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I don’t think this is a science or safety issue, it’s an issue with bad ingredient labeling. They should name these numbered dyes something more understandable.
by N_A_T_E 1y ago
I don’t think this is a science or safety issue, it’s an issue with bad ingredient labeling. They should name these numbered dyes something more understandable. “Red dye 4” sounds pretty sketchy when they could say “Cochineal extract for coloring”. People can reject the product because the ingredients include a bug derived coloring rather than fear of the unknown “red dye” invented by their imagined evil food scientists.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoSince cochineal casues so many allergic reactions, there's already a law that they have to put it on the label.
- hinkley 1y agoWhen 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.
- toast0 1y agoWikipedia reports red M&Ms were eliminated in 1976, and added back in 1987. I'm sure it took several months for these changes to make it to the marketplace, but probably not years; M&Ms have a reasonable shelf life, but they do degrade, so year old stock isn't great. My Mom was pretty salty about the red M&Ms going missing, and refused to eat blue M&Ms for quite some time.
- hinkley 1y agoAs I said, I’m pretty sure that number is wrong by a little. And does 76 mean January or December? That’s a long time for small children. This thread is about people announcing things and then taking a while to do them. But we were in a town hit particularly hard by a recession. I have no doubt they were turning inventory closer to the Best By date than yours was. I bet all those sales I remembered seeing (3 for a dollar!) were overstock.
- candiddevmike 1y agoThe only reason they add dyes, outside of baked goods IMO, is because they've used so many artificial ingredients, fillers, and preservatives that the resulting food product no longer looks appetizing. Whole, fresh food has never needed dyes added to it to be enticing to our monkey brains.
- larrled 1y agoThat’s not super true. Salmon for instance. Or Easter eggs.
- bwestergard 1y agoWild salmon have their characteristic color because they are eating organisms that contain the naturally occurring Astaxanthin. Farmed salmon subsist on grains, fish oils, etc and come out looking grey unless pigments are added to their feed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astaxanthin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astaxanthin
- 1234letshaveatw 1y agoGreat lakes salmon flesh lacks orange coloring as well
- SirMaster 1y agoDefinitely not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvvshpw4FxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvvshpw4FxM Check at 6 minutes into the video.
- 1234letshaveatw 1y agointeresting, the Salmon I have caught has not been as colorful- I mostly fish in the rivers though edit: it looks like that vid had some steelhead (trout) mixed in? This is more like what I have seen, but the color is even more "dulled" in person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e09UmeqAd4g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e09UmeqAd4g
- newsclues 1y agoI think this is a health and safety issue, and I think the food business has corrupted a lot of science. Why do we need these dyes in food? Why are so many people so unhealthy? Could it be the food we are consuming? Are we tracking the health and safety data from these policy changes to know if there is a change?
- bunderbunder 1y ago> 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."
- newsclues 1y agoI think being healthy is far more natural than you say. Go look at how native or indigenous people live vs people in cities.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoThis is somewhat survivor bias though, because all the dead that didn’t survive their youth are actually dead. In wealthy countries these would-be-dead people walk amongst us.
- bunderbunder 1y agoOne of the things they have that people in developed economies generally don't is a 50% infant mortality rate. The ones that don't achieve it through access to very unnatural artifacts such as vaccines that are quite likely to have been made using ultramodern technologies such as genetic modification. Or, I've got quite a few friends who have various congenital conditions that mean that they absolutely would not have survived in a society with a more "natural" foodway. With the modern food supply chain, though, they're doing just fine. Unnatural things you get in some ultraprocessed foods, such as vitamin fortification, mean they can even do it without having to worry about developing comorbid chronic ailments due to malnutrition.
- maxerickson 1y agoDo yellow 5 next.
- dehrmann 1y ago> Cochineal extract for coloring 95% of people wouldn't realize that's code for "insect juice," and they might prefer the artificial color.
- kozubik 1y ago"... it’s an issue with bad ingredient labeling ..." I've been working on some improved labeling for certain grocery products: https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/ https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/
- AyyEye 1y agoAwesome idea. Are you doing anything else in a similar vein?