US will ban cancer-linked Red Dye No. 3 in cereal and other foods

So nothing but natural, eh? Maybe you meant anything but natural. :)

Never seen it as a slushie in Italy but we do have azure ice cream. It used to be called "puffo" (=Smurf) but smurfs aren't popular anymore, so now they usually sell it as "marshmallow" or "cotton candy".

But it tastes nothing like raspberry?

In the U.K. I remember it being a novelty flavour for a brief period in the 90s.

I’ve not seen or heard of the idea since then, although this may reflect my own consumer preferences.

I have never seen this product or heard the term "blue raspberry" in my life, so probably not around the world.

If you eat a bowl of mixed blueberries and raspberries, it actually does taste like blue raspberry. It's a mixture of the two flavors.

I have it on good authority that the snozzberries taste like snozzberries.

You need to be squeezed. Off to the juicing room you go!

Gatorade cool blue used to be blue raspberry

> only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done

I agree with most of what you are saying. However, I think it's valid to also apply heavy scrutiny on new chemicals being added to the food chain. The default being to not allow it if it's not proven safe.

Red dye 3 probably shouldn't have been added to the food supply chain with that criteria but since it's already been there for decades with no strong link to negative outcomes there's little reason to ban it now.

> The correct (and scientifically valid) thing to do is to only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done.

Because we're talking about food I would actually like to see the opposite. Provide peer reviewed, gold standard studies showing that what you want to put in food is in fact safe.

No, you assign a risk score as well as a cost score to all the industrial inputs that you can use. In this case, there are readily available red food dyes (eg cochineal from industrially farmed insects) that have much lower risk scores (as they are from plant and animal sources) and not significantly different cost scores.

You also need to ask, what is the cost of not having this substance? In this case, the cost would be - you have food that isn't red. Is that a substantial problem for society?

To treat these as irrelevant and boil it down to "prove it is harmful or shut up" is needlessly reductive.

You didn't address the part that it adds nothing useful to the food other than color.

No you would only have to ban things with no nutritional benefit. The comment you replied to specified the case in question: it only lends the food a color.

I disagree.

Actual food, meaning plants, animals, fungus is one thing.

Novel chemical substances should IMHO be guilty until proven innocent.

I realize there's a grey area between say, a plant, and some chemical isolated from the plant. There is a spectrum of whole fresh plant, dried plant, powdered plant, and then chemically isolated constituent of the plant powder. There are useful distinctions to make along that spectrum. And eating quantities of an extracted chemical from a plant that would be impossible to consume by eating the whole plant is one such useful distinction. (e.g. I could extract cyanide from apple seeds and concentrate it, and kill myself, when there's no way I could eat enough whole apples to kill myself with the cyanide.)

But synthetic chemicals not found in nature are entirely outside of that spectrum.

I'm not really pro-bureaucrat, but perhaps the standard for food should be slightly different. Just maybe, (novel) food (additives/preservatives/ingredients) should first be proven safe, rather than waiting until they're proven unsafe to prohibit them. It's not as if this was a substance humans regularly ingested for centuries and people are only now wigging out... look at the wikipedia entry for this. The only halogen that's not part of this thing is apparently bromine, the IUPAC name for the chemical's about as long as my comment here.

Proof can take a while to get together.

I prefer the EUs precautionary principle that enables action to be taken when there is uncertainty over something.

Obviously the problem is that Red no3 is so prevalent and completely unregulated. Alcohol is sold separately and ID is needed to purchase and isn't added to children's food. If the dye was only sold separately in bottles this debate wouldn't be happening.

The water thing is even more unserious so I'll ignore it.

This is a silly argument that is often made.

Everyone knows alcohol is a toxin. It is regulated. You have to be of certain age to buy it. It isn't normally in things you consume daily as a secondary ingredient in doses that would be harmful. You can taste it if it is. If you cannot taste it, you can recognize the effects from drinking it.

The dose makes the poison with any substance, that is a base tenant of toxicology. Not many people are unintentionally poisoning themselves with water.

Food and drug regulations save lives. If you want to argue against them, please at least do so in a manner that doesn't rely on absurdist examples.

The difference, I think, is that alcohol is a choice. But having a potentially dangerous dye in a pill you're forced to take is not.

Other than bakery items, what foods do you regularly eat that depend on having a specific color? I don't see how that's anything other than a marketing tool to make them stand out on store shelves. When you order something in a restaurant, you typically don't even know what their version will look like until it gets to your table. I've never, not once, added dyes to home cooking outside of cake icings and things like that.

There've been ridiculous attempts to get rid of perfectly innocent flavor enhancers before, like the fight against MSG. Take out MSG, and food tastes less good. But take out a borderline red dye, and what's the worst that happens? Factories have to sell soda that's slightly less pretty in the bottle?

Nope, eating nothing but potatoes for the rest of your life is a fantastic way to ensure that you end up with severe macro/micronutrient deficiencies, which will be a very effective way of generating disease, including cancer.

For fun, you could grow your own seasoning (besides herbs, easy too) for those potatoes. I recently learned about the plant Salicornia - you can dehydrate them and grind them to make a green salt. I'm going to try to grow some this year.

>We (humans) don't subsist on some Matrix-like slop that provides all of our nutrients for no pleasure. Eating is a weird combination of necessity and pleasure activity. You could ask: if there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing taste, why risk it? You'd ban most spices with this line of reasoning.

I mean, we absolutely do that already. There's plenty of folks on a low sodium diet because while the salt tastes great, it's bad for them.

In this case we aren't talking about eliminating the color red entirely, we're arguing about a slightly different color. You can get red from a strawberry, raspberry, cherry skin, etc. which will work just as well. It just won't be the neon-red that red-5 produces.

But red dye has little to no value to consumers and there are equally viable alternatives. No one is going to start bootlegging red dye 3 if it is banned. Alcohol has huge value and is basically impossible to ban.

What does B12 in alcohol do?

Well, we did TRY banning alcohol, but it didn't go that well. We do at least generally attempt to prevent children from consuming alcohol, though.

Should we ban alcohol? I think people should stop drinking it, but in general I don't think the sale of things that may be harmful in some ways should be entirely prohibited, it would just be good if we minimized the amount of potentially harmful ingredients in our general food supply. e.g. if someone wanted to buy/sell Red Dye No. 3 on its own I don't think that would be a big concern.

Both alcohol and tobacco are regulated by the ATF. The FDA would ban cigarettes if they had the authority.

Yeah, B12 AND B1 in alchohol alike. There are lots of people around age 50 who get admitted to social home and have irreversible B1 deficiency, labeled as "alcohol-induced B1 deficiency".

Because that's what we tried for a hundred years and its how we ended up with innumerable wildly dangerous products on the market. The amount of research to vet all the products in your daily life would be astronomical and that's even assuming the companies making them are honest about the ingredients. Here's the context of why the FDA was founded:

> By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products that had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, mascara that could cause blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law did not get through the Congress of the United States for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_Drug_Administration

A combination of economists, epidemiologists, public health officials, governments, and individuals.

Why other than you? Because you have an impact on society. Your actions affect others.

Would you be upset if you ate something every day and didn't understand the risks fully and then developed a disease because of it? What if no one understood the risks aside from the entity that sold it to you? Would you be upset if someone you cared about deeply, say a child, made a mistake of never understanding there was a risk to consuming something, say, baby food, and then developed a life ending disease because of it? Would you feel responsible if you facilitated giving that person you cared about the food you chose to buy and there by aided in ending their life prematurely?

Any of these scenarios should make it obvious there has to be some sort of regulation around these things, as no one individual is an encyclopedia of toxic substances, and we exist in a bazaar of choices.

There could be a compromise, much like there is with alcohol and tobacco, that if you absolutely wanted to buy something toxic, you could do so. However, that wouldn't really necessitate that you couldn't use it to harm someone else.

Yes one member of my family would be thrilled if Red 40 was banned. They don't have an anaphylactic reaction, they "just" barf it back up shortly.

>The incoming administration won't be banning things from our food. It will be removing regulations and allowing corporations to put whatever they want into their products no matter what the harms are.

But RFK was also complaining about all the additives added to foods in the US, and wanted to get rid of everything from ultra processed foods to seed oils?

Historically I would agree, but we are in a new world. RFK Jr is the face of increased FDA regulation and banning of potentially toxic materials, and he is coming under the Trump administration. For the vast majority of his life, he was a Democrat Fighting frequently Republican administrations purposes of environment and health, but he is now very much rejected by The Democratic party. The Republican party seems to be welcoming him fairly warmly, although it will be interesting to see how long that persists as soon as he has some disagreement with Trump or starts making a real impact.

Personally I really hope many Democrats can put The health of our people ahead of other things and work together to make meaningful changes, because something really needs to be done. Chronic health issues have exploded and it may already be too late for multiple generations who will suffer from chronic disease their entire life as a result of this. If those of us alive and aware of these problems now don't do something to correct this course, we will be guilty of criminal negligence to our descendants in my opinion.

Incorrect.

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-00830.pdf

Scroll down to "I. Introduction".

> In the Federal Register of February 17, 2023 (88 FR 10245), we announced that we filed a color additive petition (CAP 3C0323) jointly submitted by

RFK was not the HHS nominee in February 2023.

But it appears this process has been going even earlier than that: November 15, 2022 [0]

[0]: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/17/2023-03...

Where did you read that?

I think it would mean at the time of the ban, the alternative red dyes that were available didn't work well with processed cherries.

cherry lobby

I don't know whether that's literally true, but I can certainly tell you that there is no point in banning stuff nobody in the EU is thinking of using anyway. US companies are way more "adventurous" with their additives, which makes regulation here even more important.

The main export of the EU is bureaucracy

look at the health of average person in EU vs US particularly related to food related disorders.

Include obesity, diabetes. Then move onto the GMOs and Roundup and how GMOs enabled mass use of Roundup. Roundup is now being looked into as a potential source of the increase in autism, dementia and other neurorelated conditions.

Keep digging.

It wasn’t debunked, it worked.

They changed the recipe after it received significant attention. Before then the company was happy to use food coloring on Apples to pretend it had strawberries while actually providing strawberries in another country.

The thing is you can’t bring attention to every single product, which is the point of regulations around deceptive packaging.

One ingredient, oats. https://www.quakeroats.com/products/hot-cereals/old-fashione...

I don’t know for sure but it looks like in the image the oh so simple is a different product line. Seemingly similar to all of Lays chips which come in normal and the healthier line.

> that’s an old recipe

It's also an old image from 2019. What was the recipe like in 2019? (I don't know the answer, genuine question)

The "scary red" polydimethylsiloxane is in basically everything, and it's inert, non-toxic and non-flammable. It's permitted in the EU as E900. It's an anti-foaming agent used in trace quantities to prevent oil from splattering on the employees.

There were no negative effects on rats at over 2g/kg. [1]

[1] https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/j.efsa.2020...

Also: canola oil is a rapeseed oil. You can imagine why a lot of people are more comfortable calling it "canola" than "rapeseed" (and hence why it's written that way on US packaging).

They are not the exact same ingredients in the fries. Why are you claiming this as it's clearly untrue?

Yeah, take the Doritos as an example: the UK bag lists "Cheese Powder", the US bag lists "Cheddar Cheese" with sub-ingredients in parentheses (plus Whey and Skim Milk).

What is in the UK Doritos' "Cool Original Flavour" (read: Ranch) ingredient? Maybe something like Tomato Powder, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Buttermilk, Natural and Artificial Flavors?

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protip: do not drink fanta, do not eat mcdonalds fries, do eat oats (but just buy real oats and throw in raspberrys or whatever), do not eat chips. Doesn't matter whether you are in the US or UK :)

The UK product contains freeze dried strawberries and raspberries. The USA market "strawberries and cream" contains no strawberry, instead it has freeze dried apple dyed red with added strawberry flavor.

I don't believe natural is inherently good nor artificial inherently bad but the USA product is objectively lower quality. IMHO it is cheaply made crap to fool people that do not read the ingredients.

Here's the American version of "heaps of fruit," "fruit fusion."

https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/quaker-oats-instant-oatmea...

Ingredients

Whole grain oats,sugar,dried raspberries,dried strawberries,natural flavor,tricalcium phosphate,salt,beet juice concentrate (color),iron,vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol).

The American version is identical to the UK version until "natural flavor." The US version then adds some vitamins plus tricalcium phosphate, salt, and beet juice concentrate. The only "scary" ingredient is tricalcium phosphate, which appears to be an anti-caking agent.

Edit: on Quaker's website

https://www.quakeroats.com/products/hot-cereals/instant-oatm...

It says "Tricalcium Phosphate is a source of phosphorus that also provides the essential mineral calcium." Which is actually what I suspected, it's another added vitamin that has the benefit of also being an anti caking agent.

Are you sure that Canadian version is less detrimental to the health of the consumer? It too looks artificial color-loaded to me.

> food in the US is overly colored for no other reason than it looks cool

My understanding is that a lot of food is colored to look "natural" for uniformity. A good example of this is applesauce.

Neither color of Fruit Loops is natural. American food is colored to look cool, because cool sells better with Americans. Canadian food is colored to look dull, because dull sells better with Canadians.

It's colored so some set of people can make more money.

…or cigarettes, which are available for sale everywhere.

If unhealthy foods are to be banned, we must also ban cigarettes and alcohol. If we are to let people be bodybuilders, or body destroyers, then all of these things should be available for purchase.

Ultimately it is a special kind of arrogance to tell people what they are or are not allowed to do to the one thing they unambiguously own and control: their own body.

Ok, well then, I’m sure no Americans are eating high levels of foods that contain dyes. So, surely there are long term 20 year plus studies on cumulative effects, right?

Not causing cancer falls under fiduciary duty.

Mandate big font "contains carcinogens" label when your food contains this colour. Then let the buyer choose whether s/he finds this shade of bright red attractive or not.

So in other words: no, we don't need it, particularly since people need to consume less ultraprocessed foods, not more.

> The European approach is: if it doesn't look on your plate the way it looked on the hoof or on the plant, it's probably not good to consume.

I mean, that's just not true. Fruit Loops are sold in Europe as well (albeit with slightly different colors), and there's no hoof or plant that produces anything that looks like Fruit Loops. Food coloring is a worldwide phenomenon.

Well, if you read the quote in my comment (or clicked on the source link I included), you would see that the FDA evaluated it for health risks all-up, not just cancer.

Your comment violates the following hacker news guideline:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for the full set.

Should all things that have only benefits that you don't care about and which aren't proven to have no downsides you care about be banned?

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Unless you sell that crap.

Things like Veggie Libel Laws are very much against the public interest but farm owners have managed to somehow be both rich and adored by the populace so here we are

Go for a walk each day and eat more vegetables. You’ll have far outweighed any cancer risk from all the food dies in the world.

For that to be true, people would need to be consuming 4g/kg body weight of red dye 3.

So the US is winning considering they allow less food dyes?

I hate to break it to you, but a lot of that difference comes down to labeling and disclosure requirements. If the Italian fries don't even have to disclose what type of oil they use, they probably also don't have to disclose the oil stabilizers and seasonings they use.

Let's not forget that Europe had massive epidemic of horse meat being snuck into the supply chain with no one catching on.

I think your cultural palate is showing. The marketing of a few simple ingredients sounds good except it's not like American McDonalds is putting them in for no reason. You can make the case that fillers are used to cut cost but for french fries all that stuff costs extra. To Americans that shit tastes great.

* The beef flavor is mimicking frying in beef tallow. If you use Marmite in your brown gravy you're using the same trick.

* Americans, being flushed with corn and corn syrup which is sweeter than granulated sugar, developed a sweeter tooth than other places which is why the dextrose.

* Potatoes once cut and exposed to air get that gross dark color. Most home cooks usually solve that by keeping them submerged in water until frying but Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate works the same.

Mate, that is labelling requirements. I guarantee most/all of those ""horrible"" ingredients are present in Italian McDonalds.

I hate to break this news to you but there are countries outside of the EU.

The FDA also bans more food dyes than the EU.

I love all kinds of world cuisine, but I did not find the food in France to be better or cheaper than the food in the US, on average (and I love French cuisine). The pastries and wine though... different story!

This is CLEARLY due to less strict labelling. I mean they just say "oil", what kind of oil?!?!

McDonald's hamburger good in Italy? No way.

It is more complicated than this, the US has much more rigorous food safety standards in a number of dimensions.

For example, the US has much stricter standards for preventing bacterial contamination than Europe, outside of the Nordics which share similar food safety regulations as the US. The US prohibits a lot of food importation from Europe because of lower food safety standards related to contamination.

Europe makes a lot of food safety exceptions on the basis of a process being "traditional" in some sense, nominally preserving culture. The US is a bit more technocratic less prone to the naturalistic fallacy; the FDA doesn't care that something is cultural or traditional, if there is scientific evidence of material risk then it will be banned.

If I had to summarize their food safety perspectives, the EU tends to focus more on allowable ingredients, the US tends to focus more on the uncontaminated and sterile handling of the food supply chain.

There are some differences between dairy in the US and elsewhere. US dairy cows produce milk containing A1 beta-casein, a protein that some studies suggest may cause digestive discomfort. In Europe, cows often produce A2 beta-casein milk, which some people find easier to digest.

Dairy products in the US tend to contain more lactose, and French/Italian dairy products have less due to the prevalence of aged cheeses and fermentation.

There are many other differences, and none of these seem related to some sort of mystery-makes-you-shit-yourself additive.

Similar thing with my wife and bread. In the US she developed/discovered/exposed a gluten intolerance, to the point that she removed it from her diet entirely, but bread in France is ok for her.

So it might not have anything to do with regulation at all?

Sure the US is ahead of the EU. The EU allows 11 [1] synthetic food dyes while the US only allows 9 [2]

[1] https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/food-colours

[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/color-additives-information-consume...

Why don’t you do the comparison?

To be honest, I could see an argument for separating the handling of raw agricultural product from the rest of the food system. The health effects of Oreos vs. making sure our eggs don’t have bird flu are quite different regulatory concerns.

A lot of other countries do not have the shear mass of industries and services that the US does.

> doesn’t mean people won’t be killed by it. It doesn’t mean people wont get cancer from it in 30-40 years. Killing 1% of the people that eat something would be a perfectly acceptable evolutionary loss

But it would be an evolutionary loss, unlike a synthetic compound that has been equally as well studied scientifically - this odds on would make the natural compound safer to consume… not sure why this is so complicated to understand

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If it's a fallacy then it's one I plan to keep falling for because it's useful.

No one inhales six apples in a sitting but I sure have eaten 200g of chocolate in an hour before.

It's useful to go for more "natural" foods because they aren't designed to make me eat as much of it as possible. Even if fruit loops were as healthy as an apple the apple still wins because the fruit loops are deliberately engineered to encourage you to eat more of them.

> I'm not arguing that we don't eat more ultra-processed foods. We do eat too many highly refined foods with little nutritional value. My argument is against blaming food additives, dyes, GMOs, HFCS, etc... Eating more whole foods, vegetables, and fruits would make you healthier, but that's due to the nutritional value, fiber, feeling more full for longer leading to reduced caloric intake, etc... Not because you got rid of food dyes.

But the prevalence of the above ingredients serves to increase consumption of processed foods relative to whole foods, both by increasing “addictiveness” aka how much people eat, and by decreasing its cost. HFCS is the best example of this, having heightened addictive properties via increased satiety suppression and dopamine response compared to other sugars, while being heavily subsidized to the point that final prices see a 15% reduction. As a result, HFCS is added to many products it has no business being in, because it increases sales (and so consumption, of processed foods).

https://pastebin.com/VpeCJw3D

> But that's not how things end up happening, because other forces are at play.

Is it really not how things end up happening? We must be living in two different realities. The greater the power, the higher the likelihood it becomes corrupted. With such a high incentive to give into corruption, you can’t just hand-wave it away with “but I’m sure it gets balanced out by something”. Your local family doctor might be a good enough person to help you get better without expensive drugs, but the head of a large institution? Fat chance.

If blaming behavior, worth noting food color dye consumption exacerbates behavioral issues like ADHD symptoms:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32006369/

https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9573786/

https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321798/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3441937/

The issue isn't that it's a health risk directly, it's just the result of some very reasonable principals. The "Delaney Clause" in the Food Additives Amendment of 1958 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is why it's getting banned. If something is known to cause cancer in animals, and it isn't necessary for the production of the food, then it shouldn't be included.

This is simply an application of the Precautionary Principle to things already associated with harm. Since we can't know all the goods or harms that can come from a substance, if something is known to cause potential harm and it's unnecessary, then we shouldn't consume it. The human body is an absurdly complex multi-variate system, and throwing a bunch of unnecessary random shit at it not a great idea in general, but is generally reasonable when we don't know whether it's producing harms or benefits or neither. However, when we know these additives can produce harms, and it is wildly impractical to do repeated, controlled longitudinal studies with large sample sizes on humans, all at various levels of exposure. So, since the substances are entirely unnecessary we might as well just avoid them unless they are essential to creating products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Additives_Amendment_of_19...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food,_Drug,_and_Cosmet...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

Sure, that would be interesting to see. Point me to the experts :)