California Assembly Passes Bill Banning Ingredients in Skittles and Nerds
The mocking of this inane piece of legislation is epic.
Imagine, if you will, that you are a legislative representative for a state with a budget deficit of billions of dollars. You have literal zombies in your major metropolitan areas. There is a historic exodus out of the region.
What do you do? What do you do???
If you are a California assembly member, the answer is: Combine virtue signaling with nanny state control to create regulations that would end up banning ingredients that are the key components of popular candies.
The California state Assembly has approved a bill that would ban certain ingredients found in popular candies such as Skittles and Nerds, as well as other processed foods.
Assembly Bill 418, proposed by Rep. Jesse Gabriel from Woodland Hills, now moves on to the state Senate for consideration.
While the European Union has already banned the five chemicals listed in the bill, California would become the first U.S. state to take that step.
The bill would ban processed foods with the chemicals red dye no. 3, titanium dioxide, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil and propyl paraben.
The California legislators who generated this inanity have claimed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had never evaluated these additives.
That claim is ‘inaccurate.’
The California bill states that most of these chemicals have never been independently evaluated by the FDA or were last reviewed decades ago and that these chemicals are generally known to have first entered the nation’s food supply through a federal law known as GRAS, or “generally recognized as safe” that applies to items like vinegar, salt and pepper but has come to include thousands of other substances.
The FDA says the information in the bill is incorrect. “The claim that these substances have not undergone FDA review is inaccurate. All these substances have been evaluated by the FDA,” an FDA official tells TODAY.com in an email.
“According to U.S. law (Federal Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act) ingredients added to food must be safe under their intended conditions of use, and safety information must be available to establish a reasonable certainty of no harm before they are used in products on the market,” the official continues. “The FDA administers several programs to help manufacturers demonstrate that the available data supports the safety of the substance when used as proposed.”
The ban on some of these additives appears based on old data being questioned.
Titanium dioxide (also known as E171) is a food color used to enhance food and over-the-counter products’ white color or opacity, and is found in products such as Skittles, Jell-O, Sour Patch Kids and even sunscreen and house paint. A 2017 European study published in Nature found the chemical to collect in the body in places like the kidney, liver, spleen and bloodstream. In 2022, the EU banned titanium dioxide following an assessment by the European Food Safety Authority, which linked the chemical to genotoxicity (the ability to damage DNA), and labeled it as “possibly carcinogenic.”
However, some researchers believe restrictions on titanium dioxide are based on old findings and should be reassessed. The FDA limits the use of titanium dioxide in food to being just 1% of the food’s weight.
The mocking of this inanity is epic.
Keep Fentanyl off our streets that’s literally destroying lives and killing hundreds every year in this state alone? Nah, let’s ban a popular candy instead.
— SilverPatriotRedux (@ReduxPatriot) May 16, 2023
Wait a minute so Cities in California can pass out free crack and meth pipes but Skittles are a problem?? Another California Clown show…go after nonsense with a Javelin Missile but ignore actual issues…
— Michael Martinez (@leftkinger) May 16, 2023
California tackling the important issues as usual.
Nevermind everything else that is fk'd with this state… Skittles can't hurt us anymore. https://t.co/RpvuSJtIHE
— Auxtin 𖤐🏳️🌈 (@IAmAuxtin) May 16, 2023
God have pity on California….no one else will.
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Comments
How long before California bans sunshine?
Get with the program. Sunshine causes skin cancer, much worse than Skittles. /s
They don’t actually care whether the food coloring is dangerous, they just want to CONTROL you! There’s an infinite number of things that are more hazardous to your health than colored candy that they don’t want to touch because it is against the woke narrative – they won’t ban illegals, fentanyl, human feces on sidewalks, stealing, addicts leaving dirty used needles around, etc.
Interestingly, they did not ban Carmine which is red dye made by squishing Spanish aphids. Carmine, aka cochineal and cochineal extract, is a popular coloring agent in candies, yogurts, etc.
Let them eat insects.
Now where am I supposed to get ingredients for my purple drank?
Why is California like a bowl of granola? Because after you separate the fruits from the NUTS all you have left are the flakes.
So I wonder when the food manufacturers and other manufacturers are just going to throw their hands in the air and say, “Fuck it, we’re outta here.” and exit the California market due to these lunatic laws they are passing.
The essence of the problem is that the ingredients have been properly recorded, reported and and registered. If they were undocumented they would be allowed in.
That’s why I buy my fruit and veggie pills from Balance of Nature. The label shows exactly how much of each ingredient I am gettting and I fully trust the anonymous testimonials of people whose health has been miraculously improved by taking these wonderful pills which are available all over the state of California.
San Diego County is going after the plastic produce bags in the grocery stores, too. Apparently they want to sell us on the idea of using opaque cloth bags for produce. We’re supposed to wash them.
This reminds me of my mother, who decided that disposable baby diapers were awfully expensive, so she’d use cloth diapers when my first baby was newborn. That venture lasted one day. She said, “Well, I used them, but those plastic pants leaked. After washing the diapers, all the baby clothes, and the bedding twice, I decided that the cost of all that hot water and soap, plus the work, was more expensive than those diapers.”
California is full of politicians who do not think about anything but pleasing their real constituents (whoever pays them) rather than voters.
We used a diaper service with our son, and really liked the cloth diapers (and they didn’t leak).
But I wouldn’t make anyone else do so.
well washed old cloth diapers were great for polishing my truck. But it has been many years since my youngest was in diapers. I don’t think there are even diaper services any longer
First they came for my colored milk, then my colored candy. Signs and omens abound. The racial genocide has begun.
Whoah. Shouldn’t that be “candy of color” and “milk of color”?
Funny you should mention that.
Titanium dioxide is the pigment that makes white paint racist in Norway.
How can the Rainbow Community allow this?
Aren’t WHITE skittles the greatest threat to democracy?? The other skittles colors should be celebrated and added to every school lunch program!
If you desire to ‘taste the rainbow’ CA is good bet.
Remember when the sidewalks in California were paved with gold?
Now they’re paved with a rainbow that you can taste.
This is why junk science is so dangerous, no matter how many times, and how authoritatively it is debunked people who liked it as their narrative will cling to it.
Everyone just needs to pipe down and let this stand. Otherwise my plan to start shipping U-Huals full of Skittles won’t make me any money.
On a side note – no one has said anything about Jello. The article says Jello has these ultra-toxic, man-killing ingredients. Oh, what will hospitals do now?
Back to tapioca, I guess.
Which is literally poisonous… until boiled correctly.
Why do the legislators wish to ban titanium oxide and not fentanyl?
Because they can do the former and not the latter.
It’s like being a big-city mayor — you can’t fix the schools, or crime, or the police, or the courts, or businesses leaving, or the downtown, but by gum, you can add bike lanes! See, there’s a problem you can fix.
And so with legislators — they can’t fix the budget, the prisons, the rotten educational system, exploding crime, the drug epidemic, the homeless epidemic, or the businesses leaving the state, but they can ban titanium oxide. So that’s what they do.
Yep. Way easier to ban lawful products from the shelves of law abiding store owners than to force criminals to stop selling illegal substances.
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”
–AYN RAND, “Atlas Shrugged”
So Skittles are already banned in Europe? Awesome! Go EU!
Just once, I’d like to see a company respond to such a move by pulling all of their products from California, and going “You’re not worth the future hassles.”
California, a Skittles desert?
The world turned upside down!
It’s all really very simple. Dealers were selling candy that looked like fentanyl instead of the real thing. This being California, of course they came for the candy.
Precisely.
“Dealers were selling fentanyl that looked like candy instead of real drugs.”
Other than that, thumbs up.
Hey, speaking of grammar nazi exercises… does anybody know if Milhouse is all right? I haven’t seen anything from him in at least two weeks!
I wondered the same thing
Kinda miss the little feller.
I miss him, too. I did send him an email to an address we have on file, but I got no response. I hope he is okay.
I meant it the way I wrote it.
OK, then I guess I just don’t understand it.
Put a spike protein on the Skittles and the California legislature will mandate it.
Any product that contains an ingredient banned by the Peoples’ Republic of Mexifornia should of course be illegal there. Those ingredients are in a lot of things. So there should be a lot of empty shelves in the Peoples’ Republic. I see this as a good thing.
Subotai Bahadur
This is one of the reasons DW and I never visit California. In California, EVERYTHING gives you cancer. You’d have to be suicidal to go there.
Why would anyone want to eat “red dye no. 3, titanium dioxide, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil and propyl paraben”? I’m not saying it should be illegal. But don’t eat the shit. There’s no glory in celebrating eating fake food that nobody should be eating in the first place.