> Still, upon banning red dye No. 3 from cosmetics in 1990, the FDA downplayed its dangers, noting that the risk of developing cancer from the dye appeared to be less than 1 in 100,000—small compared to the risk of natural disasters (70 in 100,000) or the risk of a train or plane crash (6 in 100,000). Representatives of the food industry had similar messages, with one industry study reportedly saying a person would have to eat 724,000 cans of fruit cocktail a year for 70 years to ingest an equivalent amount of red dye No. 3 as the rats fed the high 4 percent diet dose.
This feels like maybe another example of expending a lot of political energy on something that will have no impact, while almost certainly expending a lot less energy on more important matters.
Hmm. Would you say the same thing about train or plane crashes, areas that are heavily regulated? Or is the line somewhere between 1 in 100,000 and 6 in 100,000?
California has 40 million people. With something as ubiquitous as food dye, that would be 2400 people developing cancer.
Preventing that doesn’t strike me as a “no impact” move.
If we can avoid these things without substantial human cost on the balance (do more people die harvesting beets than producing Red #5?), why would we not?
Just guesstimating but compare that in California 3500-4000 people a year die in auto accidents. Telling big foodco to stop putting one type of red dye in their crap to save 2400 people a year seems like an easy win in comparison.
So the spicy hot frozen chicken wings are a slightly different different shade of red, who cares.
Planes and trains are already highly regulated, likely the reason we use them as an example of something you have an absurdly low chance of being killed by. The fact that the risk from this red dye is only a fraction of even those small numbers might indicate it should be of commensurately lower priority. For context, about 1 in 54,000 people will die of a wasp or hornet attack, making that cause twice as risky as this red dye. What I'm saying is, it does not sound like this is a big deal to me.
> For context, about 1 in 54,000 people will die of a wasp or hornet attack, making that cause twice as risky as this red dye
Yes, and we test people for allergy to these attacks, and often those people carry interventions like EpiPens, etc.—this risk is high enough that we do something about it, no? People clear nests near their homes, etc.
Why not do something about red dye?
I agree that it's unlikely to affect many people. At a population level, we often take action to further reduce low-risk events because the aggregate benefit is high (2400 cancers prevented) and the cost is low (a few companies spend a few bucks to replace a barely-toxic red dye with a non-toxic one).
One reason we do this is that the same trade-off at the individual level is comparatively expensive and wasteful, as the benefits only accrue (and the costs may only be low) if you can aggregate them over a large enough sample size.
Consider another example: most people are not affected by vehicle accidents, but the risk is still there and pretty high. At the individual level, there is very little you can do besides "not drive" and "live in a pedestrian area". Historically, few car manufacturers included safety features before they were mandated, because they increased cost and consumers did not perceive the risk as high enough to be worth it. Regulation that mandates these safety measures raises the cost floor, but not by as much because now the extra cost is somewhat amortized over the full fleet for sale. Further, some of these safety features primarily benefit people other than the vehicle owners, like backup cameras.
How many people are killed by vehicles backing up? Lifetime risk is also about 1 in 100,000. Yet we still mandate this feature in new vehicles because the cost is comparatively low.
There are plenty of these kinds of trade-offs that regulators make at a population level that would not necessarily make sense at an individual level. The individual impact is quite low. But the combined aggregate effect is probably quite large.
If we were talking about something that right now makes quality of life better for the a small risk trade off, I get it. We risk our lives on vehicles because we have places to be. But food coloring? Just ban it if there is any doubt, what’s the downside? My gum will be white now?
Interesting - I saw this article and thought it'd be talking about red #40, which has been linked to ADHD-like symptoms in children [1]. I've been pleased to see more food items replacing artificial colorings with things like beet juice lately.
My oldest child has a neurological response to artificial colors but we don't know exactly which and haven't tried a challenge test. This is not uncommon and has been known for quite some time, which is why the EU has banned many of these coloring additives for years. One of the reasons we often shop at Whole Foods for prepared foods & baked goods is that they don't allow any artificial colors or flavors in products they sell. It's useful for peace of mind.
Beet juice, annatto, spirulina, carrot juice / beta carotene, and many other options abound. What infuriates me is when I see something white (like vanilla pudding) that contains blue #5... for no good reason.
Recently, I purchased some chocolate covered sunflower seeds. Natural chocolate color so I didn't think to check ingredients at the store but when I got home, I reviewed the ingredients. It had red, blue, and yellow artificial coloring - I was blown away! Of course, I'm sure they used the colors to arrive at a nice, consistent brown color but at what cost? Why not just do away with those artificial colorings and just let the natural chocolate color show through? Surely, the inclusion of those colors is also some sort of cost that they could even save money with if they weren't used.
Jokes aside, that's a good point - but if you think about it, why should we want to ingest something that provides no health value and only exists to make the food product look more visually appealing?
I don't know what kind of epidemiological effects dye has had in the long run, but it just makes no sense to me that as a society we have said "yeah, color our food so it looks more appealing, even though chemically it's probably not great for us". Just sort of odd, honestly.
Nutritious food doesn't always look amazing, and that's completely fine by me. I don't eat food because of the color, I eat food because it's healthy or tasty.
I agree, if I could uncheck a box that says “coloring” when buying food, I would uncheck that every time. The only issue I have is that we don’t live in a world where that is possible, and food dyes inhabit anything that is wrapped in plastic. It’s very much a “take it or leave it” deal and increasingly more often, I leave it.
I suspect that a major problem is the fact that everything is focus group driven and when given the choice between a frozen drink dyed red with beet juice and the same drink dyed neon red with food dyes, people will gravitate towards the neon red drink because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to believe is higher quality.
As long as people gravitate to the best-looking food item when comparing different foods on a shelf, including meat, there's going to be an incentive to use dyes or apply some process that changes the color.
You may be fine receiving an uglier food item, but I bet you don't seek it out when judging equally-priced alternatives.
> but it just makes no sense to me that as a society we have said "yeah, color our food so it looks more appealing, even though chemically it's probably not great for us". Just sort of odd, honestly.
How is this meaningfully different from adding salts and sugars to make food taste more appealing?
While there are a relative few who would be happy with a bland looking, bland tasting shake for 3 meals a day, most people wouldn't. Biologically, it's _normal_ for people to want food to look and taste appealing.
Adding ingredients like salt, which are a naturally occurring substance that can positively affect the taste of a food (as well as acting as a natural preservative in some cases) is completely different than adding an artificial chemical that is designed to make the food look fresher but has no actual health or taste benefits.
Also, of course we want food to taste good, that's half the point of eating and why people enjoy eating. Adding a coloring dye doesn't affect taste.
Which is why nobody uses food colouring outside of (especially children's) baking at home. But in ready meals and other prepared foods sold in supermarkets, they're adding it to make you buy it, not for your pleasure while eating it. 'Ooh it looks so vibrant and fresh' or whatever. Or in the case of sweets etc. to hint at the flavour.
Lab tests of 100 mice over a few weeks seem insufficient to get data on safety of something we want to feed to 100 million people for an 80 year lifespan.
Sure - in the lab experiment, the dosage is higher. But plenty of things are dangerous after time, or only for a very tiny fraction of people. Plenty of things might have effects that aren't routinely measured in mice (eg. this additive makes your eyesight worse, or that additive makes you dumber).
Do large scale passive human studies. Do the studies based on credit card data being directly linked to ingredients lists of products purchased.
If people consuming more of an ingredient end up performing worse at school, involved in more crime, having more sick days, or dying younger, then the government should spring into action and ban/restrict it pending a proper controlled study.
A special government department should be set up to handle and analyze this (very private) data, firewalled off from the rest of government. It's worth it to make millions of peoples lives healthier.
It seems extremely unlikely this would happen- both because of lack of political will, and because this would be considered a huge intrusion into people's privacy.
But if told "you can either get cancer and die at age 65, or live to 85 if you are happy for scientists to look at what you eat and drink", the vast majority of people would choose the latter.
You are almost certainly underestimating just how much opposition there would be to this if the government tried to do it.
I worked in health-adjacent fields for several decades and it took me quite some time to recognize that some of the best ideas for public health are simply non-viable due to political opposition, and "have the government set up an epidemiological wing that does data science on private data to improve health" is definitely one of them.
What's actually offered is "you can get cancer and die at age 65 either way but if you let us take notes we might not poison your grandkids the same way," and that's much less convincing.
>or live to 85 if you are happy for scientists to look at what you eat and drink
But we don't know that's true with anywhere near degree of certainly. Pretending that it is borderline lying and only serves to weaken trust in institutions.
This is basically a cohort study. How do you account for the usual issues of cohort studies? eg. having bad eating habits (in general) is bad for your health and people with bad eating habits also tend to eat more artificially colored products?
Correct for it as best as possible (eg. by correcting for every demographic factor you can), and then for results that still look promising, do actual controlled studies - eg. "contact mcdonalds and get them to halve the amount of additive X in food they serve in any zip code ending in an even digit".
If additive X still looks like it's doing harm when the data from the controlled study comes in, ban it.
But as a government, you can force the biggest users of an additive to do a controlled study by a deadline date or have authority to use the substance at all in food revoked.
But in this case it seems like confounders is guaranteed to turn up a massive amount of false positives. Forcing companies to fund said studies on shaky evidence seems arbitrary and unfair.
not the dye made out of crushed up insects it seems. that is labeled natural red 4, C.I. 75470, or E120 (per wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine)
I hadn't heard about the mind state thing until I went onto Wikipedia just now, but I've known I was allergic to Yellow #5 since early childhood. It brings on rapid asthma type symptoms. Also discovered around Halloween time when I ate a large number of orange cookies from the grocery store, that I'll break out in hives all over my body if I ingest enough of the stuff. Have made a point not to do that again.
We found about (about our son's allergy) on Halloween, too, when he was 5. He got an uncontrollable neurologic eye tic that persisted for about a week.
So far as I can tell this is basically an anecdote. She doesn't even try to back it up aside from vague mentions of "articles" that she found (no specific studies were mentioned). Why should we give any credence to this over any other random HN commenter?
"The Food Standards Agency today announced its decision to recommend to Ministers the phasing out of six colours in food and drink in the EU. These six colours - sunset yellow (E110), quinoline yellow (E104), carmoisine (E122), allura red (E129), tartrazine (E102) and ponceau 4R (E124) - had been shown to increase hyperactive behaviour of children in a study published by a University of Southampton research team in September 2007."
Aspergillus nidulans has been genetically engineered by researchers to produce carminic acid. No bugs needed. Can still cause allergenic reactions unfortunately.
I don't understand? Is this some sort of jab at the concept of being cautious given that so many things that were promoted as "totally safe" turned out to be "extremely unsafe"?
Do you also find the bans on lead-acetate sweeteners to be silly since the Romans managed to build a big empire while also drinking lots of wines sweetened with it?
This is the main problem. If we have a prop 65 warning on lead and coffee, we've lumped to entirely different risk categories together where one is really bad and one is just - well coffee.
They should have to include some actual reason, perhaps a QR code or something which can produce a Cancer Facts.
Or really just add Cancer Facts into Nutrition Facts, complete with estimated QALY cost per serving. They should also incorporate IQ damage and not only cancer.
It's a stupid oversight in the law, there is zero penalty for incorrectly labeling something as causing cancer, so nobody does any actual work to see if they have used an ingredient or substance worth warning for, and just slaps a cheap sticker on instead.
It's the equivalent of putting "no artificial sweeteners" on a bag of sugar.
This feels like maybe another example of expending a lot of political energy on something that will have no impact, while almost certainly expending a lot less energy on more important matters.