Backlash to artificial dye grows as Kraft ditches coloring for Kool-Aid, Jell-O

Even the whole notion of abolishing the food pyramid to advocate for more fibrous whole foods (e.g., vegetables, fruits) and stylizing it as a plate was her idea, later coopted by RFK Jr.

https://apnews.com/article/health-healthy-eating-a9f5cd19e17...

Being called names isn’t a reason for not doing something.

The FDA has executive agency to make changes without any other politician getting involved. Obama could have easily made the same changes being made now.

The truth is they didn’t think it was important enough.

> In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them.

This is not true, and for some reason this seems to be a common urban myth.

The distinction between natural and artificial flavors goes back to 1906, and in 1938 there was a stronger law requiring the disclosure of artificial flavoring, color, or preservatives. I don't know if you're referring to the 1958 Food Additives and Amendment Act, but that didn't really affect ingredient listings either -- it was about food safety, not disclosure. But there was nothing substantially different about ingredient listings between the 1970s and today. I honestly don't know where you got this information, or what kind of ingredients you were under the impression that your father was able to analyze. The 1960s and 1970s was definitely the era when awareness around these things began to grow among consumers, so it definitely helps explain your father's attention to these things. But the idea that disclosure requirements have been watered down, or that this is due to corporate lobbying, is something like an urban legend. There are certainly issues around trade regulation and naming, like which species of fish are or are not allowed to be labeled as catfish, similar to how champagne can only come from a particular region of France. So there is definitely massive lobbying around geographical disclosures and naming. But the idea that there has been some kind of massive shift of disclosure in terms of chemicals is just not true. If you look up the ingredients on actual historical processed snack labels from the 1970s, they're not any different from today.

> I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food

Ironically, this is what the legislation is moving toward: Anything "natural" is good, while anything "chemical" is bad to a lot of the world.

The problem historically was that when consumers were given detailed ingredient labels, they often decided to not purchase the products. Chemical and food manufacturers spent vast amounts of money to get ingredient labels watered down so that consumers wouldn't see the chemical names. In the 70s labels were much more detailed.

Labels like "natural flavors" exist to cover up what's actually in the food. "natural vanilla flavoring" sounds much nicer than "vanillin and acetovanillone extracted from waste sawdust".

> What people say they want and what people choose to buy are very different things.

As the mac & cheese box featuring Super Mario in the article hints, a big chunk of these people are children. Is it any surprise they don't make the most rational of choices?

On the other hand, this is like asking an alcoholic if he wishes to quit drinking. He'll say yes, but then go into a bar on his way home from work... People claim to want to be healthy, yet their discipline isn't perfect and their will is not iron - what hypocrites!

...or is the most convenient

Chefs have a famous saying that "You eat with your eyes first." The color of one's food is a huge part of that first sample.

I can report that Crystal Pepsi tasted like Pesi and not Sprite at least, so there must be some limitations.

I can believe this for the cake itself, not the icing, which is probably what she/you mean. Interesting.

2004 eastern US reporting in, can confirm the school Mountain dew conspiracy. I wonder if there's a site dedicated to tracking these kind of pre-social media viral memes and conspiracies. (I should say 'mass' social media since myspace was a thing, just barely anyone used it)

When I was a kid Ralston Purina owned a bunch of human food enterprises as well and that always disturbed me.

People have been coloring food for thousands of years with dyes like Saffron, carmine, turmeric, and squid ink.

> Whole, fresh food has never needed dyes added to it to be enticing to our monkey brains.

Have you ever cooked? Most stews use spices for colouring. A paella looks ill without saffron in it.

Fruits and vegetables from a few hundred years ago would be almost unrecognizable and unpalatable to modern consumers. The colorful, delicious, and durable fruits and vegetables of today are the result of lots of work and selective breeding.

jell-o of any color looks absolutely vile to me

That’s not super true. Salmon for instance. Or Easter eggs.

Red 4 is already bug paste. Always has been. The “preference” based only on perception is just advertising.

Naturally colored candies use beet extracts for red.

Wait until people find out where jelly beans come from.

When I was a kid I ate lunch with a girl who couldn’t have M&Ms because she was allergic to the red die. I was appalled by this.

And the strangest thing about that story is that she was maybe 4 years old when Mars pulled the red M&Ms due to a cancer scare with a different red food coloring. Though my recollection was that it was a few years more recent than that, given how shelf life and supply chains work, I may have been getting back stock. I think I eventually proved to her that there were no red M&Ms anymore. I guess her parents hadn’t bothered to check for years. Not the first injustice I had tried to right but the easiest one.

Five years later they added Red back and I would think of her every time I ate M&Ms for a long time after.

> Why are so many people so unhealthy?

Because being unhealthy is the natural state of things, and keeping a handle on that fact, at scale, is difficult and complicated. We used to do a much worse job of it, though. Humans living in developed economies where everyone eats all these oft-maligned foods live much longer than their ancestors did a few centuries ago. And those who live into old age tend to remain healthier longer than those who did a few centuries ago.

That's to say that there isn't room for improvement, or that there aren't things in our food supply that don't belong there. But a sense of perspective is important. "Is this food coloring increasing people's lifetime risk of a specific cancer from 0.005% to 0.01%?" is still a pretty tidy improvement over, "Ugh, yet another outbreak of ergotism. Well, why don't we try burning witches to see if that puts it to a stop."

Little s Science can’t get “corrupted” because it is just a tool. When the scientific method is used to determine what people prefer to buy based on one second of looking at the product, that is arguably an immoral use of the scientific method especially if the health of the users is not taken into account.

That’s also to say that “trust the science“ can be a dangerous way to shut down discussion when people are actually grasping for words to understand whether a scientific method is being improperly used.

> Why are so many people so unhealthy? Could it be the food we are consuming?

There's no doubt about this. High sugar, low fiber is the biggest culprit.

I don't understand why Americans accept this behavior from corporates. They are basically poisoning people for economic reasons. Why don't they use that extra profit, made over the health of millions, to speed up this process.

I understand the need to phase out/in ingredients in this situation, however I've never understood when there is a simple ban on an unnecessary ingredient why it takes long. I'm specifically talking about those "microbeads" in bodywash that were banned a few years ago. The companies got years to phase them out. They served no real purpose and were not replaced with anything. Companies just had to stop adding them to the bodywash - why give them years to do so? I get that labelling would be inaccurate so give them a few months to change that.

And run out existing contracts with existing suppliers.

> Are artificial dyes actually bad for you?

The fact that this is a legitimate question is very concerning. Some of these dyes are/were ubiquitous and there is very little research about them. IIRC a few have evidence of harm. Nothing should be this widely deployed without understanding them more.

If you were more questioning "Is natural actually better for people or just a nice sounding word" which could also be implied by your question, I agree with that, with the caveat that artificial stuff has more potential for surprises since it doesn't have the history of being used safely "natural" stuff does, and should have a higher bar of research.

There are a lot of different artificial dyes. Most of them haven't been extensively studied in a rigorous way. It probably isn't even possible to determine whether they have any negative effects on human health because there's no ethical or affordable way to run that experiment. Since dyes are purely cosmetic and there's no actual need for them then it might be better to just avoid the risk.

If you care about being healthy why are you eating kraft mac and cheese in the first place.

People act like taking the food dye out of gushers is suddenly going to fix their problems. You need to avoid this food in the first place.

Re: preservatives, I remember watching a video a few years ago, where a woman decided that she didn't like all the preservatives in store-bought tortillas, so she was going to make them herself at home. It's a really simple thing to make, so why not?

They all went stale before the day was out. She compared the ingredients between what she had made and what came out of the box at the grocery store, and the ones that she didn't use? They were all preservatives.

Choose your battles wisely.

I will concede that the use of sweeteners in everything in the US is unhinged. It's hard to really understand until you've spent enough time out of the country to where you're buying groceries and looking at the ingredients. You come back to the states and everything tastes weirdly sweet. It was a real "fish don't know they're wet" moment for me, which mostly came about from marrying an Australian.

Flour fortification is one of the great public health successes of the 20th century, and I’m not aware of any data showing that folic acid is any more harmful than any of the other synthetic B vitamins added to our food. I’ve actively looked for such data, as someone with the fairly common genetic mutation affecting MTHFR, and frankly all I find is nonsense.

I'm still upset that I picked up a set of those little fruit cup things advertising "no added sugar", only to be met by intensely bitter and gross flavor. Turns out they added monk fruit extract instead, as an artificial sweetener. To FRUIT. Fruit is naturally sweet!

Absolutely, stop subsidizing corn and glucose syrup through ag policy, and tax sugar consumption. Mexico taxed sugar to mitigate obesity to great success. GLP-1s destroy demand (Walmart already sees this in their purchasing data for consumers who are on GLP-1s), but we should also restrict supply by not subsidizing it in the first place. Why are we paying both to make the poison and then treat the poison? Not very capital efficient!

After Mexico Implemented a Tax, Purchases of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Decreased and Water Increased: Difference by Place of Residence, Household Composition, and Income Level - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5525113/ | https://doi.org/10.3945/jn.117.251892

Building upon the sugar beverage tax in Mexico: a modelling study of tax alternatives to increase benefits - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10649495/ | https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2023-012227

USA Facts: Federal farm subsidies: What the data says - https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...

(~40 million acres of corn is used for inefficient ethanol biofuels as well, but I will reserve that rant for another thread)

Yes to the point of having it go under FDA review along with PFAS, BPA, mercury, etc. If sugar can survive their empirical heath analyses, then you can have all you want. Everyone should go and comment on the FDA's public docket if they feel the same: https://www.regulations.gov/docket/FDA-2025-N-1733

https://www.fda.gov/food/food-chemical-safety/list-select-ch...

Which is the worst part about all of this: It took government pressure and calling them out to force a change. My anger at government is why they didn't do this SOONER? Why did it take someone like RJF jr. to move this needle? After all the people we've had at Sec. of Agriculture, HHS, and FDA Commissioners..

I don't think this was because people were putting pressure, otherwise the sheer numbers of those communities would have done something by now. It only required one person in power to say enough, fix this.

I think beetroot is more likely.

We're talking about Kool aid. Changing the food coloring isn't going to make six cups of refined sugar healthy.

And it should be fairly easy for them because they're already doing it for most of the rest of the world.

The FDA 'allowing' hyper processed foods is a just what you get when you don't ban things pre-emptively or because you don't think people should be eating them.

People blame science when a company does something they don't like and then credit the free market when it does something they do, forgetting that a huge public company doesn't do anything because it is the right thing, they do it because they think they will make money by doing it.

We can either change the incentives that exist to sell people hyper processed food, or we can regulate everything to death, or we can figure out how to make people not want to eat it. I'm not sure which answer is the best one, but I think that making scientists the boogeymen for a human incentive problem is the wrong way to find it.

To back that up:

> The most common synthetic food dyes in the U.S. — including Blue 1, Blue 2, Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6 — are all approved for use in Europe. They use different names for them there, which may account for some of the confusion.

https://archive.ph/2025.06.18-205957/https://www.thecut.com/...

Way too many people are getting their information on this topic from things like Tiktok and Instagram. Every video on there just proclaims how the EU has banned food dyes and additives that we use, therefore they're unsafe and we should ban them as well.

Never mentioned is that the US has also banned food dyes and additives that are still in use in the EU.

Getting rid of pharma ads is going to be a first amendment issue, and should be struck down, as it likely will. Creating an environment where the goverment can single out who the first amendment does and doesn't apply to is far far worse than pharma advertising.

Heh, never said it shouldn't be allowed. I was just pointing out that some of these things are often more complex than they initially seem.

I thought it was moderately well known. A couple of decades ago a friend would take some red candy when hiking as it could give her (at least the feeling of) a significant short-term energy boost if needed, more than just regular sugar would.

I actually thought that particular red dye was banned where I'm from some time back, though I don't recall why. Allergies perhaps? But that's just a guess.

You'll have to look for it yourself I guess? I don't know if anyone has even tried studying it, the effect is pretty subtle if you don't know to look for it. I'm just posting my experiences with it.