Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed the nation's first law banning four "toxic" chemical food additives found in popular drinks, baked goods, candy and snacks.
California became the first state in the nation to prohibit four food additives found in popular cereal, soda, candy and drinks after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a ban on them Saturday.
The California Food Safety Act will ban the manufacture, sale or distribution of brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben and red dye No. 3 — potentially affecting 12,000 products that use those substances, according to the Environmental Working Group.
The legislation was popularly known as the “Skittles ban” because an earlier version also targeted titanium dioxide, used as a coloring agent in candies including Skittles, Starburst and Sour Patch Kids, according to the Environmental Working Group. But the measure, Assembly Bill 418, was amended in September to remove mention of the substance.
Ahhh but I don't have enough cancer yet :( On a serious note, sometimes people shit talk California but they have a massive economy and when they do things like this it has a huge positive benefit for the entire country. Most companies will just reformulate instead of having California specific products so everyone benefits.
To me this is amazing news, I am allergic to Red Dye #3. If I eat something that has it, within seconds my throat closes and I can barely breathe. The worst part is that there is no need to use it. Sweet Tarts for example uses beets to get the red coloring in their candy.
Yep! I had problems with one of those red dyes as a kid. Made me go ape shit mode and I was violent every single time I had a candy with it. Then all the other time I was hyperactive but harmless.
There is, but banning these substances is a political process not a scientific one. It's definitely true that this should be done by experts and not politicians.
The thing is that it's impossible to set up an experiment to show that something is safe. All you can do is collect more evidence that something is not dangerous. This leads to GRAS.
There's also the additional fact that the dosage makes the poison. There is no substance for which a single molecule can harm you meaningfully.
Roundup is about as toxic as tablesalt. Caffeine is vastly more toxic than that. And Tylenol, well, that simply wouldn't be approved if it were invented today. The ratio between the therapeutic dose and the lethal dose is too small.
Then there's tradition and utility.
Plenty of herbal supplements and even foods are quite dangerous but are sold because they always were and they are "natural".
We can all agree that certain substances don't belong in food - either because they are useless or there's strong evidence they're harmful.
It's the useful ones for which there is some evidence that they may cause issues when given in extreme doses, but a vast number of substances exhibit that behavior. Caffeine and Tylenol, for example. You do not think of these as poisons, but they are. Caffeine is so dangerous that you have to go through a lot of trouble to get it in its pure form.
The fact is that those supstances are certainly more dangerous than the substances in the article, but people are not clamoring to ban them.
And all this complexity is before people's individual interests are involved.
This is why when you compare, say, us and eu food regulations you find substances that are on one list and not the other. One is not a superset of the other.
Anyway, these substances are not "toxic" in really any correct usage of the term, and it's probably very unlikely that a ban will make anyone healthier or happier, despite what you may read about when you Google these substances. Even if you go to the scientific level.
Scientists can have their own agenda. They're still people. Or they can just be bad scientists. Or they can just be churning out papers as fast as possible to increase their prestige.
It used to be that the top paper that came up (it may still be up in the list) when you search glyphosate and bees was a bad paper. It did correctly conclude that glyphosate killed the bees when they put it in the honey, but they had to put so much in there in order to see any effect at all that the concentration was high enough to actually kill aquatic weeds. Next it wasn't properly controlled. Do you know what else will kill bees if put it in their honey? Water. And most definitely caffeine. I assure you a very small amount of caffeine in honey will kill a nest.
It's just a political thing with good optics because who can argue with banning a "toxic" substance.
Scientists can have their own agenda. They're still people. Or they can just be bad scientists. Or they can just be churning out papers as fast as possible to increase their prestige.
It's interesting to me, that if you had said this exact phrase in relation to climate change research, or any other politically divisive science, you would have been down voted to oblivion, but when talking about this, you got up voted. What you've written here is true regardless of the subject matter, but when it comes to agendas, it's even more true in politically divisive science.
Any state health agency would fall under the executive branch of government. The power of creating laws is under the legislative branch (like the Senate). Executive agencies have the authority to enforce laws and under Chevron Deference the authority to interpret laws where vague, but not form new laws.
For example, if a bill was passed saying cars can't be louder than 110 dBs an executive agency could decide the proper way of measuring volume, if not prescribed by law.
I believe the executive branch can suggest new laws, but they would still have to pass through the state's legislative branch. The suggested law may still need to be formally introduced by a member of the legislative branch, though.
I'd think the Legislative would set up a health agency empowered to ban "toxic food additives", and let the agency determine which ones are toxic. Otherwise, the Legislative branch has to ban every individual thing.
Those agencies are toothless. Even under Biden, they're rebuilding those agencies and just crossing their fingers that they aren't torn apart again in 2024 or 2028.
Isn't this standard procedure for blogs/journalism? I thought the quotes are used to imply a term is not being used because the author thinks it's true, but rather to indicate that that's what the topic is centered on.
Not to mention, the discussion around it is if these are actually toxic or not. It would be correct to highlight toxicity as a subject of debate with quotes.
Since the article didn't list many examples, I looked them up.
brominated vegetable oil- used in sodas, usually citrus flavored ones
potassium bromate- look out for this in breads
propylparaben- used in packaged baked goods, mostly pastries and tortillas
red dye No. 3- aka Erythrosine, its a pink dye, so watch out for that ingredient in any pink foods
and lastly to cover all bases:
titanium dioxide- its a white dye, so watch out for that ingredient in any white foods
brominated vegetable oil - it's found in citrus sodas because the (natural) citrus flavoring is an oil, an orange or citrus oil of some type, and is prone to separating if there's not a way to keep is suspended in water. And I've seen separated sodas in a QA testing lab and they look pretty nasty. I imagine orange sodas that haven't already reformulated will have to, so they might end up tasting different. I know orange Gatorade reformulated to get rid of BVO about 10 years ago or more. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/brominated-vegetable-oil-bvo
As a note, California also forced (by being one of the largest markets) reformulation of dark sodas containing caramel color across the nation. Caramel color is what happens when you brown toast or caramelize sugar. I kinda just scratched my head because it seems you'll get more exposure to the carcinogen they're talking about if you burn your toast. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/questions-answers-about-4-mei . And if burned baked goods were a genuine problem, it seems we would've known it long before now.
I think most industries definitely need more regulation, but California sometimes seems to do banning so often on the slightest sliver of data, and it kinda creates a regulatory "crying wolf" situation, where people become so used to the "known to cause cancer in California" warnings that they start to ignore ALL of them and can't differentiate the ones that are dead fucking serious and the ones that honestly require unusual situations for it to happen like someone eating/consuming a physically unlikely amount of the product constantly.
I personally think it's a problem when people don't have a way to differentiate the warnings about things that'll genuinely fuck you up under current levels of exposure, and things you basically have to go dip yourself in a vat of daily for months before it harms you.
And I think it's a problem because people naturally have short attention spans, and when EVERYTHING has a warning, you know people aren't going to actually do research to figure out which one is dead serious and which is fluffed up and starting at shadows. So you start to get inconsistent heeding of the warnings. Eventually you'll ignore the boy crying wolf because you're so tired of going to to check if the wolf is there, and the wolf'll come eat you then.
I have no solutions for solving it though, given how polarized things are (one side massively under-regulating, and the other sometimes starting at shadows) and how few people are willing to listen to nuance.
As someone with a chemistry background it's a real pet peeve of mine when people fearmonger about benign chemicals or go "if I can't pronounce it then it shouldn't be in my food!" And it helps absolutely no one that there are cases where the FDA bends to the industry.
If you asked me if I'd rather soak my exposed hands in benzene for an hour, or eat food with any of these now banned products, I would instantly pick the food without question. The public isn't necessarily aware that some things are far more carcinogenic than others.
And to add to that, we've got things which cause harm because of their physical properties, not chemical. All particulate matter is horrible for our lungs and can cause cancer and permanent damage, but the matter itself could be totally benign. It's why even nicotine free cigarettes cause some harm -- all smokes have suspended particulate matter. It's a concern with vaping that metal nanoparticles might be generated too.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here. We just don't have the public education nor warnings necessary to actually represent these things accurately.
I'm not sure theblack of research is because people have short attention spans. I think there just isn't time in the day. I have to research every ingredient in everything that I eat, what companies are actually nestle brands to avoid those, but wait what browser can I use to research them because some have privacy concerns, etc. It becomes a giant rabbit hole that people don't have time for even if they have the world's longest attention span.
For anyone interested in trying to avoid bad stuff, there’s this free app called Yuka I’ve been using for a year or so now where you can scan foods and other products and it gives them a score and a comprehensive breakdown of the additives and overall health of the food with linked sources.
All processed foods have additives for taste, shelf life or looks. Even if they aren't listed on the ingredient breakdown because they are classified as "manufacturing aids", a loop hole that the food industry created for themselves.
Consider the resources it takes to maintain, update, and query a large amount data, the $99 yearly app store fee, development of the app, and plain usefulness of it. That seems pretty generous to me, especially with how much is free to use.
The bromate ingredients are only dangerous if the factory fucked up during production as well. If they're doing their job correctly, there is no bromate in your food.
It's sort of like how you don't have to worry about food poisoning from chicken when it's cooked through, even though it's not recommended to risk eating the raw stuff.
No idea about the other two banned ingredients, but the risk seems pretty low for these at least. I wouldn't bother throwing food away over their presence, personally, but that's just me.
"The bromate ingredients are only dangerous if the factory fucked up during production as well. If they're doing their job correctly, there is no bromine in your food."
Idk if that's true or not so not commenting on that portion. However, "I wouldn't bother throwing food away over their presence, personally, but that's just me." We all have different risk tolerances so that's fine. What isn't fine is that the FDA makes a practice of taking corporate bribes, allowing flawed or outright manipulated studies, etc and then suddenly approving foods, additives, drugs, that are known or strongly suspected to be unsafe. For example, Donald Rumsfeld (sound familiar?) was a food company exec who really really wanted aspartame approved but they were having trouble getting through the approval process because it wasn't easily demonstrable that the product was safe. Rumsfeld gets added to Ronald Reagan's transition team and suddenly it's approved. Scary stuff. It's been approved in other countries so mayyyybe it's fine but the history of its approval is appalling and simply proves that the FDA isn't always looking out for the best interest of society at large. So if a state like CA steps in and says "holy shit don't eat this", I'm listening.
One source: "Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president January 21, 1981. Rumsfeld, while still CEO at Searle, was part of Reagan's transition team. This team hand-picked Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., to be the new FDA commissioner. Dr. Hayes, a pharmacologist, had no previous experience with food additives before being appointed director of the FDA. On January 21, 1981, the day after Ronald Reagan's inauguration, Reagan issued an executive order eliminating the FDA commissioners' authority to take action and Searle re-applied to the FDA for approval to use aspartame in food sweetener. Hayes, Reagan's new FDA commissioner, appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the board of inquiry's decision. It soon became clear that the panel would uphold the ban by a 3-2 decision. So Hayes installed a sixth member on the commission, and the vote became deadlocked. He then personally broke the tie in aspartame's favor."
What isn’t fine is that the FDA makes a practice of taking corporate bribes, allowing flawed or outright manipulated studies, etc and then suddenly approving foods, additives, drugs, that are known or strongly suspected to be unsafe.
Yeah, corruption isn't fine. I don't live on that continent though, so, I'm afraid I can't help you out much with Donald Rumsfeld. I just like accuracy in my science and proportionate anxiety about risks.
These aren't the only toxic additives allowed in food in the US by the way but it's a good start. On account of Google no longer being a search engine I have attempted to find you a more comprehensive list and given up after looking at the first 3 links since they don't go anywhere that looks reputable. Maybe someone else knows a good source for us?
This is the right move, I just wish it was done decades ago when we knew these additives were problematic. Like how many lives have been impacted since we knew? I wish karma was a thing as those who knew and carried on as is, have blood on their hands.
There seems to be some disagreement, but TiO2 (a very white pigment powder) is generally considered safe and has been used in everything from wall paint to toothpaste for decades. A few studies have suggested possible genetic toxicity, but it may be only from the extremely small nano-particle form. Another study suggested lung problems much like asbestos, but that might be from breathing high level aerosol concentrations. All in all, there’s no clear consensus, which seems like a pretty good sign for such a commonly used material, but the jury is still out.