Kennedy to announce plan to remove artificial dyes from the nation’s food supply
Kennedy to announce plan to remove artificial dyes from the nation’s food supply
Wow. Finally this administration does something that seems like a good idea.
Nobody tell them they will be following the EU's lead by doing this.
Except they will probably not regulate natural dyes, or even force listing of the replacements. Some of the replacements will not be healthy.
So like usual, it looks good at first sight but will sicken and poison many children and adults instead.
food allergies too!
Definitely hope for the best that we'll actually get healthy food from this, but expect the worst in that they will fuck it up and somehow make us sicker.
If we can't have lead paint, we can always have lead food dye /s
Ehh... natural food colorings are often a lot more allergenic then the artificial ones. So if somebody has a allergy to annato or cochineal some such this could be bad news for them.
Yeah, it's extremely rare when I read "Trump administration..." followed by an action I agree with. Broken clock and such.
How are you going to enforce thay without inspections, nunbnuts?
Just what I was thinking.
They aren't! Honestly. I assume that this is just virtue signaling?
I would think that if I wasn't so certain that RFK Jr was actually a complete moron
Dyes are not responsible for hyperactivity in children. "Artificial" does not necessarily mean unsafe, nor does replacing them with "natural" versions make the food any safer. You might applaud this because you think artificial dyes shouldn't be in food, and maybe you're right. But it's still unscientific horseshit which will accomplish very little and undermine the FDA by wasting time. The reasoning is unsound, which just makes it easier for the corrupt to alter the outcome to serve their own agenda.
I overall agree that the concerns are overblown and sometimes outright fake, and that artificial colors aren't inherently any more dangerous than any other ingredient
I also agree that Kennedy and his ilk are really using this as a smokescreen for all the other bullshit they're up to
That said, I'm largely in favor of banning artificial dyes.
Pretty much the only purpose they serve is to make unhealthy processed junk food more attractive, so I think we should be discouraging that.
There is some evidence that some artificial dyes may be harmful in some ways. In the grand scheme of hazardous chemicals I'm expected to in my life they're near the bottom of the list of things I'm concerned about, probably falling somewhere in between alcohol and grilled meat (neither of which I'm planning to cut out of my diet anytime soon, but I also enjoy those things so I'm more willing to accept the risk, I'm pretty ambivalent about whether or not my food is exactly the right color)
It's really dyes in general. There are really very very few cases where dyes should be in food anyway.
I agree with everything you said, but my point is that if they use a lie to justify the regulation, they can modify the lie to justify anything. Maybe Goya uses a specific dye that is important to their profits, so they make a donation and they get a special exception.
Remember the scene in A Knight's Tale where the Prince is like "I looked it up and this guy is legally a knight because I'm the prince and I said so." Ok, we're all cool with that because we want William to be a knight, and we think chivalry and honor should matter more than lineage. That squares with our moral code, but it violates the legal system they had established for the movie. It's a problem, because next the prince could be like "And also in my research, I found an old law that requires I sleep with all your wives."
If RFK can ban dyes because blue makes kids hyper, next he can ban msg because chinese food makes him feel bloated, or he can ban vaccines because thiomersal causes autism. When the "because" is bullshit, it's bad whether we like the outcome or not.
I haven’t thoroughly researched this, but a quick search might suggest there’s more to the story, but I don’t know if this is outdated information or not. Anybody with insight?
I want to be clear that I'm not arguing in favor of food dyes. I don't think food should be dyed at all. And I agree we need to thoroughly research everything going into our food. The FDA needs to be stronger and more proactive.
But it also needs to be science-based in its methodology. It needs to be transparent and consistent. Nowhere in that link does it talk about hyperactivity in children, which is the justification that RFK cites in announcing the ban. He doesn't mention cancer risks or hypersensitivity, probably because he doesn't want to be pressured to ban every carcinogenic substance in the food supply. And that's exactly the problem I have with all of this. He's picking and choosing what to ban and using fiction to justify how selective he's being. That's precisely how you corrupt a process. And the best way to introduce corruption is to do it to get a palatable result.
Yeah I don't think you know what the word"research" means
People are use to the color. Dyes get banned. People see what the food looks like without the dyes. People get weirded out over it - like the green ketchup from Sherk promotions. People eat less of it. Health improves due to people eating less (diet and food moderation ftw).
RFK claims success.
Yeah except we'll all be inhaling even more VOCs and working in mines so is it really a win?
I'll take any win I can get.
That's honestly the least unhinged policy he's likely to push.
Two things he stands for that I am in alignment with, banning artificial food dyes and pharma ads. If he succeeds in both those things, he can still fuck off, but do I want those to succeed.
Ban food dyes, artificial or not, or at least limit them somewhat. People have this illogical knee-jerk reaction to the words artificial and natural as if those imply some kind of value judgement. There's tons of natural stuff you don't want anywhere near you and plenty of artificial stuff that's super beneficial, people need to stop assuming natural means healthy and artificial means unhealthy.
Also yes, ban fucking pharmaceutical ads.
Agreed. I debated specifying artificial or what not. I would argue that beet powder is a dye. Nothing wrong with it. The problem exists when the extremes are exercised within the definitions. Companies can’t just color in the lines. Gotta find some way to corrupt it for profit.
I say that all the time, so instead I'd like to steelman the "natural > artificial" perspective.
There are, let's say, a few hundred things or so in nature that are good for humans. Apples, nuts, etc. This makes sense, since humans evolved in nature. There are natural bad things too, but when people say "natural is healthier" they obviously understand that poison exists in nature. We can extend this list of good things to include artificial things which seem "natural" because people have been eating it for generations with no apparent problems, like tofu -- or cooked food. If you stick to just eating these few hundred known good things, you most likely won't cause problems for yourself, even if you're missing out on artificial superfoods and modern medicine etc.
In contrast, we're constantly inventing artificial things, and we haven't had generations to prove they're worth. Now there's thousands, millions of things to put in our bodies. Theoretically, they've all been FDA (or analogous organization) approved, and the FDA is quite conservative, but even if the FDA is 99.9% accurate (which it ain't), things still slip through the gaps all the time. So anything artificial is a bit risky, since it hasn't had generations to prove itself.
I think all that is true, but it's just one side of the picture, since it ignores the benefits of artificial foods and drugs. Seems to me like this comes from a case of extreme conservatism or deontology. If you're extremely conservative and/or not remotely utilitarian, it makes sense to go all-natural, right?
For once I'm actually down with something he's said. A broken clock strikes right twice a day or something kinda thing.
Making Mountain Dew Code Red and Flamming Hot Cheetos bright ass fucking red has always seemed so pointless to me. The only reason people would find uncolored food unappealing would probably come down to conditioning since we were kids. In the US we have literally always had food that was heavily colored all over the grocery store and has always been hard to avoid. And colorized beverages in cans I always found incredibly dumb as 80% of people will never even see the liquid in the first place since they drink it right out of the can.
Exception to be made for 'Cheetos Orange'
I can just imagine a rant from him about how the crazy liberals don’t want Cheetos to be orange.
So they found an expert in the field whose last name is Nestle. It's not confusing at all.
You can't eat dyes in food when you have died from a pandemic
but then what will those hooligans drink if there's no more Kool-Aid?
worm-kool aid, gets everyone a parasite eggs diet. mixture of pig tapeworms, and some hookworms.
Aww they'll have to remove the "less than 2% petroleum based ingredients" on Twizzlers.
And yet some people wonder why we're not big into importing US foodstuffs into Europe.
The EU accepts his concession.
I mean. This was already on its way. I thought Trump would force it to be reversed.
