
Just do some research on what seed oils where used for just some decades ago, and the extreme processes they go through to make them somewhat edible and not too unpalatable. It's just a byproduct of corporations trying to reduce costs at the expense of our health. They'd do it with literal shit if they could find the way.
There is enough research linking saturated fat (beef tallow has a lot) to heart disease. Not saying seed oils are better. But claiming beef tallow is better doesn't cut it.
>There is enough research linking saturated fat (beef tallow has a lot) to heart disease
Find me one where saturated fat is isolated from every confounding factor. There is none. They are epidemiological studies linking saturated fat from junk food (itself mostly comprised of processed carbs with a myriad of artificial ingredients) to heart disease. That's akin to claiming that dairy protein alone is bad for health because almost every junk dessert has some form of dairy in it as an ingredient.
Find me one where it debunks saturated fat does not contribute, and has not been funded by the relevant industry. No study in history is free of confounding factors, because we are talking about people.
The previous administration were the one who started Operation Warp Speed to reduce other regulatory hurdles, so maybe they will.
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"according to claude" makes it hard for my mind to give much credence to the post in a way very different from "according to Wikipedia" with a link. I intend this politely, but if I wanted to know what claude would output I would ask it myself, during the phase of the moon when the way I've chosen to word the prompt has the best chance of working.
FD&C Red 40 (Allura Red AC): Linked to hyperactivity in children in some studies, although evidence is mixed. Theoretical concerns regarding disruption of cell membrane integrity, potentially leading to increased permeability and toxicity.
FD&C Yellow 5 (Tartrazine): Some in vitro studies suggest potential neurotoxic effects, though human evidence is lacking. Theoretical concerns regarding modulation of neurotransmitters, potentially leading to behavioral changes.
FD&C Yellow 6 (Sunset Yellow FCF): Similar to Yellow 5, some in vitro studies raise concerns, but human evidence is limited. Theoretical concerns regarding binding to DNA, potentially leading to mutagenic effects.
FD&C Blue 1 (Brilliant Blue FCF): Theoretical concerns regarding exacerbation of respiratory conditions like asthma. Theoretical concerns regarding increased cell membrane permeability, potentially leading to toxicity.
FD&C Blue 2 (Indigo Carmine): Limited human studies, but some animal research suggests potential neurological impacts. Theoretical concerns regarding triggering or exacerbating immunological reactions.
Read food labels.
It'd be great if people stopped just copy-pasting stuff from LLMs and then responding to that instead of other real human people.
It's not a foregone conclusion that just because people haven't ingested things before doesn't inherently mean that ingesting them is bad. Saying it is is itself a pretty obvious logical fallacy. Now I'm not saying at all that ingesting oil, even byproducts after multiple rounds of synthesis, is a good idea. But it's not impossible to synthesize something edible out of something inedible, so the fact that oil is inedible doesn't mean that all oil derivatives are as well.
You have some valid points, but this mostly reads as exasperated defeatism that doesn't offer any actionable solutions.
Meanwhile cigarettes, which are also cancer linked, are legal with a warning and some picture on them.
And alcohol, which is also linked to cancer, is legal, with a warning on it.
And (non-self driving) automobiles, which kills tens of thousands of Americans yearly, with no warning or pictures, are legal.
Activities that reward being sedentary - a known factor in lethal cancers and disease - have no warning labels. When is my PS5 gonna warn me about playing video games?
While Americans are dying from a range of cardiovascular disease and cancers it's comforting to know that red M&Ms or red fruit punch won't be one of the causes.
Why’s there no avenue for receiving risk appropriate compensation funds for having increased personal risk of death by consuming something a reasonable expert in the industry could consider dangerous?
If I skirt the law on technicalities to cause harm to an employer for example, such as knowingly implementing trivial security encryption on critical transactions, I feel I could be liable for damages. Why is this a game of spot the problem and then get off with a warning before going to the next preplanned technicality workaround that usually also causes cancer but will buy them a few years until the process repeats?
Shouldn’t mass risk of life be considered a terror level charge? Or rather, instead of saying no to that question because it didn’t appear to meet X criteria, why aren’t we finding ways it could meet that criteria? For example if it needs a political reason, we should ask how this could be a politically motivated decision rather than saying this doesn’t appear to meet any political agenda. That’s how the laws are always completely one sided abused against normal people anyway in a more extreme stretch than my example. I think it’s reasonable to do a reasonable-amount of application back.
Because the people en masse have not successfully come together to demand this.
What makes companies more powerful than the people is not that companies actually have more power. They don't. It's that they concentrate the power they do have into the hands of a small group of decision-makers, which allows it to be deployed effectively. By comparison, the people are divided, disjointed, disorganized, and distracted, and as such typically fail to come together to demand specific changes they agree on.
Idk I think there is a ton of overlap between industry and the highest levels of government. They wouldn’t want pesky things like human well-being to get in the way of profit so they get their hands on some of the levers of power and mitigate their liability one way or the other. It’d probably take a class action lawsuit in the kind of case you describe to be brought to justice.
Most people wont like this, but the answer is because courts care about if the harm actually occurred in fact, not if there is risk that harm might occur.
You cant sue another driver because they risked crashing into your car.
It would set a precedent that is unpalatable to people who sell this stuff.