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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

by 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.
    - croes 1y ago
      Where did I say natural dyes should be used? The subject was artificial dyes and parent found it illogical banning them without proper proof of harm. My point is, at least for food, there should be proof of no harm. I said nothing about natural dyes. Why do so many people read A is bad as not-A is good? And if all is tested so well why was red 3 banned so late?
RamblingCTO 1y ago
I think that's the biggest issue nowadays/back then: we don't test shit like at all and find out decades later that it destroys us. For what? Because the market incentivizes temporary gains for "competitiveness". The whole system is misaligned. We have those e/acc and silicon valley peeps telling us it's for the PrOgReSs and it's necessary. All the while they eat grass fed beef. You gotta live what you preach!
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  They may eat "grass fed beef" (which in no way magically makes a steak any healthier) but they are the same people who microdosed LSD for two years because it was the fad of the time. They aren't super aware and taking advantage of us, they are actually that utterly stupid. They are the epitome of that software dev you worked with who only just learned about <thing> yesterday, read a few articles and wikipedia pages, and assume they must know enough about <thing> to have better takes than people who have been working knee deep in <thing> for 30 years. They love to say they are "reasoning from first principles" because they have no actual expert experience to how those "first principles" haven't been useful or relevant in that field for centuries. It's the classic "I know just enough to be dangerous" problem we are all familiar with of Users of our software products, the kind that uninstall System32 to "speed up their machine" like the internet told them, but 100 million people gave them the power of the US government. They vastly overestimate how much of the space they have so far learned, and don't even know how much they don't know.

by 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.
  - croes 1y ago
    Where did I say natural dyes should be used? The subject was artificial dyes and parent found it illogical banning them without proper proof of harm. My point is, at least for food, there should be proof of no harm. I said nothing about natural dyes. Why do so many people read A is bad as not-A is good? And if all is tested so well why was red 3 banned so late?

RamblingCTO 1y ago

I think that's the biggest issue nowadays/back then: we don't test shit like at all and find out decades later that it destroys us. For what? Because the market incentivizes temporary gains for "competitiveness". The whole system is misaligned. We have those e/acc and silicon valley peeps telling us it's for the PrOgReSs and it's necessary. All the while they eat grass fed beef. You gotta live what you preach!

mrguyorama 1y ago
They may eat "grass fed beef" (which in no way magically makes a steak any healthier) but they are the same people who microdosed LSD for two years because it was the fad of the time. They aren't super aware and taking advantage of us, they are actually that utterly stupid. They are the epitome of that software dev you worked with who only just learned about <thing> yesterday, read a few articles and wikipedia pages, and assume they must know enough about <thing> to have better takes than people who have been working knee deep in <thing> for 30 years. They love to say they are "reasoning from first principles" because they have no actual expert experience to how those "first principles" haven't been useful or relevant in that field for centuries. It's the classic "I know just enough to be dangerous" problem we are all familiar with of Users of our software products, the kind that uninstall System32 to "speed up their machine" like the internet told them, but 100 million people gave them the power of the US government. They vastly overestimate how much of the space they have so far learned, and don't even know how much they don't know.