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.
God have pity on California….no one else will.
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