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.
Kinda weird this has to be done at the bill level, there isn’t a health agency that monitors these things and bans as necessary?
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.
Welp, I’m gonna check my pantry now for any of these ingredients.
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?
Someone above linked Yuka.
Work for a food company dealing with fallout from this, all of our strawberry products have red #3 in it and there’s alot of discussion swirling around this (though none of the stuff I personally work on is affected, so I’m not privy to any specifics). For whatever reason, they’re not going with any alternative red dyes (cost is a probable factor), so we’re just going to have not-pink strawberry stuff. Though I think there was quite a bit of market research done and alot of people just preferred not having any sort of coloring added. So then we have to wrestle with the packaging because how do you convey that this vanilla-looking food is actually strawberry-flavored? It messes a bit with the packaging we already had, but whatever. I imagine food companies all over the place are dealing with this same question.
Why do you need to dye strawberries when they are already red? Fucking dumb as hell.
When I hear stuff like this is makes me sure that food companies are intentionally trying to give us cancer.
Because there aren’t strawberries in it either. At least not whole ones.
Just a crazy idea, but just throw a strawberry 🍓 on the package near the flavor name. Boom, solved!
I’m sorry, but “how do you convey a food is strawberry flavored?” is a terrible excuse. Pictures and words like we’ve done for all recorded history. The idea that X taste has to be Y color is an unnecessary human invention. You should be driven more by the content of your food, than how “pretty” it is. Dressing up junk to make it palatable shouldn’t be the end goal.
You should be driven more by the content of your food, than how “pretty” it is.
That’s not how people work.
You could have the most delicious beef Wellington on the planet, but if it looks like monkey brains, it’s going to give people a gag reflex. If you have a good that your brain expects to taste one way and it tastes another way, then it might cause a gag reflex or other aversion. Of your food looks spoiled, people will be adverse to it even if it’s fresh and perfectly fine.
You can’t undo human survival evolution because it’s ‘unnecessary’ with the snap of your fingers.
Except that modern colors are faked. Natural strawberry stuff isn’t red. “Red cookie = strawberry” is not reality. This idea that the whole food has to be the color of its flavor is manufactured. You expect it now because it’s all you’ve ever known.
This has nothing to do with spoiled food and you’re being completely disingenuous.
