Kennedy to announce plan to remove artificial dyes from the nation’s food supply
Kennedy to announce plan to remove artificial dyes from the nation’s food supply
The FDA has approved 36 color additives, including nine petroleum-based synthetic dyes used in foods and beverages.
Yeah, fair enough.
It's the one position he holds that isn't completely crazy (and that shot of him being forced to pose with a Big Mac was pure comedy). He'll kill millions with his vaccine views, but I can get behind this.
Of course if a Dem announced this, conservatives would be drinking paint in solidarity with dye manufacturers.
When the pigeon knocks over the chess pieces, it sometimes accidently makes a good move.
Did this worm farm just do something decent?
It says "remove them", not "forbid them". The Nation's food supply is going to be dunked in ammonia before you can eat it.
Adding a "/s" because given the times this sounds weirdly plausible...
I mean you already bleach the chicken to try and offset the horrendous food safety standards through the rest of the chain...
I'm going to assume that worm brain will move to ban more than the programmatic petroleum-based additives and ban anything that has a synthetic sounding name.
I'm in Canada where we have restricted some food dyes. I miss the old colours of Froot Loops and Smarties (similar to M&Ms, not rockets). But it's fine because those colourants really do only exist to make junk food look good.
It's not clear to me the exact scope of what they consider to be artifical dyes though. Is a dye produced by a genetically modified bacteria natural enough?
Conservatives have been saying that Dems want to force them to eat bugs, so it's a little strange to be tacitly encouraging the use of Natural Red 4 which is made from crushed beetles.
The fun thing about "natural" vs "artificial" dyes is pretty nothingburger in reality. The manufacturers of chemical dyes, scents, etc. just generate the chemical by whatever means. If it's a "natural" flavor/scent/color it is derived from something like a beetle or a flower. If it's "artificial" it is derived via a chemical process. The end product is the same.
Reminds me of some years back when Starbucks answered the cry of, "but we don't want artificial flavors/colors in our coffee!" so they started using a red dye for one of their drinks that was derived from crushed up beetle shells. People then freaked out, "I don't want to drink beetle shells!!!!!!"
TL;DR: The end product is the same, whether it be natural or artificial. The real concern, is if the product should really be consumed at all.
The Big Brains like RFK Jr. likely lack the mental capacity to understand such concepts, so all the dyes will become "natural" and stick around, and just increase the number of purée'd parakeets. Basically, another shitty cup game.
TL;DR: The end product is the same, whether it be natural or artificial. The real concern, is if the product should really be consumed at all.
This is hot crap. They are different chemicals, the end product is not the same and you're spouting misinformation.
Most of the artificial dyes that people have banned in countries other than the USA are derived from petrochemicals. Natural dyes have been in use far longer and have been shown to have fewer negative health outcomes.
Eg. Red dye containing bugs (cochineal, E120) has no known health effects except to an extremely small percentage of the population whom are allergic to bugs, hence it is marked as an ingredient when used, to alert those with allergies. Its replacement alternatives are:
- red dye #2 (amaranth, E123) which was made from coal tar, and is now made from petroleum byproducts. It is a suspected carcinogen and is banned in most of the world including the US.
- red dye #3 (erythrosine, E127) was first extracted from coal tar and is derived from phenol, currently extracted from petroleum byproducts and it is a known carcinogen and restricted heavily in what it can be used in since the early 1990s in every developed nation except the USA, until this very announcement by the FDA and RFK jr which will bring the USA in line with the rest of the world's protections. California also separately banned it in October 2023.
- red dye 40 (Allura red) is an entirely synthetic dye invented by a chemical corporation in 1971 by azo coupling between diazotized 5-amino-4-methoxy-2-toluenesulfonic acid and 6-hydroxy-2-naphthalene sulfonic acid. I don't know what that means in order to determine if its feedstocks are petrochemicals, but mice studies showed bowel disorders and DNA damage which caused several countries to ban it over the years, however it's currently believed to be safe if the maximum daily limit is adhered to.
And that's just red dye.
This is very much a stopped clock situation.
Also, how are they gonna regulate and enforce this, considering the FDA is gonna stop administering food safety?
Despite jr being a massive fuckwit, this is actually good
How are you going to enforce thay without inspections, nunbnuts?
They aren't! Honestly. I assume that this is just virtue signaling?
Just what I was thinking.
Wow. Finally this administration does something that seems like a good idea.
Nobody tell them they will be following the EU's lead by doing this.
Except they will probably not regulate natural dyes, or even force listing of the replacements. Some of the replacements will not be healthy.
So like usual, it looks good at first sight but will sicken and poison many children and adults instead.
food allergies too!
I have a relative who developed a deadly allergy to dill suddenly, as in her throat starts closing if she's in the same room as a pickle deadly. She has a lot of difficulty contacting companies to find out if dill is one of the "natural flavors" in their products, because many will simply stonewall any attempts to learn if she can safely consume their product
Definitely hope for the best that we'll actually get healthy food from this, but expect the worst in that they will fuck it up and somehow make us sicker.
If we can't have lead paint, we can always have lead food dye /s
Ehh... natural food colorings are often a lot more allergenic then the artificial ones. So if somebody has a allergy to annato or cochineal some such this could be bad news for them.
Yeah, it's extremely rare when I read "Trump administration..." followed by an action I agree with. Broken clock and such.
Canada and the EU did that year's ago.
Dyes are not responsible for hyperactivity in children. "Artificial" does not necessarily mean unsafe, nor does replacing them with "natural" versions make the food any safer. You might applaud this because you think artificial dyes shouldn't be in food, and maybe you're right. But it's still unscientific horseshit which will accomplish very little and undermine the FDA by wasting time. The reasoning is unsound, which just makes it easier for the corrupt to alter the outcome to serve their own agenda.
I overall agree that the concerns are overblown and sometimes outright fake, and that artificial colors aren't inherently any more dangerous than any other ingredient
I also agree that Kennedy and his ilk are really using this as a smokescreen for all the other bullshit they're up to
That said, I'm largely in favor of banning artificial dyes.
Pretty much the only purpose they serve is to make unhealthy processed junk food more attractive, so I think we should be discouraging that.
There is some evidence that some artificial dyes may be harmful in some ways. In the grand scheme of hazardous chemicals I'm expected to in my life they're near the bottom of the list of things I'm concerned about, probably falling somewhere in between alcohol and grilled meat (neither of which I'm planning to cut out of my diet anytime soon, but I also enjoy those things so I'm more willing to accept the risk, I'm pretty ambivalent about whether or not my food is exactly the right color)
I agree with everything you said, but my point is that if they use a lie to justify the regulation, they can modify the lie to justify anything. Maybe Goya uses a specific dye that is important to their profits, so they make a donation and they get a special exception.
Remember the scene in A Knight's Tale where the Prince is like "I looked it up and this guy is legally a knight because I'm the prince and I said so." Ok, we're all cool with that because we want William to be a knight, and we think chivalry and honor should matter more than lineage. That squares with our moral code, but it violates the legal system they had established for the movie. It's a problem, because next the prince could be like "And also in my research, I found an old law that requires I sleep with all your wives."
If RFK can ban dyes because blue makes kids hyper, next he can ban msg because chinese food makes him feel bloated, or he can ban vaccines because thiomersal causes autism. When the "because" is bullshit, it's bad whether we like the outcome or not.
It's really dyes in general. There are really very very few cases where dyes should be in food anyway.
I haven’t thoroughly researched this, but a quick search might suggest there’s more to the story, but I don’t know if this is outdated information or not. Anybody with insight?
I want to be clear that I'm not arguing in favor of food dyes. I don't think food should be dyed at all. And I agree we need to thoroughly research everything going into our food. The FDA needs to be stronger and more proactive.
But it also needs to be science-based in its methodology. It needs to be transparent and consistent. Nowhere in that link does it talk about hyperactivity in children, which is the justification that RFK cites in announcing the ban. He doesn't mention cancer risks or hypersensitivity, probably because he doesn't want to be pressured to ban every carcinogenic substance in the food supply. And that's exactly the problem I have with all of this. He's picking and choosing what to ban and using fiction to justify how selective he's being. That's precisely how you corrupt a process. And the best way to introduce corruption is to do it to get a palatable result.
Good luck selling the salmon at this point if you do that
https://thekitchenknowhow.com/is-salmon-dyed/
Farm-raised salmon would be fine.
Or 'black' olives.
People are use to the color. Dyes get banned. People see what the food looks like without the dyes. People get weirded out over it - like the green ketchup from Sherk promotions. People eat less of it. Health improves due to people eating less (diet and food moderation ftw).
RFK claims success.
Yeah except we'll all be inhaling even more VOCs and working in mines so is it really a win?
I'll take any win I can get.
natural dyes still exist (which doesn’t imply they’re necessarily healthier; just that if banning artificial dyes that doesn’t mean there will be no food colouring)… afaik australia has much stricter regulation around some of this, and tbh you can barely tell the difference… some products are slightly less vibrant, but honestly if you’re not directly comparing them you don’t even notice
That's honestly the least unhinged policy he's likely to push.
So they found an expert in the field whose last name is Nestle. It's not confusing at all.
Marion Nestle isn't just AN expert. She is THE expert in food science. You would be hard done by to find a more qualified and well spoken fount of knowledge.
- Brandeis University, lecturer in biology, 1971-73
- Brandeis University, assistant professor of biology, 1974-76
- UCSF School of Medicine, lecturer in biochemistry and biophysics, 1976-84
- UCSF School of Medicine, associate dean, school of medicine, human biology programs administrative director, medical scientist training program, 1976-86
- UCSF School of Medicine, lecturer in medicine, 1979-84
- UCSF School of Medicine, acting director, medical scientist training program 1983-84
- UCSF School of Medicine, lecturer in family and community medicine, 1984-85
- UCSF School of Medicine, director, John Tung/American Cancer Society clinical nutrition education center, 1984-86
- UCSF School of Medicine, adjunct associate professor, family and community medicine, 1985-86
- UCSF School of Medicine, associated faculty, Institute for Health Policy Studies and Institute for Aging Health Policy, 1983-86
- Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC, staff director for nutrition policy, senior nutrition policy advisor, managing editor, Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health (1988), 1986-88
- New York University, School of Education, professor and chair, nutrition and food studies, 1998-2003
- New York University, professor and director of Public Health Initiatives, 2003-04
- New York University, Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, c. 2004—
- New York University, honorary professor in the Department of Sociology, 2006
She literally wrote the book on how nutrition is politicized and obfusticated by capital.
Despite the surname and expertise in food, she's unrelated to the Nestle family. Just a bit of fun nominative determinism.
TIL, thank you. I'll be looking out for future statements of her.
nominative determinism
One of my favorite phrases
I'd choose you as my lawyer. Laying those facts down!
You can't eat dyes in food when you have died from a pandemic
Two things he stands for that I am in alignment with, banning artificial food dyes and pharma ads. If he succeeds in both those things, he can still fuck off, but do I want those to succeed.
Ban food dyes, artificial or not, or at least limit them somewhat. People have this illogical knee-jerk reaction to the words artificial and natural as if those imply some kind of value judgement. There's tons of natural stuff you don't want anywhere near you and plenty of artificial stuff that's super beneficial, people need to stop assuming natural means healthy and artificial means unhealthy.
Also yes, ban fucking pharmaceutical ads.
Agreed. I debated specifying artificial or what not. I would argue that beet powder is a dye. Nothing wrong with it. The problem exists when the extremes are exercised within the definitions. Companies can’t just color in the lines. Gotta find some way to corrupt it for profit.
I say that all the time, so instead I'd like to steelman the "natural > artificial" perspective.
There are, let's say, a few hundred things or so in nature that are good for humans. Apples, nuts, etc. This makes sense, since humans evolved in nature. There are natural bad things too, but when people say "natural is healthier" they obviously understand that poison exists in nature. We can extend this list of good things to include artificial things which seem "natural" because people have been eating it for generations with no apparent problems, like tofu -- or cooked food. If you stick to just eating these few hundred known good things, you most likely won't cause problems for yourself, even if you're missing out on artificial superfoods and modern medicine etc.
In contrast, we're constantly inventing artificial things, and we haven't had generations to prove they're worth. Now there's thousands, millions of things to put in our bodies. Theoretically, they've all been FDA (or analogous organization) approved, and the FDA is quite conservative, but even if the FDA is 99.9% accurate (which it ain't), things still slip through the gaps all the time. So anything artificial is a bit risky, since it hasn't had generations to prove itself.
I think all that is true, but it's just one side of the picture, since it ignores the benefits of artificial foods and drugs. Seems to me like this comes from a case of extreme conservatism or deontology. If you're extremely conservative and/or not remotely utilitarian, it makes sense to go all-natural, right?
For once I'm actually down with something he's said. A broken clock strikes right twice a day or something kinda thing.
Making Mountain Dew Code Red and Flamming Hot Cheetos bright ass fucking red has always seemed so pointless to me. The only reason people would find uncolored food unappealing would probably come down to conditioning since we were kids. In the US we have literally always had food that was heavily colored all over the grocery store and has always been hard to avoid. And colorized beverages in cans I always found incredibly dumb as 80% of people will never even see the liquid in the first place since they drink it right out of the can.
I mean. This was already on its way. I thought Trump would force it to be reversed.
Exception to be made for 'Cheetos Orange'
I can just imagine a rant from him about how the crazy liberals don’t want Cheetos to be orange.
but then what will those hooligans drink if there's no more Kool-Aid?
worm-kool aid, gets everyone a parasite eggs diet. mixture of pig tapeworms, and some hookworms.
The EU accepts his concession.