My understanding is that there are somewhat more restrictive regulations on food dyes in the EU compared to the US. But that overall there isn't a big concern about the majority of these dyes.
There also isn't a fundamental difference between a synthetic and a natural dye. Okay, humans are more likely to have encountered a natural dye during their evolution and adapted to ingesting them. But that is unlikely to matter to all kinds of dyes, and also wouldn't filter out any health effects that don't affect reproductive fitness.
Treating a whole category of molecules this way does not make sense. It makes sense to evaluate the health effects of individual dyes. But that is not unique to synthetic dyes.
The sheer percentage of artificial food dyes that have been banned suggests otherwise. There’s a long pattern of banning something once enough evidence builds up only to be replaced by something that’s then eventually banded.
If there where significant value that might be different, but there isn’t a great argument for experimenting on millions of people here.
How many artificial food dyes have been actually banned? I mean in the time where we actually had some regulations, the old days were quite wild in terms of safety in all areas, so I don't think that would be a useful comparison.
I don’t recall the exact number, but well over half that have been in common use were eventually banned.
Edit Prior to this administration: Butter yellow, Green 1, Green 2, Orange 1, Orange 2, Orange B, Red 1, Red 2, Red 4, Red 32, Sudan 1, Violet 1, Yellow 1, Yellow 2, Yellow 3, Yellow 4 + some more in the really early days.
It’s a naturally occurring non organic molecule, but it’s not naturally a white pigment. It takes a lot of processing to get that brilliant white powder and as such it’s not something our ancestors dealt with.
Huh? Our ancestors have been eating meat for 2 million years. We know because bones do not biodegrade so we've found many prehistoric bones with tool marks left when prehistoric people cut the meat off the bone.
I'm in awe at the number of people that will go to bat for things like artificial dyes in food, only because the policy is coming from the present administration. It's just common sense. We don't need to be ingesting this shit. It's cosmetic and not needed for nutrition. Why are you feeding your child Fruit Loops and not Cheerios?
I personally have known people who develop migraines after eating food with artificial dyes. We can sit here and snipe and play semantics and argue over pointless details but why bother? Just get rid of them all.
I want these decisions to be bases on scientific and medical data, not on gut feeling or unfounded personal belief. I have no issue with regulating specific dyes or additives in food, or groups of related chemicals.
And your anecdote is not scientific data. You cannot draw any conclusions from that.
Again with this, you are simply proving my point further. I don't need a panel of credentialed scientists to tell me if this stuff is okay or not. It's unnecessary to sustain life and provides no nutrition whatsoever. There is literally zero reason to add it to food. Your kid can eat white or chocolate icing on birthday cakes. Get rid of it. The end.
I know this feels cut and dry to you, but what you're kicking is a fundamental pillar of the industrial food system. Many food products emerge from processing a dull or unappetizing color. Food needs to last as long as possible and still look like food. It's tempting to say that food should all be made with love in home kitchens, but that's untenable for feeding 8 billion people.
My favorite example of this is orange juice. OJ is kept in long term storage to stretch a seasonal crop into year-round availability. What comes out is brown and flavorless! This brown mush is restored to something a person would drink with the addition of "flavor packs" made by the perfume industry. This has the added benefit of giving brands a consistent and repeatable flavor. Regulatory bodies in their wisdom allow this product to be called "100% juice".
You might say well get rid of that too. I'm not arguing this is the ideal food system. But it has to be said, this goes a lot deeper than the easy ones like frosting and fruit loops.
Calling it "the perfume industry" is a half truth. It's the flavoring industry, but it so happens that there's a lot of overlap between perfume and flavoring in terms of raw materials.
However, flavoring is a distinct profession. Besides that, very few novel compounds are allowed in food compared to fragrance. If any flavoring is synthetic in origin (which is not the same thing as novel, to be clear) then the product must be labeled as artificially flavored. If they call the product 100% juice and added flavoring is used, then that flavoring in turn has to have been sourced from the fruit.
In other words, they're using extracts from real oranges to reconstitute the flavor lost during pasteurization. They can further adjust which parts of the extract they use (called fractions and isolates) to dial in a particular flavor.
I appreciate the nuance! My intention was to show that there's a surprising amount of correction for flavor and taste necessary even for one-ingredient "natural" foods.
But there is a clear public health trade-off there, because far fewer people will drink O.J. if that work is required (vs. just pouring it out of a carton).
Food presentation has an effect on taste. This is why the dyes are used. Frankly, I wouldn't want to live in a world where the only food we're allowed to eat has to demonstrate that it's only made of ingredients necessary to sustain life and be nutritional.
When your mom eats something that is bad for her and her brain can tell it is bad for her, then if that experience is repeated a lot, then every time it encounters that thing or even thinks about that thing, her brain will tend to cause a defensive reaction, which itself is unpleasant and can affect your mom's behavior. None of this need be conscious or deliberate.
I don't think gp is trying to imply that she's explicitly making it up, just that the phenomena is in her head. To take an absurd example, it's probably safe to say that electromagentic sensitivity doesn't actually exist (ie. radio waves aren't actually causing people pain/distress), even if sufferers aren't lying to others about their experiences.
1. Because you'll feed them to your kids who do not make their own decisions, other than if they'll pay to remove cancers off their anus or die at home at 25.
2. Because a massive food industry would gladly lie about how unsafe their product is just like tobacco companies and they have far more money than you to befuddle the research.
>1. Because you'll feed them to your kids who do not make their own decisions, other than if they'll pay to remove cancers off their anus or die at home at 25.
How about we mandate physical activity for kids as well, given all the known harms of being inactive? Maybe refer kids to CPS if they're too fat too?
Yeah, Yellow dye #6 may cause testicular cancer, but I can't stand boring looking pastries. Sure people could use saffron, but that's expensive and we have to have cheap and good looking, right?
Ban 'em all. If it isn't already in the foods we eat, it doesn't belong.
But yes I think the food color is ultimately important to succeeding in the marketplace and we aren't going to be getting rid of food dyes in manufactured food anytime soon.
>the food color is ultimately important to succeeding in the marketplace
The decision-makers at Walmart seem to believe artificial colors are no longer important to succeeding with Walmart's customers and prospective customers.
And clearly they're not important to succeeding at Whole Foods, where all artificial colors have been disallowed for many years.
Artificial colorants make it easier to design visually hyperstimulating foods without having to compromise on flavor. What could the upside for the consumer be, to disrupt our evolved associations between appearance and flavor?
I could not find my reference but I thought it was something more along the lines that either they don’t need to be disclosed in the EU or they go under different safer sounding names.
But this is likely also an attempt to market to people who think things like "but I don't want to be exposed to chemicals" while not realizing water is a chemical.
When people -- myself included -- say they have a problem with chemicals in food, they of course mean artificial chemicals: that is, compounds, preservatives, dyes, and flavors that are non-naturally present for that particular food item and were added for their shelf life, taste, aesthetic, or addictive properties.
Next time you visit your grocery store, go read the ingredients list of a few different boxed and frozen items. It's not uncommon to see three- or four- dozen ingredients on items that should have less than 10.
While all of these compounds may have FDA approval and studies verifying their safety for ingestion, please keep several things in mind:
1. Studies use large, population-based sample sizes and their effects are based on their statistical significance on these populations. In other words, "side effects" are a population-level phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon. It is plausible that individual side effects are hidden as statistical noise. This is a problem with pharmacological studies as well and there is no easy solution to it AFAIK.
2. We have a massive obesity crisis in this country (and increasingly globally). Sedentary lifestyles and increased caloric intake is no doubt part of this, but it is blindingly obvious (to me, at least) that the meat of the problem is environmental, primarily diets, and these compounds are wreaking havoc on the endocrine systems of the population causing a massive uptick in obesity and diabetes.
>1. Studies use large, population-based sample sizes and their effects are based on their statistical significance on these populations. In other words, "side effects" are a population-level phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon. It is plausible that individual side effects are hidden as statistical noise. This is a problem with pharmacological studies as well and there is no easy solution to it AFAIK.
I don't get it, are you trying to imply there might be 0.0001% of people with negative side effects, they're not getting picked up, and for that reason those substances should have never been approved? If so what does that say about allergens? If the Colombian exchange happened today, should we ban peanuts on the basis that a few percent of people get side effects?
>but it is blindingly obvious (to me, at least) that the meat of the problem is environmental, primarily diets, and these compounds are wreaking havoc on the endocrine systems of the population causing a massive uptick in obesity and diabetes.
How is it "blindingly obvious" that it's caused by artificial colors specifically though? Otherwise it's a leap to go from "there must be something in the food" to "we should ban artificial colors".
What level of evidence is acceptable before stopping things entering our food chain? Is it anything that doesn't have positive evidence of harm ok? Presumably a little bit of study is required... So how much? How many interactions should be studied? Is there a benefit trade off (I'm actually struggling here, so if you think so, perhaps you can clarify what benefits would lead to a a higher risk of harm)?
>What level of evidence is acceptable before stopping things entering our food chain? Is it anything that doesn't have positive evidence of harm ok?
Peanuts have very clear evidence of harm (at least to those who are allergic), and it's unclear what "benefits" it has besides "it tastes good". Why allow it?
3. Long term effects are very hard to study and tease out.
4. Interactions are even harder to establish, since the possible different cocktails and biologies combinatorially explode. This is the primary reason for a precautionary principle in introducing new compounds into our diets.
The type of people you’re replying to would wait until their experiment was done to agree to ban things that are obviously bad even if by the time they said “ok guys I agree to ban it I have the data now!” all of humanity is next to them in a dead pile. Prior to that they would argue ad infinitum that there’s no proof x y and z are bad. People do that on this very forum with ingestion of microplastics. I don’t have patience for people like this anymore.
The point is it's totally possible for some artificial dyes to potentially be harmful and need to be regulated, but eliminating them all just because they're "artificial" is woo-woo nonsense on the same order as my deliberately parodic example.
Know what else is artificial? Insulin and penicillin.
>Know what else is artificial? Insulin and penicillin.
Even if they may have side effects/allergies, we tolerate them because they provide extremely large benefits to the population. You can't compare that to a chemical we use to make the colors of candies pop more.
No one is dying or getting seriously ill because their Fruit Loops had bland and unsaturated colors.
It’s not. The one who controls the null hypothesis rules the world.. Should a new dye be banned until it is proven safe, or should a new dye be banned only when it has been proven unsafe?
The answer to the above question is not a scientific one. It has to do with how we want to operate as a society, it’s a political or social issue.
The thing is, there are many chemicals which are safe to drink in reasonable amounts, and many chemicals that are not safe to drink in any amount. People deciding not to eat something because "it has chemicals in it" is a pretty ignorant take.
> People deciding not to eat something because "it has chemicals in it" is a pretty ignorant take.
When people say this they are obviously not referring the the definition of "chemical" that a chemist would use. Pretending otherwise is exactly the "nerd-snark" mentioned above which makes people distrust experts because they clearly aren't intending to use the term "chemical" in a sense that would include substances like water.
There are too many food (and personal care and clothing etc) chemical additives for the average person to remotely be able to keep up with the details of each, especially given not all products even need to disclose them–the charitable, or simply non snarky, reading of that kind of comment is more like "I don't want to eat food with unnecessary/under-studied additives in it."
I meant overweight not dumb. Fat people (like my dad) don't drink a lot of water, they drink soda and sugar water. And every time I grocery shop at Walmart is pretty noticeable demographic of people buying crates of coke.
I participated in some consumer testing when Kellogg's Canada was switching their breakfast cereals to natural colours. Beyond some muted colours, the cereal tasted exactly the same. Seemed like a no brainer, really.
Was it just the US who enjoyed brighter, shinier and arguably "faker" things, or did other countries also experience sales drops when other brands removed artificial coloring?
I'm curious (as in HN curious discussion) whether this points to something greater about US culture.
Synthetic and “natural” is so hazy. What’s the difference between a dye that’s synthetically made and one where we crush up bugs and extract the same exact chemical (real thing.). Why don’t we just eliminate most dyes overall…
Eh. Being honest with dyes there's a pretty strong distinction between "natural" dyes going through several extraction and purification steps but remaining more or less the same intact molecule found in something alive.
"Synthetic" dyes being the result of a long chain of steps and intermediate molecules which are usually ultimately sourced from things like air, petroleum, and seawater.
Science literacy is bad so people have problems articulating the issue of concern which is "it is fair to have concerns about novel chemicals making their way into the food supply which evolution has not had a chance to address", not that something not found in nature is automatically bad but that such things need to be introduced carefully.
People don't know science though so everything is turning into "if it's not found in nature it is a monster and unclean", which to be honest is fair to a degree for people who don't know being forced to accept things blindly and asked to trust that everything is fine from people who would gladly disregard dangers in exchange for a fraction of a cent in profit margin.
That doesn't mean they're making good decisions just that their fear is justified.
> To prepare carmine, the powdered insect bodies are boiled in ammonia or a sodium carbonate solution, the insoluble matter is removed by filtering, and alum is added to the clear salt solution of carminic acid to precipitate the red aluminium salt. Purity of color is ensured by the absence of iron. Stannous chloride, citric acid, borax, or gelatin may be added to regulate the formation of the precipitate. For shades of purple, lime is added to the alum.
We are exposed to so much anti-customer behavior thanks to HN. But this move is a shining example of alignment between customers and a commercial entity.
Businesses doing things in line with customer preferences is exciting to see.
Can someone please explain to me why people are so hostile to this? Like even if you don't care, why would people be against putting less chemicals in food?
Seems inconsistent to say "truth be told" before "probably". These sorts of vibes based statements cloud conversation and confuse the scientifically illiterate who are quick to attach truth to belief.
This is good but the effects are also highly marginal. The key change would be if the U.S. moved to the EU system where a new food needs to be proven to be safe before it can be sold as opposed to the current system where a new food is assumed to be safe until proven otherwise.
That is the systemic shift that’s actually important and would have automatically handled the dyes issue as well.
If China stops buying our soybeans, we can start planting other things. Aren't natural food dyes just a great way to encourage diversity in domestic agriculture?
I am not an expert in synthetic vs. natural, but I feel like this decision isn't actually about health (I don't see any reason to believe why Wal-Mart cares at all about the health of Americans) but rather some larger macroeconomic reality.
China imports only 21% of it's soy from america. Down from 40% 5y back.
America consistently exports only half of its soy output. The other half is all used domestically.
To be clear, almost all soy in the world is used for animal feed, not for humans to consume. My exact knowledge of poultry is limited, but I believe broiler chickens are made possible (3kg in 50 days) only because of a diet consisting of a certain kind of corn and certain kind of soy.
> We can start planting other things
American farms and the entire supply chain is pretty hardwired to corn and soy, for the same reasons punjab/haryana farms are hardwired to rice (even tho it's arid land, rice isn't even native, thus uses up groundwater too fast).
Government-set/subsidized price floors, insurance, storage programs specifically for 4 program crops, of which one was corn, and to which soy was a later addition. India has the same thing for rice etc.
Soy/corn rotation also caused extreme lock-in, since soy leaves a lot of nitrogen in the soil after harvest, and corn needs a lot of nitrogen.
There are many other factors, but essentially, the entire farm supply chain is locked in to corn/soy in most American farmland similar to how most punjab/haryana supply chain is stuck in rice/wheat alternation and resulting farmland/aquifer overuse.
In america too corn soy are not native. And the excess nitrogen goes down the rivers and causes hypoxia in the gulf of (mexico|america). Very symmetric problem.
It's extremely expensive to get them to grow anything different. For starters, removing the price floors and such is electoral suicide. Most of the farmers (that remain) depend on these things heavily. You can complete the rest...
More random stats: 40% of us corn goes to animal feed, 40% goes to ethanol (for blending with petrol among other things), and the rest is other stuff.
Even more: 70% of soy goes to animal feed, primarily broiler chicken, 15% goes to oil. Margarine, processed crap, lots of fried goods, all use this. I think you can even make plastic with it. I forgot what the other 15% was... And the people actually eating tofu, soy milk, etc are a tiny percentage and don't even register.
Corn was domesticated in Mexico like 10,000 years ago. It is indeed native in so far as an extremely human selected crop can be. (selective breeding over thousands of years not genetic engineering)
If China is buying South American soybeans instead of US soybeans than whoever was buying from South America is going to buy from the US because it's not like 8 million tons of soybeans per month are magically getting created in Brazil.
It's not that there will be no market effect but it's pretty close to a zero sum game because the global production and consumption of soy really isn't changing that much.
<it's not like 8 million tons of soybeans per month are magically getting created in Brazil>
Brazil increase in production this year is 5.3 million metric tons. So looks like Brazil can replace US exports to China without affecting existing customers.
Brazil’s 2025/26 Soy Crop Seen Growing 3% Versus the Previous Cycle
Generally, I tend to eat natural foods. I have for decades. They just taste better. Dyes are mostly used in processed foods, because otherwise they would look unappealing next to fresh natural food. And for a very good reason.
All that is to say, doesn't much matter to me what they regulate, I eat hardly any of that stuff anyway.
Can you clearly state what that reason is? The only reason stated in the article is that this move "is in line with evolving customer preferences and in support of a more transparent food system".
They're mainly petrochemicals and were dubiously granted protected status. Lots of colors are poisions, read "A Rainbow of Risks" - great paper on documented problems with these
> We won’t see the full effect of his efforts until years down the road.
What are the expected outcomes of this change? What are the efforts that are driving this? The linked article cites consumer preferences as a primary driver for removing synthetic dyes, not any FDA regulations enforcing their removal.
I predict that years down the road, a high-quality randomized study of Walmart versus non-Walmart shoppers will show that this move had no impact whatsoever on human health. I'm happy to make this a formal wager with you if you want.
My understanding is that there are somewhat more restrictive regulations on food dyes in the EU compared to the US. But that overall there isn't a big concern about the majority of these dyes.
There also isn't a fundamental difference between a synthetic and a natural dye. Okay, humans are more likely to have encountered a natural dye during their evolution and adapted to ingesting them. But that is unlikely to matter to all kinds of dyes, and also wouldn't filter out any health effects that don't affect reproductive fitness.
Treating a whole category of molecules this way does not make sense. It makes sense to evaluate the health effects of individual dyes. But that is not unique to synthetic dyes.
The sheer percentage of artificial food dyes that have been banned suggests otherwise. There’s a long pattern of banning something once enough evidence builds up only to be replaced by something that’s then eventually banded.
If there where significant value that might be different, but there isn’t a great argument for experimenting on millions of people here.
How many artificial food dyes have been actually banned? I mean in the time where we actually had some regulations, the old days were quite wild in terms of safety in all areas, so I don't think that would be a useful comparison.
I don’t recall the exact number, but well over half that have been in common use were eventually banned.
Edit Prior to this administration: Butter yellow, Green 1, Green 2, Orange 1, Orange 2, Orange B, Red 1, Red 2, Red 4, Red 32, Sudan 1, Violet 1, Yellow 1, Yellow 2, Yellow 3, Yellow 4 + some more in the really early days.
EU had a longer list including Titanium dioxide.
Titanium dioxide is naturally occurring.
The poster was using the phrase natural dye.
It’s a naturally occurring non organic molecule, but it’s not naturally a white pigment. It takes a lot of processing to get that brilliant white powder and as such it’s not something our ancestors dealt with.
So is arsenic.
Totally off-topic, but your comment reminded me of some lyrics to a song by one of my favorite folk singers [0]:
[0]: https://youtu.be/ixE73z_a37UIt is not naturally occurring in the human diet.
This is the same argument people use against bread, and against meat.
Huh? Our ancestors have been eating meat for 2 million years. We know because bones do not biodegrade so we've found many prehistoric bones with tool marks left when prehistoric people cut the meat off the bone.
I'm in awe at the number of people that will go to bat for things like artificial dyes in food, only because the policy is coming from the present administration. It's just common sense. We don't need to be ingesting this shit. It's cosmetic and not needed for nutrition. Why are you feeding your child Fruit Loops and not Cheerios?
I personally have known people who develop migraines after eating food with artificial dyes. We can sit here and snipe and play semantics and argue over pointless details but why bother? Just get rid of them all.
I want these decisions to be bases on scientific and medical data, not on gut feeling or unfounded personal belief. I have no issue with regulating specific dyes or additives in food, or groups of related chemicals.
And your anecdote is not scientific data. You cannot draw any conclusions from that.
Again with this, you are simply proving my point further. I don't need a panel of credentialed scientists to tell me if this stuff is okay or not. It's unnecessary to sustain life and provides no nutrition whatsoever. There is literally zero reason to add it to food. Your kid can eat white or chocolate icing on birthday cakes. Get rid of it. The end.
I know this feels cut and dry to you, but what you're kicking is a fundamental pillar of the industrial food system. Many food products emerge from processing a dull or unappetizing color. Food needs to last as long as possible and still look like food. It's tempting to say that food should all be made with love in home kitchens, but that's untenable for feeding 8 billion people.
My favorite example of this is orange juice. OJ is kept in long term storage to stretch a seasonal crop into year-round availability. What comes out is brown and flavorless! This brown mush is restored to something a person would drink with the addition of "flavor packs" made by the perfume industry. This has the added benefit of giving brands a consistent and repeatable flavor. Regulatory bodies in their wisdom allow this product to be called "100% juice".
You might say well get rid of that too. I'm not arguing this is the ideal food system. But it has to be said, this goes a lot deeper than the easy ones like frosting and fruit loops.
Calling it "the perfume industry" is a half truth. It's the flavoring industry, but it so happens that there's a lot of overlap between perfume and flavoring in terms of raw materials.
However, flavoring is a distinct profession. Besides that, very few novel compounds are allowed in food compared to fragrance. If any flavoring is synthetic in origin (which is not the same thing as novel, to be clear) then the product must be labeled as artificially flavored. If they call the product 100% juice and added flavoring is used, then that flavoring in turn has to have been sourced from the fruit.
In other words, they're using extracts from real oranges to reconstitute the flavor lost during pasteurization. They can further adjust which parts of the extract they use (called fractions and isolates) to dial in a particular flavor.
I appreciate the nuance! My intention was to show that there's a surprising amount of correction for flavor and taste necessary even for one-ingredient "natural" foods.
Primarily in bulk operations, none of that bullshit is needed if you just juice some fresh oranges into a glass and drink it…
But there is a clear public health trade-off there, because far fewer people will drink O.J. if that work is required (vs. just pouring it out of a carton).
Is it? OJ isn’t particularly healthy.
Fair. It's better than orange soda!
Food presentation has an effect on taste. This is why the dyes are used. Frankly, I wouldn't want to live in a world where the only food we're allowed to eat has to demonstrate that it's only made of ingredients necessary to sustain life and be nutritional.
We don’t make decisions to ban foodstuffs based on whether they are “necessary to sustain life.”
Maybe we should. Ideally we should ban ingredients that are not on a whitelist instead of banning ingredients on a blacklist.
Why are we as a society allowing these paperclip maximizing companies to experiment on hundreds of millions of people for their own profits..
Bingo; should have to prove something is safe rather than the opposite
There is no scientific framework that can tell you the correct amount of non-food material to intentionally add to your otherwise fine food.
https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/qualified-presump...
Its a risk assessment not a measure of absolute certainty.
> scientific and medical data,
which has never been been manipulated by funding.
> I personally have known people who develop migraines after eating food with artificial dyes
Yeah, my mom was the same way when she had food with MSG in it. But only when she knew there was MSG in it.
When your mom eats something that is bad for her and her brain can tell it is bad for her, then if that experience is repeated a lot, then every time it encounters that thing or even thinks about that thing, her brain will tend to cause a defensive reaction, which itself is unpleasant and can affect your mom's behavior. None of this need be conscious or deliberate.
I don't think gp is trying to imply that she's explicitly making it up, just that the phenomena is in her head. To take an absurd example, it's probably safe to say that electromagentic sensitivity doesn't actually exist (ie. radio waves aren't actually causing people pain/distress), even if sufferers aren't lying to others about their experiences.
[flagged]
Not wanting multi-billion dollar conglomerates putting poison in everyone's food is a far-right position now, didn't you get the memo?
It's weird being a 90s/2000s anti-war, anti-globalization, and pro-labor Democrat in a 2025 world.
+1. G.R.A.S. (generally recognized as safe) is long overdue for reform
You can live your life how you want. What the rest of us eat isn't your business.
Fluoride in communal drinking water is another thing I notice strange ingroup outgroup thinking in ...
If I want to eat fruit loops, why are you getting involved?
We have options and can make our own decisions about what to eat.
Your unhealthy habits should not be normalized but unfortunately it is via mass advertising.
You don't know anything about me what kind of comment is this?
Assumptions like this is why I don't want other people making decisions for me
I don’t need to know anything about you to know that eating fruit loops is an unhealthy habit.
1. Because you'll feed them to your kids who do not make their own decisions, other than if they'll pay to remove cancers off their anus or die at home at 25.
2. Because a massive food industry would gladly lie about how unsafe their product is just like tobacco companies and they have far more money than you to befuddle the research.
This is a little dramatic
Tobacco still isn't illegal. We're all free to smoke.
Were given information and we're free to do what we want with it.
All... give your kids some cigs and see what happens.
>1. Because you'll feed them to your kids who do not make their own decisions, other than if they'll pay to remove cancers off their anus or die at home at 25.
How about we mandate physical activity for kids as well, given all the known harms of being inactive? Maybe refer kids to CPS if they're too fat too?
I think Walmart's move probably isn't about toxicology as much as it is about consumer perception
Probably. It's still interesting that Walmart perceives consumer perception to be shifting against synthetic dyes.
Bipartisan issue we can all rally around
> My understanding is that there are somewhat more restrictive regulations on food dyes in the EU compared to the US.
There isn't. The US's FDA allows fewer of them than the EU's EFSA.
There are people with allergies to some naturally derived dyes. Annatto (from tree seeds) and carmine (from bugs) in particular.
A small number of people get anaphylaxis from carmine.
Yeah, Yellow dye #6 may cause testicular cancer, but I can't stand boring looking pastries. Sure people could use saffron, but that's expensive and we have to have cheap and good looking, right?
Ban 'em all. If it isn't already in the foods we eat, it doesn't belong.
As someone who has an allergic reaction to one of these dyes, I support their banning.
I'm allergic to Yellow #5 (Tartrazine), but not to Tumeric which seems to do just as good as job of making things yellow/orange.
> It makes sense to evaluate the health effects of individual dyes
I wonder if changing the color of food is actually that important.
I was looking at this paper which seems to have a bunch of citations. Different colors are associated with different flavors in certain countries.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13411-015-0031-3#...
But yes I think the food color is ultimately important to succeeding in the marketplace and we aren't going to be getting rid of food dyes in manufactured food anytime soon.
>the food color is ultimately important to succeeding in the marketplace
The decision-makers at Walmart seem to believe artificial colors are no longer important to succeeding with Walmart's customers and prospective customers.
And clearly they're not important to succeeding at Whole Foods, where all artificial colors have been disallowed for many years.
Wait? If artificial dyes become forbidden. Won't it make competiton easier since your competitors can't use dyes either.
There are natural dyes that can be used too.
Artificial colorants make it easier to design visually hyperstimulating foods without having to compromise on flavor. What could the upside for the consumer be, to disrupt our evolved associations between appearance and flavor?
Inquiring minds want to know: have experiments been done on the perception of (say) totally monochromatic Froot Loops, or monochromatic Lucky Charms ?
At one point NASA tried out things like blue ham.
It is if you're trying to sell it. Not dyes, but beer bottle color affects purchasing decisions [0-1].
[0]: https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5710/6/4/64 [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266615432...
Ah, yes. The "I don't think anyone needs to do this, therefore no one needs to do this" argument.
Hardly. I'm openly wondering. If you _need_ to do this, then please, by all means, share that with us here now.
I could not find my reference but I thought it was something more along the lines that either they don’t need to be disclosed in the EU or they go under different safer sounding names.
They are under Exxx codes. Not even safer sounding they are just listed by their technical codes.
Thank you that’s it. I had remember some folks comparing products debunking those claims “see red #5 is not in the European version”
Red 5 is not allowed in Europe and doesn't have an E number, so in this case they are right.
Ummm there is not even a red 5? It was just a made up example.
But this is likely also an attempt to market to people who think things like "but I don't want to be exposed to chemicals" while not realizing water is a chemical.
Very funny, but also flippant and glib.
When people -- myself included -- say they have a problem with chemicals in food, they of course mean artificial chemicals: that is, compounds, preservatives, dyes, and flavors that are non-naturally present for that particular food item and were added for their shelf life, taste, aesthetic, or addictive properties.
Next time you visit your grocery store, go read the ingredients list of a few different boxed and frozen items. It's not uncommon to see three- or four- dozen ingredients on items that should have less than 10.
While all of these compounds may have FDA approval and studies verifying their safety for ingestion, please keep several things in mind:
1. Studies use large, population-based sample sizes and their effects are based on their statistical significance on these populations. In other words, "side effects" are a population-level phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon. It is plausible that individual side effects are hidden as statistical noise. This is a problem with pharmacological studies as well and there is no easy solution to it AFAIK.
2. We have a massive obesity crisis in this country (and increasingly globally). Sedentary lifestyles and increased caloric intake is no doubt part of this, but it is blindingly obvious (to me, at least) that the meat of the problem is environmental, primarily diets, and these compounds are wreaking havoc on the endocrine systems of the population causing a massive uptick in obesity and diabetes.
>1. Studies use large, population-based sample sizes and their effects are based on their statistical significance on these populations. In other words, "side effects" are a population-level phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon. It is plausible that individual side effects are hidden as statistical noise. This is a problem with pharmacological studies as well and there is no easy solution to it AFAIK.
I don't get it, are you trying to imply there might be 0.0001% of people with negative side effects, they're not getting picked up, and for that reason those substances should have never been approved? If so what does that say about allergens? If the Colombian exchange happened today, should we ban peanuts on the basis that a few percent of people get side effects?
>but it is blindingly obvious (to me, at least) that the meat of the problem is environmental, primarily diets, and these compounds are wreaking havoc on the endocrine systems of the population causing a massive uptick in obesity and diabetes.
How is it "blindingly obvious" that it's caused by artificial colors specifically though? Otherwise it's a leap to go from "there must be something in the food" to "we should ban artificial colors".
What level of evidence is acceptable before stopping things entering our food chain? Is it anything that doesn't have positive evidence of harm ok? Presumably a little bit of study is required... So how much? How many interactions should be studied? Is there a benefit trade off (I'm actually struggling here, so if you think so, perhaps you can clarify what benefits would lead to a a higher risk of harm)?
>What level of evidence is acceptable before stopping things entering our food chain? Is it anything that doesn't have positive evidence of harm ok?
Peanuts have very clear evidence of harm (at least to those who are allergic), and it's unclear what "benefits" it has besides "it tastes good". Why allow it?
3. Long term effects are very hard to study and tease out.
4. Interactions are even harder to establish, since the possible different cocktails and biologies combinatorially explode. This is the primary reason for a precautionary principle in introducing new compounds into our diets.
The type of people you’re replying to would wait until their experiment was done to agree to ban things that are obviously bad even if by the time they said “ok guys I agree to ban it I have the data now!” all of humanity is next to them in a dead pile. Prior to that they would argue ad infinitum that there’s no proof x y and z are bad. People do that on this very forum with ingestion of microplastics. I don’t have patience for people like this anymore.
This is the kind of nerd-snark that makes normal people not trust anything from the mouths of "experts."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM
The point is it's totally possible for some artificial dyes to potentially be harmful and need to be regulated, but eliminating them all just because they're "artificial" is woo-woo nonsense on the same order as my deliberately parodic example.
Know what else is artificial? Insulin and penicillin.
>Know what else is artificial? Insulin and penicillin.
Even if they may have side effects/allergies, we tolerate them because they provide extremely large benefits to the population. You can't compare that to a chemical we use to make the colors of candies pop more.
No one is dying or getting seriously ill because their Fruit Loops had bland and unsaturated colors.
It’s not. The one who controls the null hypothesis rules the world.. Should a new dye be banned until it is proven safe, or should a new dye be banned only when it has been proven unsafe?
The answer to the above question is not a scientific one. It has to do with how we want to operate as a society, it’s a political or social issue.
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The thing is, there are many chemicals which are safe to drink in reasonable amounts, and many chemicals that are not safe to drink in any amount. People deciding not to eat something because "it has chemicals in it" is a pretty ignorant take.
> People deciding not to eat something because "it has chemicals in it" is a pretty ignorant take.
When people say this they are obviously not referring the the definition of "chemical" that a chemist would use. Pretending otherwise is exactly the "nerd-snark" mentioned above which makes people distrust experts because they clearly aren't intending to use the term "chemical" in a sense that would include substances like water.
Right, just like the town that banned dihydrogen monoxide.
There are too many food (and personal care and clothing etc) chemical additives for the average person to remotely be able to keep up with the details of each, especially given not all products even need to disclose them–the charitable, or simply non snarky, reading of that kind of comment is more like "I don't want to eat food with unnecessary/under-studied additives in it."
they might not drink water
Most likely so if they buy their food at walmart.
It's extremely presumptuous of you to assume that everyone who shops at Walmart are uneducated simpletons.
Maybe they're smarter than you with money. The same box of cereal that costs less than $2 at Walmart is almost $6 at Whole Foods.
I meant overweight not dumb. Fat people (like my dad) don't drink a lot of water, they drink soda and sugar water. And every time I grocery shop at Walmart is pretty noticeable demographic of people buying crates of coke.
That comment is right up there with deliberately misunderstanding "Organic" food labeling for anything carbon-based.
Middle school level argument.. Good luck on making better arguments I guess.
I participated in some consumer testing when Kellogg's Canada was switching their breakfast cereals to natural colours. Beyond some muted colours, the cereal tasted exactly the same. Seemed like a no brainer, really.
IIRC they switched to natural dyes in 2017, but sales fell because average people are "shiny object" driven. So they reverted it.
Not that I'm aware of.. The product I tested was after 2017 is still advertised here in Canada with natural colours, made with fruit juices.
The US parent company is also committing to it as well.
https://www.wkkellogg.com/our-impact/make-eating-well-easy/q...
Sorry, it was actually general mills who did this.
https://www.fooddive.com/news/silly-general-mills-artificial...
Was it just the US who enjoyed brighter, shinier and arguably "faker" things, or did other countries also experience sales drops when other brands removed artificial coloring?
I'm curious (as in HN curious discussion) whether this points to something greater about US culture.
Synthetic and “natural” is so hazy. What’s the difference between a dye that’s synthetically made and one where we crush up bugs and extract the same exact chemical (real thing.). Why don’t we just eliminate most dyes overall…
Eh. Being honest with dyes there's a pretty strong distinction between "natural" dyes going through several extraction and purification steps but remaining more or less the same intact molecule found in something alive.
"Synthetic" dyes being the result of a long chain of steps and intermediate molecules which are usually ultimately sourced from things like air, petroleum, and seawater.
Science literacy is bad so people have problems articulating the issue of concern which is "it is fair to have concerns about novel chemicals making their way into the food supply which evolution has not had a chance to address", not that something not found in nature is automatically bad but that such things need to be introduced carefully.
People don't know science though so everything is turning into "if it's not found in nature it is a monster and unclean", which to be honest is fair to a degree for people who don't know being forced to accept things blindly and asked to trust that everything is fine from people who would gladly disregard dangers in exchange for a fraction of a cent in profit margin.
That doesn't mean they're making good decisions just that their fear is justified.
Yeah, the line between "natural" and "synthetic" is mostly vibes at this point
Wikipedia says about carmine …
> To prepare carmine, the powdered insect bodies are boiled in ammonia or a sodium carbonate solution, the insoluble matter is removed by filtering, and alum is added to the clear salt solution of carminic acid to precipitate the red aluminium salt. Purity of color is ensured by the absence of iron. Stannous chloride, citric acid, borax, or gelatin may be added to regulate the formation of the precipitate. For shades of purple, lime is added to the alum.
At this point how natural is it?
You will eat the bugs...
I have some bad news for you if that bothers you https://www.livescience.com/36292-red-food-dye-bugs-cochinea.... That’s where “natural” dye comes from
Interesting read! At least it's not cockroaches. The bugs look like raspberries funnily enough.
We are exposed to so much anti-customer behavior thanks to HN. But this move is a shining example of alignment between customers and a commercial entity.
Businesses doing things in line with customer preferences is exciting to see.
Can someone please explain to me why people are so hostile to this? Like even if you don't care, why would people be against putting less chemicals in food?
Because chemistry is awesome, and chemicals give us amazing modern super powers.
Also, everything is a chemical.
A subset of both natural and artificial chemicals cause cancer, we should identify those carcinogens and not eat those. At least not too much.
Their brains go to mush from the US left-right politics divide is why.
Agreed. We must eliminate dangerous chemicals like dihydrogen monoxide from our food!
Who, whom?
We should use lead pipes because they are made from naturally occurring lead. Synthetic PEX pipes have to go because: synthetic.
Truth be told they both probably leech chemicals into the water supply.
Seems inconsistent to say "truth be told" before "probably". These sorts of vibes based statements cloud conversation and confuse the scientifically illiterate who are quick to attach truth to belief.
This is good but the effects are also highly marginal. The key change would be if the U.S. moved to the EU system where a new food needs to be proven to be safe before it can be sold as opposed to the current system where a new food is assumed to be safe until proven otherwise.
That is the systemic shift that’s actually important and would have automatically handled the dyes issue as well.
If China stops buying our soybeans, we can start planting other things. Aren't natural food dyes just a great way to encourage diversity in domestic agriculture?
I am not an expert in synthetic vs. natural, but I feel like this decision isn't actually about health (I don't see any reason to believe why Wal-Mart cares at all about the health of Americans) but rather some larger macroeconomic reality.
Disclaimer: numbers are from memory
> china
China imports only 21% of it's soy from america. Down from 40% 5y back.
America consistently exports only half of its soy output. The other half is all used domestically.
To be clear, almost all soy in the world is used for animal feed, not for humans to consume. My exact knowledge of poultry is limited, but I believe broiler chickens are made possible (3kg in 50 days) only because of a diet consisting of a certain kind of corn and certain kind of soy.
> We can start planting other things
American farms and the entire supply chain is pretty hardwired to corn and soy, for the same reasons punjab/haryana farms are hardwired to rice (even tho it's arid land, rice isn't even native, thus uses up groundwater too fast).
Government-set/subsidized price floors, insurance, storage programs specifically for 4 program crops, of which one was corn, and to which soy was a later addition. India has the same thing for rice etc.
Soy/corn rotation also caused extreme lock-in, since soy leaves a lot of nitrogen in the soil after harvest, and corn needs a lot of nitrogen.
There are many other factors, but essentially, the entire farm supply chain is locked in to corn/soy in most American farmland similar to how most punjab/haryana supply chain is stuck in rice/wheat alternation and resulting farmland/aquifer overuse.
In america too corn soy are not native. And the excess nitrogen goes down the rivers and causes hypoxia in the gulf of (mexico|america). Very symmetric problem.
It's extremely expensive to get them to grow anything different. For starters, removing the price floors and such is electoral suicide. Most of the farmers (that remain) depend on these things heavily. You can complete the rest...
More random stats: 40% of us corn goes to animal feed, 40% goes to ethanol (for blending with petrol among other things), and the rest is other stuff.
Even more: 70% of soy goes to animal feed, primarily broiler chicken, 15% goes to oil. Margarine, processed crap, lots of fried goods, all use this. I think you can even make plastic with it. I forgot what the other 15% was... And the people actually eating tofu, soy milk, etc are a tiny percentage and don't even register.
>In america too corn soy are not native.
Corn was domesticated in Mexico like 10,000 years ago. It is indeed native in so far as an extremely human selected crop can be. (selective breeding over thousands of years not genetic engineering)
Ugh.
THE SAME NUMBER OF SOYBEANS ARE GETTING CONSUMED.
If China is buying South American soybeans instead of US soybeans than whoever was buying from South America is going to buy from the US because it's not like 8 million tons of soybeans per month are magically getting created in Brazil.
It's not that there will be no market effect but it's pretty close to a zero sum game because the global production and consumption of soy really isn't changing that much.
<it's not like 8 million tons of soybeans per month are magically getting created in Brazil>
Brazil increase in production this year is 5.3 million metric tons. So looks like Brazil can replace US exports to China without affecting existing customers.
Brazil’s 2025/26 Soy Crop Seen Growing 3% Versus the Previous Cycle
https://www.agriculture.com/partners-brazil-s-2025-26-soy-cr...
> month
> year
Why are farmers asking for a bailout, claiming no one is buying their soy beans?
Generally, I tend to eat natural foods. I have for decades. They just taste better. Dyes are mostly used in processed foods, because otherwise they would look unappealing next to fresh natural food. And for a very good reason.
All that is to say, doesn't much matter to me what they regulate, I eat hardly any of that stuff anyway.
What a HUGE win for everyone's health. Kudos.
Based on what evidence?
Not against removing unnecessary stuff from food, but lets be real about the effects.
Indeed. So what is missing from the list? Perhaps emulsifiers?
Absolutely. I found out late in life that emulsifiers like soy lethicin are awful for us. Take those out next please
I'll be curious to see how they define "synthetic" and what ingredients make the cut or get quietly swapped in
it's already easy to eat and drink things without any dyes or even artificial flavoring
(except OTC medication always has that nonsense, but now my advil is also dye-free)
but Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the life-expectancy of people back when everything was natural and organic
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMpuL2GMQSd/embed/
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Hope this spreads to other countries.
Which other countries?
I'm sure I'm simplifying things, but I think this ban is common practice at this point in most of the EU, Canada.
Where else is hypercouloring cereal common?
The food additive laws vary a great deal between countries, even US/Canada/UK/EU/Japan. It's pretty eye opening.
A side effect is these substances may continue to be distributed in other countries.
If RFK gets his way there will certainly be things spreading to other countries.
Aldi US did the same back in 2015.
Good, there is a reason why just about every other country outlaws these.
Can you clearly state what that reason is? The only reason stated in the article is that this move "is in line with evolving customer preferences and in support of a more transparent food system".
They're mainly petrochemicals and were dubiously granted protected status. Lots of colors are poisions, read "A Rainbow of Risks" - great paper on documented problems with these
Some dyes _have_ been found to be carcinogenic and outlawed in the USA, even prior to this administration.
From there, you then apply the "precautionary principle" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle .
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Please don't post unsubstantive comments.
Please especially don't do that when a thread is new, because threads are sensitive to initial conditions.
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yeah, kids scarfing down the same cheeto’s minus synthetic orange is probably worth a polio epidemic
> We won’t see the full effect of his efforts until years down the road.
What are the expected outcomes of this change? What are the efforts that are driving this? The linked article cites consumer preferences as a primary driver for removing synthetic dyes, not any FDA regulations enforcing their removal.
He's right about dyes. Anything else?
I predict that years down the road, a high-quality randomized study of Walmart versus non-Walmart shoppers will show that this move had no impact whatsoever on human health. I'm happy to make this a formal wager with you if you want.
Years down the road, when US children are dying from easily preventable childhood diseases.
Nothing RFK Jr. might do will outweigh the death and suffering he will cause by restricting and maligning vaccines today.
83 deaths at least and counting....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Samoa_measles_outbreak