5 ms·

Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in? Rhetorical question because I think people like RFKJr got into power beca

by klik99 1y ago

Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in? Rhetorical question because I think people like RFKJr got into power because previous administrations didn't take care of the obvious things that need regulation, and if you ignore the basics for too long people flip over to someone who packages a couple of reasonable stances with a lot of damaging ideas. I agree with RFK for pushing for change in this industry but I give him no credit, instead I blame previous administrations on both sides for not taking a better stance on regulating food like every other developed country in the world.

adestefan 1y ago
[flagged]
- refurb 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - magicalist 1y ago
    The FDA has nothing to do with this action either though?
  - adestefan 1y ago
    They did it. The Republicans rolled it all back.
    - refurb 1y ago
      Rolled back a banning of artificial dyes? Gonna need a source for that.
- boston_clone 1y ago
  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-a9f5cd19e17f4c2794e7355325c76d07 https://apnews.com/article/health-healthy-eating-a9f5cd19e17...
- koolba 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - jamiek88 1y ago
    Wow even in a thread about misinformation a misinformed person jumps in with a comment that adds nothing and attempts to derail.
refurb 1y ago
As a scientist I don’t think this change is really science based. Banning artificial colors because “chemicals are bad” isn’t logical. Banning artificial dyes because one random paper maybe found a cancer link isn’t rational (generally if studies are all over the place the effect is so small you’re seeing noise). If you want to avoid artificial dyes, cool, avoid them! But blanket bans of dyes where the data is questionable about harm isn’t logical.
- croes 1y ago
  Allowing artificial dyes that are consumed without proper testing for harm is illogical. You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color
  - gruez 1y ago
    >You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color Easy for you to say while writing a HN comment, but people would certainly be turned off by gray yolks[1] for instance, even if theoretically they were safe to eat. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/07/12/201501977/help-my-egg-yolks-are-freakishly-white https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/07/12/201501977/he...
    - j-bos 1y ago
      While it's easy to fake a healthy golden yolk, in my experience raising chickens, pale yolks are usually from a troubled hen.
    - croes 1y ago
      And? Just because people don’t like grey yolk doesn’t mean we should put an untested color in it.
      - mrguyorama 1y ago
        These colors are all extensively tested, precisely because people were scarred of them being "unnatural". The "natural" colors HAVE NOT been tested so extensively. So do you want to put "Natural" but utterly untested chemicals in our food or "unnatural" but extensively tested chemicals? Because unless you ban food coloring outright, companies are going to color your food. They have the data that in the American market, (fake) bright yellow yolks sell more and for more profit than natural yolk colors. Your assumption of "artificial dye" == "Untested" is currently wrong. The US requires almost no testing for pretty much anything put in our food right now, due to "Generally recognized as safe" bullshit. There are hundreds of chemical additives that have not really been tested that you can just put in food legally. US food law does not distinguish between "artificial" chemicals and "natural" chemicals except in labeling. You can source a chemical from oranges, turn it into a completely different chemical, put that in your food product, and call it "natural". The only difference from a chemistry standpoint is that you sourced your chemical feedstock from some sort of plant or animal instead of taking simple hydrocarbons and building up your chemical. Salicylic acid does the exact same thing in your body whether you process it from willow bark or build it up from Phenol, and both versions are simultaneously a horrible birth defect inducing toxin, as well as an utterly essential and safe modern medicine. This change does nothing to make us safer.
magicalist 1y ago
> Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in? They still aren't regulating it, they just held a press conference announcing, literally "we don’t have an agreement; we have an understanding" (and, as covered in this article, no one in the food industry seems to know who exactly the "understanding" is with). Meanwhile they're firing anyone at the FDA or HHS that can do anything, and the EPA is trying to not regulate coal plants while the Trump administration uses emergency powers to keep coal plants running even over the economic objections of the power companies running them. And of course the EPA is delaying and relaxing the new limits on PFAS in drinking water from last year. So...no, not really any sensible regulations here.
- jibe 1y ago
  But it is creating real change already? All you have to do is ask, apparently. Regulation is coming, but not going to complain that companies are preemptively taking action. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/hhs-fda-phase-out-petroleum-based-synthetic-dyes-nations-food-supply https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/hhs-fda-...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - magicalist 1y ago
    I'm not going to complain, but real change of what? It's no apparent loss, so I'm happy to say "cool", but we know we won't even be able to measure any public health benefit of what this non-binding, non-regulatory "understanding" is going to bring about. Seems more like some number of food companies are happy to go along with something that costs them basically nothing, while anything meaningful won't actually be done or is actually in the process of being reversed.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    You should note, that Republicans only decided to go after artificial colors after the industry had already solved this "problem" for a hundred other countries. Meanwhile, all this hubbub over "artificial" vs "natural" colors is fucking nonsensical. Very very few of the "artificial" colors have some evidence of maybe causing some harm from chronic exposure. Not that you should have chronic exposure to any of these foods in the first place since the sugar and fat and salt content alone is unhealthy and will cause you significant chronic health problems unless you exercise for a couple hours a day. But it doesn't matter whether a chemical is produced by some process in nature or some process in a lab. What matters is how the human body reacts to it. Do we have tomes of evidence that eating "natural" colors is actually safe? No, we do not. Most of them are just GRAS (Generally recognized as safe, which is an outright misnomer) and therefore have no evidence of any safety other than "We used in the 50s so whatever". Nevermind that "natural" food dyes aren't even! To make "natural red #4" involves taking large amounts of carminic acid from some bugs and reacting that with aluminum or calcium salts. In fact in the US, you can do pretty much whatever you want to a naturally sourced chemical and still call the product of that chemistry "natural". Replacing well studied, simple, dyes with less studied dyes just because a core part of their chemistry was able to be sourced from """Nature""" is utterly stupid and pointless and meaningless. What actually matters is replacing ingredients that show some toxicity to chronic exposure with ingredients that have significant data to show they are not chronically toxic. There's no structural system in "natural" dyes to actually do that. This push will not stop Dupont from extracting curcumin from turmeric, massively modifying it to make it easier for an industrial process to use without fouling up their equipment, accidentally make it cancerous after you eat it for 20 years, and poison us all with a "natural" chemical for decades. "Natural" has no structural overlap with "Isn't unhealthy". Organic Ricin will kill you just as dead.
HumblyTossed 1y ago
My favorite photo of Trump is him grinning his ass off because he forced RFK Jr not to kiss the ring, but to touch a cheeseburger. They really do deserve each other.
toast0 1y ago
The writing was on the wall for this before RFK Jr got installed. He may or may not be putting it over the finish line, but things were moving in that direction anyway. In 2023, California passed a law banning some additives effective 2027 [1]. In 2016, Mars pledged to remove artificial dyes from their products by 2021 [2]; they didn't do it [3], but they pledged to. [1] https://text.npr.org/2023/10/10/1204839281/california-ban-food-additives-red-dye-3-propylparaben-candy https://text.npr.org/2023/10/10/1204839281/california-ban-fo... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190902043853/https://www.mars.com/news-and-stories/press-releases/remove-artificial-colors https://web.archive.org/web/20190902043853/https://www.mars.... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210204131124/https://www.cspinet.org/news/mars-fails-fulfill-commitment-remove-dyes-its-american-products-cspi-says-20210203 https://web.archive.org/web/20210204131124/https://www.cspin...
timewizard 1y ago
> Why did it take an insane person I think the mark of political insanity is labeling someone "insane" simply because you apparently partially disagree with them. > but I give him no credit So you're not interested in solving the actual problem in favor of ensuring your preconceived ideas are never changed? > instead I blame previous administrations Yea I can't imagine the type of person they would have been pandering to. :|
- klik99 1y ago
  Google AI says: "While the term "insane" is subjective, dumping a bear carcass in Central Park is both illegal and highly inadvisable." RFK believes "For decades, the CDC has kept a tight grip on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, concealing vital vaccine safety information from the public," - IE that CDC has conspired to conceal harmful effects of vaccines. If he finds that database, I'll gladly sit up and listen. But until he finds it I'll consider this a conspiracy theory and, according to Psychology Today, belief in conspiracy theories is not necessarily associated with mental disorders. I disagree with a lot of people in the Trump administration, but I only use the word insane (in the subjective sense, not in the literally diagnosed sense) to describe RFKJr. I don't give him credit because he comes to his view from a lot of dangerous mistrust of science and medicine. I know a lot of people at CDC who work on flu vaccines and AIDs research, and my step-father was on the team that eradicated smallpox. RFKJr has done unimaginable harm to public health and is pushing us backwards. The people at CDC genuinely want to help people. You can say they've done things wrong, overstepped in some way, or have too much research money from private industry, and that could be a good discussion. No group is perfect, but the answer isn't to destroy it all, or think the CDC is part of a conspiracy. I think food dyes need more research and better understanding before deploying to millions of people, that is not the same as his anti-science stance. While breaking a lot of things, he also happened to do something good, I don't think that counts as "solving the actual problem". And, as far as your last point about previous administrations I meant both democrat and republican, but it's been obvious a long time that Democrats pandering would cause a backlash. At any rate, I don't discount peoples ideas as brainwashing or preconceived ideas, even people I disagree with. I want America to succeed. Trump even did a few things in his first term I agreed with. You seem to have a filter to think people who don't buy into this "new golden age" are brainwashed or tribal. This isn't true. Spend some time considering other view points.
mattmaroon 1y ago
One interesting thing about Trump is he’s so deeply popular with the Republican base that he can win elections despite being drastically outspent by the opposition. He also uses tools like primaries and executive orders against those who oppose him. So whereas a normal candidate may be concerned about upsetting the corporations that fund their election, Trump has built a little bit of insulation against that. He can (and does frequently) take on big corporations other politicians would feel the need to not alienate. No other Republican would dare cross agribusiness. He also, for the same reasons, is able to make Republican politicians adopt his positions. So if he wants to do something that democrats already want to do (and that’s not as uncommon as you might think; he was a Democrat for decades) it gets done easily. RFK Jr is the worst person, but he deserves credit when he’s right.
shekiera 1y ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 1y ago
  > I think your comment is absurd When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by klik99 1y ago

adestefan 1y ago

[flagged]

refurb 1y ago
[flagged]
- magicalist 1y ago
  The FDA has nothing to do with this action either though?
- adestefan 1y ago
  They did it. The Republicans rolled it all back.
  - refurb 1y ago
    Rolled back a banning of artificial dyes? Gonna need a source for that.
boston_clone 1y ago
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-a9f5cd19e17f4c2794e7355325c76d07 https://apnews.com/article/health-healthy-eating-a9f5cd19e17...
koolba 1y ago
[flagged]
- jamiek88 1y ago
  Wow even in a thread about misinformation a misinformed person jumps in with a comment that adds nothing and attempts to derail.

refurb 1y ago

As a scientist I don’t think this change is really science based. Banning artificial colors because “chemicals are bad” isn’t logical. Banning artificial dyes because one random paper maybe found a cancer link isn’t rational (generally if studies are all over the place the effect is so small you’re seeing noise). If you want to avoid artificial dyes, cool, avoid them! But blanket bans of dyes where the data is questionable about harm isn’t logical.

croes 1y ago
Allowing artificial dyes that are consumed without proper testing for harm is illogical. You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color
- gruez 1y ago
  >You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color Easy for you to say while writing a HN comment, but people would certainly be turned off by gray yolks[1] for instance, even if theoretically they were safe to eat. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/07/12/201501977/help-my-egg-yolks-are-freakishly-white https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/07/12/201501977/he...
  - j-bos 1y ago
    While it's easy to fake a healthy golden yolk, in my experience raising chickens, pale yolks are usually from a troubled hen.
  - croes 1y ago
    And? Just because people don’t like grey yolk doesn’t mean we should put an untested color in it.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      These colors are all extensively tested, precisely because people were scarred of them being "unnatural". The "natural" colors HAVE NOT been tested so extensively. So do you want to put "Natural" but utterly untested chemicals in our food or "unnatural" but extensively tested chemicals? Because unless you ban food coloring outright, companies are going to color your food. They have the data that in the American market, (fake) bright yellow yolks sell more and for more profit than natural yolk colors. Your assumption of "artificial dye" == "Untested" is currently wrong. The US requires almost no testing for pretty much anything put in our food right now, due to "Generally recognized as safe" bullshit. There are hundreds of chemical additives that have not really been tested that you can just put in food legally. US food law does not distinguish between "artificial" chemicals and "natural" chemicals except in labeling. You can source a chemical from oranges, turn it into a completely different chemical, put that in your food product, and call it "natural". The only difference from a chemistry standpoint is that you sourced your chemical feedstock from some sort of plant or animal instead of taking simple hydrocarbons and building up your chemical. Salicylic acid does the exact same thing in your body whether you process it from willow bark or build it up from Phenol, and both versions are simultaneously a horrible birth defect inducing toxin, as well as an utterly essential and safe modern medicine. This change does nothing to make us safer.

magicalist 1y ago

> Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in? They still aren't regulating it, they just held a press conference announcing, literally "we don’t have an agreement; we have an understanding" (and, as covered in this article, no one in the food industry seems to know who exactly the "understanding" is with). Meanwhile they're firing anyone at the FDA or HHS that can do anything, and the EPA is trying to not regulate coal plants while the Trump administration uses emergency powers to keep coal plants running even over the economic objections of the power companies running them. And of course the EPA is delaying and relaxing the new limits on PFAS in drinking water from last year. So...no, not really any sensible regulations here.

jibe 1y ago
But it is creating real change already? All you have to do is ask, apparently. Regulation is coming, but not going to complain that companies are preemptively taking action. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/hhs-fda-phase-out-petroleum-based-synthetic-dyes-nations-food-supply https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/hhs-fda-...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- magicalist 1y ago
  I'm not going to complain, but real change of what? It's no apparent loss, so I'm happy to say "cool", but we know we won't even be able to measure any public health benefit of what this non-binding, non-regulatory "understanding" is going to bring about. Seems more like some number of food companies are happy to go along with something that costs them basically nothing, while anything meaningful won't actually be done or is actually in the process of being reversed.
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  You should note, that Republicans only decided to go after artificial colors after the industry had already solved this "problem" for a hundred other countries. Meanwhile, all this hubbub over "artificial" vs "natural" colors is fucking nonsensical. Very very few of the "artificial" colors have some evidence of maybe causing some harm from chronic exposure. Not that you should have chronic exposure to any of these foods in the first place since the sugar and fat and salt content alone is unhealthy and will cause you significant chronic health problems unless you exercise for a couple hours a day. But it doesn't matter whether a chemical is produced by some process in nature or some process in a lab. What matters is how the human body reacts to it. Do we have tomes of evidence that eating "natural" colors is actually safe? No, we do not. Most of them are just GRAS (Generally recognized as safe, which is an outright misnomer) and therefore have no evidence of any safety other than "We used in the 50s so whatever". Nevermind that "natural" food dyes aren't even! To make "natural red #4" involves taking large amounts of carminic acid from some bugs and reacting that with aluminum or calcium salts. In fact in the US, you can do pretty much whatever you want to a naturally sourced chemical and still call the product of that chemistry "natural". Replacing well studied, simple, dyes with less studied dyes just because a core part of their chemistry was able to be sourced from """Nature""" is utterly stupid and pointless and meaningless. What actually matters is replacing ingredients that show some toxicity to chronic exposure with ingredients that have significant data to show they are not chronically toxic. There's no structural system in "natural" dyes to actually do that. This push will not stop Dupont from extracting curcumin from turmeric, massively modifying it to make it easier for an industrial process to use without fouling up their equipment, accidentally make it cancerous after you eat it for 20 years, and poison us all with a "natural" chemical for decades. "Natural" has no structural overlap with "Isn't unhealthy". Organic Ricin will kill you just as dead.

HumblyTossed 1y ago

My favorite photo of Trump is him grinning his ass off because he forced RFK Jr not to kiss the ring, but to touch a cheeseburger. They really do deserve each other.

toast0 1y ago

The writing was on the wall for this before RFK Jr got installed. He may or may not be putting it over the finish line, but things were moving in that direction anyway. In 2023, California passed a law banning some additives effective 2027 [1]. In 2016, Mars pledged to remove artificial dyes from their products by 2021 [2]; they didn't do it [3], but they pledged to. [1] https://text.npr.org/2023/10/10/1204839281/california-ban-food-additives-red-dye-3-propylparaben-candy https://text.npr.org/2023/10/10/1204839281/california-ban-fo... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190902043853/https://www.mars.com/news-and-stories/press-releases/remove-artificial-colors https://web.archive.org/web/20190902043853/https://www.mars.... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210204131124/https://www.cspinet.org/news/mars-fails-fulfill-commitment-remove-dyes-its-american-products-cspi-says-20210203 https://web.archive.org/web/20210204131124/https://www.cspin...

timewizard 1y ago

> Why did it take an insane person I think the mark of political insanity is labeling someone "insane" simply because you apparently partially disagree with them. > but I give him no credit So you're not interested in solving the actual problem in favor of ensuring your preconceived ideas are never changed? > instead I blame previous administrations Yea I can't imagine the type of person they would have been pandering to. :|

klik99 1y ago
Google AI says: "While the term "insane" is subjective, dumping a bear carcass in Central Park is both illegal and highly inadvisable." RFK believes "For decades, the CDC has kept a tight grip on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, concealing vital vaccine safety information from the public," - IE that CDC has conspired to conceal harmful effects of vaccines. If he finds that database, I'll gladly sit up and listen. But until he finds it I'll consider this a conspiracy theory and, according to Psychology Today, belief in conspiracy theories is not necessarily associated with mental disorders. I disagree with a lot of people in the Trump administration, but I only use the word insane (in the subjective sense, not in the literally diagnosed sense) to describe RFKJr. I don't give him credit because he comes to his view from a lot of dangerous mistrust of science and medicine. I know a lot of people at CDC who work on flu vaccines and AIDs research, and my step-father was on the team that eradicated smallpox. RFKJr has done unimaginable harm to public health and is pushing us backwards. The people at CDC genuinely want to help people. You can say they've done things wrong, overstepped in some way, or have too much research money from private industry, and that could be a good discussion. No group is perfect, but the answer isn't to destroy it all, or think the CDC is part of a conspiracy. I think food dyes need more research and better understanding before deploying to millions of people, that is not the same as his anti-science stance. While breaking a lot of things, he also happened to do something good, I don't think that counts as "solving the actual problem". And, as far as your last point about previous administrations I meant both democrat and republican, but it's been obvious a long time that Democrats pandering would cause a backlash. At any rate, I don't discount peoples ideas as brainwashing or preconceived ideas, even people I disagree with. I want America to succeed. Trump even did a few things in his first term I agreed with. You seem to have a filter to think people who don't buy into this "new golden age" are brainwashed or tribal. This isn't true. Spend some time considering other view points.

mattmaroon 1y ago

One interesting thing about Trump is he’s so deeply popular with the Republican base that he can win elections despite being drastically outspent by the opposition. He also uses tools like primaries and executive orders against those who oppose him. So whereas a normal candidate may be concerned about upsetting the corporations that fund their election, Trump has built a little bit of insulation against that. He can (and does frequently) take on big corporations other politicians would feel the need to not alienate. No other Republican would dare cross agribusiness. He also, for the same reasons, is able to make Republican politicians adopt his positions. So if he wants to do something that democrats already want to do (and that’s not as uncommon as you might think; he was a Democrat for decades) it gets done easily. RFK Jr is the worst person, but he deserves credit when he’s right.

shekiera 1y ago

[flagged]

tomhow 1y ago
> I think your comment is absurd When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html