HHS, FDA Unveil Plan to Phase Out Food Dyes
RFK Jr.: “These poisonous compounds offer no nutritional benefit and pose real, measurable dangers to our children’s health and development.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began the process of banning food dyes.
The plan includes:
- Establishing a national standard and timeline for the food industry to transition from petrochemical-based dyes to natural alternatives.
- Initiating the process to revoke authorization for two synthetic food colorings—Citrus Red No. 2 and Orange B—within the coming months.
- Working with industry to eliminate six remaining synthetic dyes—FD&C Green No. 3, FD&C Red No. 40, FD&C Yellow No. 5, FD&C Yellow No. 6, FD&C Blue No. 1, and FD&C Blue No. 2—from the food supply by the end of next year.
- Authorizing four new natural color additives in the coming weeks, while also accelerating the review and approval of others.
- Partnering with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct comprehensive research on how food additives impact children’s health and development.
- Requesting food companies to remove FD&C Red No. 3 sooner than the 2027-2028 deadline previously required.
The FDA will review the following natural alternatives: calcium phosphate, Galdieria extract blue, gardenia blue, and butterfly pea flower extract.
“For too long, some food producers have been feeding Americans petroleum-based chemicals without their knowledge or consent,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “These poisonous compounds offer no nutritional benefit and pose real, measurable dangers to our children’s health and development. That era is coming to an end. We’re restoring gold-standard science, applying common sense, and beginning to earn back the public’s trust. And we’re doing it by working with industry to get these toxic dyes out of the foods our families eat every day.”
Many popular foods and drinks include those six food dyes:
- Mountain Dew
- Jolly Rancher
- Skittles
- Takis
- Froot Loops
- Pop-Tarts
- Doritos
- Cheetos
“Today, the FDA is asking food companies to substitute petrochemical dyes with natural ingredients for American children as they already do in Europe and Canada,” said FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, MD, MPH. “We have a new epidemic of childhood diabetes, obesity, depression, and ADHD. Given the growing concerns of doctors and parents about the potential role of petroleum-based food dyes, we should not be taking risks and do everything possible to safeguard the health of our children.”
The United Kingdom bans six artificial dyes and has strict regulations on Yellow 5 and Yellow 6.
The European Union hasn’t banned artificial dyes, but restricts some and requires warning labels.
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And at this point the food companies can tell Kennedy, Makary, and the FDA to shove it and continue to use the food dyes they’ve always used because the FDA has to abide by the Administrative Procedures Act that requires a comment period before they promulgate any rule or regulation. So the FDA can ask, but the food industry doesn’t have go along with the request.
Start with a nice gentle ask and if they don’t come on board then out comes the big stick.
Not everything needs to be full noise and flash bangs.
And then get sued in federal court and have everything overturned and injunctions put into place because you were too fecking stupid to actually follow the Administrative Procedures Act which outlines the process by which a new regulations are promulgated and put into place by the administrative branch.
Persuasion has many forms. Removing these products from tables funded with Federal $ seems easy enough. Going to in kind food boxes v cash benefits is one way. Another is removing them from school lunch/breakfast + all dining facilities on federal property. Then expand to all cafeteria style dining at entities which.receive Federal Funds. If we.gotta go through APA then OK but make it painfully permanent by removing not just the dyes or the brand but the product line of the conglomerate from consideration for purchase.
Nah. You can ALWAYS ask first for voluntary cooperation. Then if it fails, you can bring down the big guns by the book — or even if it succeeds, There’s Democrat precedent.
As for the “violence rating system”… the president thanked the industry for adopting such a system voluntarily, as had been requested by him and the first lady. Their reward for complying voluntarily? The government will now impose on them a better, federal system. See how it pays to cooperate?
–VIN SUPRYNOWICZ
I don’t trust these “Natural” replacements. Have you looked at what they make natural dyes out of? Petroleum sounds healthier.
I especially like the carmine one that’s made from beetles. We’re finally going to eat ze bugs!
In college, I was a huge devotee of grape soda. At one point, I damaged a can, so I poured the soda into a cup. I was dismayed to see it was a transparent gray, like water with a little carbon dust distributed in it. I figured the manufacturer saved the cosmetics for the bottled product people could see, instead of the canned product they couldn’t.
I suspect we’re going to see a bunch of pushback when the general public starts encountering groceries that just don’t “look right,”
That, or folks will be horrified by what their junk food actually looks like without “makeup”.
Maybe, just maybe Big Ag puts these additives in to get the disease states that benefit Big Pharma.
If the package lists more than 2 or 3 ingredients, its not food anyway.
Bear in mind that the packaged food industry will ALWAYS use the cheapest possible ingredients and fillers it can without losing market share. It doesn’t matter if its labeled organic, all-natural or gourmet, its always about how little it costs to make and how much the consumer will stand for.
That might be true if you’re buying Hard Tack. Baking bread, I tend to have 4-5 ingredients before flavorants are counted for specialty breads. Making sausages, the same.
I might be able to roast beef with your 3 ingredient limit – beef, salt, pepper…
I couldn’t have made the delicious brisket I made for Easter if I had restricted it to 2-3 ingredients. There were 4, just involving the meat. Then you had the onions, garlic, and carrots cooked alongside….
The Moroccan roast lamb I did would have been right out, and there was nothing there but the meat and the rub (which had at least 4 ingredients, itself).
I won’t even mention the green beans.
I just had ham. Thanks for making me feel bad 😉
I get what you are trying to say here, main ingredients then yes as few as possible!
The other thing to keep in mind is that ingredients are listed in order of amount used. So it annoys the f88k out of me when sugar is like the second or third listed ingredient!!
Also annoys the f88k out of my when things like bread have 20-30 ingredients listed in them!! Hence why I love home made bread as you literally control what goes in to it…and don’t get me started on what shop bought bread needs 1-2 grams of sugar PER slice while your home made bread only uses a fraction of that and lasts just as long!!
“If the package lists more than 2 or 3 ingredients, its not food anyway.”
And if it doesn’t, it’s not food for very long.
then why didnt they boycott the companies and like what was done to miller lite etc etc
get their bottom line
now the government is once again having a conflict of interest
“without their ( parents) knowledge”
then the government can inform people
and let them decide
pose real, measurable dangers to our children’s health and development
Can we see the science for that? Because a lot of the science on both sides has been pretty sketchy.
Mountain Dew
Takis
Froot Loops
Doritos
Some of those are toxic, even before you add in petrochemical dyes. Just sayin’.
as they already do in Europe and Canada
Have you seen those children? I’m not sure we want our children healthy in the way those kids are healthy. You’d be better off starting by bringing PE back to elementary schools the nation over. Make ’em climb that rope!
Most of the civilised world has moved away from chemical food colouring many moons ago. It is time America caught up.
nothing civilized about socialism which is the move to get communism
“government knows best” agenda
is not healthy …how ironic
From cyclamate to Suzuki Sidekicks, the USA is no slacker when it comes to arbitrarily banning stuff that the rest of the world has absolutely no problem with, so I refuse to be lectured about what the rest of the world does or doesn’t think.
PE is not going to overcome the junk that’s in food. You can’t exercise away a crap diet (not to mention the value of exercise as a stratagem for weight loss is greatly exaggerated).
June Cleaver manged to keep trim, and you can be sure she wasn’t spending her free time at the gym sweating to the oldies.
“You can’t exercise away a crap diet”
Especially when the school responsible for the PE serves precisely that crap diet.
well
she had to be sure the beaver was in shape
That’s ridiculous. Calories in versus calories burned is the key. The 1st Law of Thermodynamics makes that clear.
So-called “junk food” is perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with it.
That simplistic model doesn’t account for human physiology. The 1st law of thermodynamics applies in closed systems, which the human body is not.
“All calories are the same” is not true (although the junk food peddlers would love for you to believe that since that would absolve them of any responsibility – “you’re fat because you’re a lazy cow who eats ‘too much’ and lacks willpower”) because different foods are metabolized differently in the body. Carbs will spike blood sugar, protein has a minimal effect on blood sugar, and fats will raise it little if at all. Eating 200 calories of ice cream will have a dramatically different effect on your body compared to 200 calories of protein. That’s one reason why it’s easy to scarf down a family-sized bag of potato chips, whereas if you were to try and binge on porterhouse steaks or even broccoli, you’d quit long before you got to the gluttonous stage.
Like it or not, hormones have a huge influence on weight gain/loss, insulin being a major contributor in that regard. That’s why you can’t overcome a crap diet with mere exercise.
Just as long as they don’t touch my M&Ms.
Especially the green ones.
(Age test.)
I eat M&Ms in a certain order when I’m not scarfing down the whole package at once.
Red – Blue – Green – Orange – Yellow – Brown (Racist I guess)
I really like that they have designer M&Ms and that they have done a whole lot of different flavors over the year. I always go with the peanut ones over the plain but I like the almond ones too. I like the dark chocolate ones.
Only problem I have is their price is going up as their contents are decreasing in amount. Also I shouldn’t be eating candy.
Mars is also a very woke company now and that does bug me.
I like that high-protein candy made from monkey meat.
Rhesus Pieces.
Long over-due. Now about HFCS being dramatically over-used, a stricter definition of “natural flavors”, and an over-all review of European studies on banned food substances ( and I am well aware that some banned items have no scientific basis but are merely to keep American products like chicken which we can sell at less than half the EU price off their shelves).
Can’t help but think this is about control.
Don’t trust the mad leftist RFK, not one bit.
Idiots keep whining about that red dye that’s made from bugs. From red insect shells.
Not one of them seems to realize that its a natural dye. That you can dye something by putting it in water those bugs were boiled in.
And you can eat those bugs. Safely, if gross.
I’ll take a red dye made with bugs over a red dye made with lead.
Do NOT want a government banning stuff ‘for the greater good’.
correct
but its the easy way out and most? many like that route
Do NOT want a government banning stuff ‘for the greater good’.
QFT
IMO the product labeled ‘snozberries’ shouldn’t just taste like snozberries they should be snozberries. It’s pretty clear that our population is unhealthy. Roughly 75% of military age adults are not healthy/physically fit enough to join. Huge numbers of obesity and diabetes. The knock on effects of which are less mobility so less exercise and increasing rates of other things like heart problems.
All this doesn’t stem from PE being removed,.some part is food additives. I don’t see the issue in working to correct it and encourage folks to eat healthier while simultaneously creating incentives to build up ways to meet the demand. If adults want to sit on the couch all day and eat pop tarts, chips, fatty cakes and wash it down with Mtn Dew no one is gonna raid their home to stop them. Might cut off their ability to use an EBT card to pay for it though.
In a perfect world, food/snack companies would provide full disclosure regarding all the ingredients used in their product (especially the ingredients requiring an advanced degree in chemistry to understand what that stuff really is and what the hell it’s doing in the food in the first place), along with possible health risks and adverse effects to humans.
Ain’t happening, cuz “trade secrets.”
The truth is a lot of novel ingredients sneak in under the GRAS clause, because they’re assumed to be “close enough” to the original ingredient so as to generate insufficient curiosity as to their true effects on human physiology; e.g. HFCS vis-à-vis sugar, for one.
Food companies get away with a lot of this kind of stuff because it’s cheaper, and they’re laughing all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, we don’t know half the stuff that we put in our mouths when we consume highly processed foods, much less what it’s really doing to our bodies. The concern is real – next time you wait in line at the grocery store, observe the person in front of you and behind you and take note of how much of their purchase is highly processed food, and how little of it is actual food.
Something must be done. It’s not a stretch to imagine they’re exploiting ignorance to poison us gradually, especially when you consider that the scientists who once worked for Big Tobacco jumped ship and are now working for Big Food, and they’re using the same playbook.
Watch some of Calley Means’ videos.
Nobody forces you to eat “highly-processed” foods. You can buy raw food and prepare everything for yourself or just shop at special stores or be a vegetarian or whatever.
I have a right to have access to the foods I like – even if they are bad for me. It’s my choice.
Adults can and should definitely always be allowed to make their own decisions about lifestyle choices. Wanna drink a 1/5 of Jack Daniels daily with 12 pack of beer? Sure but that’s gonna damage your liver. Wanna smoke 2 packs of Camels per day? Probably gonna damage your lungs, higher cancer risks.
Ingesting ‘bad’ food is the same. Want to eat only highly processed foods, high in sugar, fats and carbs? Go ahead but probably gonna get diabetes and become obese. Leads to joint pain, less mobility, then even less exercise so now additional weight gain b/c not burning off enough calories, now getting into hypertension and higher risk of stroke and cardiopulmonary arrest.
IMO we should recognize the impacts of ‘bad’ foods. Label them appropriately, do a better job of educating public on the dangers and their alternatives. Then levy taxes on them similar to the taxes on alcoholic beverages and tobacco products. Further every damn cent of all those taxes should go towards funding healthcare not into general revenues.
The labeling stuff has gotten way out of hand. People already have access to easily and cheaply find out pretty much anything they want to know about their food. No need to force everyone to label every single thing.
As to the tax idea – I am 100% against it. The tobacco taxes, that you bring up, are a great example. They are nothing but robbery by the government and taking advantage of a disfavored population. It is criminal what they do with cigarette taxes, and most of the other BS they carry out in their jihad against cigarettes. They burned down much of private property rights in their assault on cigarette smoking (which was SERIOUS damage to our society) – only to actually be encouraging everyone to smoke joints everywhere. No thanks to the BS taxes “for our own good”. Not the government’s business.
I’d agree with you on getting rid of taxes on both cigarettes and alcohol (other than retail sales tax). Then I’d go further and remove all uses of the tax code to provide any incentives either positive or negative to ‘nudge’ (coerce) individual decisions.
I doubt most people are willing to give up ‘their’ provision that benefits them in order to eliminate the ability of govt to influence and cajole individual decisions using the carrot and stick of the tax code to reward some things with less taxes but punish others with more taxes.
If were gonna keep this carrot and stick then we should at least equalize it for ‘bad food’. If nothing else to provide revenue for health care. Of course we.could always go back to risk based pricing in Health insurance but that might be too invasive when we add your meal planning/purchase codes from grocery to your disclosure to get health insurance. Can’t fairly charge some fat ass who eats Twinkie, frozen Pizza, Mtn Dew and doesn’t exercise b/c his knees/ankles arw blown from excess weight unless we account for how his behavior impacts his health. Very unfair to have little to no difference in premium cost for that guy and someone who exercises daily, eats clean and maintains close to ideal weight.
Where did I say anyone was being “forced” to eat junk food? Nice strawman you got there.
Let me spell it out for you: I am saying there ought to be informed consent, which is not presently the case.
Guess you didn’t pick up that lesson from the “covid” shot nonsense.
Red dye is extremely bad for kids with ADHD.
Then parents shouldn’t be feeding their ADHD kids foods containing red food dyes. It’s marked right on the container of food if it contains red food dye, after all. Problem solved and you don’t need to involve the federal government at all. You simply make the parents responsible for their own children.
Says the tinfoil hat libertarian who has never had a child with ADHD. Happy Halloween to you.
ADHD is a medical hoax that they use to run experiments on children with VERY HARD drugs. It is CRIMINAL what they do to kids under the BS rubric of “ADHD”.
ADHD is a very real thing. The brains of children who have ADHD operate at a lower level of central nervous system arousal. That’s why stimulants like Ritalin help them to cope with their horrible experience in the German model of education in the government schools. Finding an appropriate learning environment is better than medication.
I suggest you educate yourself about this issue rather than spouting off on something you do not understand.
The Government
With WW2 came the government takeover of the public schools lunch programs and with that CAME A COST ( not just to freedoms) so b/c the Government wanted to keep control they allowed/authorized additives to foods so that they would last longer ….cheaper to make
So of course the big corporations ONCE AGAIN have to take the blame b/c thats the agreement when you allow the government to once again
come in and “help”
think banking and the fed
think healthcare and the government run medicaid obamacare etc
David Fenton of Fenton Communications, a public relations firm engaged by the NRDC, negotiated an exclusive deal with the producers of 60 Minutes to break the findings of a 1989 NRDC report, compiled by two nondoctoral activists, that has not been printed as a part of any peer-reviewed journal: “Intolerable Risk: Pesticides in Our Children’s Food.” This collaboration spawned the 60 Minutes segment “‘A’ Is for Apple.”
CBS-TV aired the program that featured the misbegotten segment on February 26, 1989. “‘A’ Is for Apple” symbolized by an image of an apple with a superimposed skull and crossbones began with correspondent Ed Bradley’s assertion about daminozide (which he mistermed a pesticide): “The most potent cancer-causing ag
https://www.acsh.org/news/1999/02/01/an-unhappy-anniversary-the-alar-scare-ten-years-later
I think RFK is okay but I don’t buy most of this. They can do some real studies and show what problems there are with these dyes – REAL studies – but just because the EUrotrash scum and other countries ban them doesn’t mean anything to me. And I think the whole “petroleum-based” description is for effect. Unless there is SOLID evidence that these dyes cause real problems – and not bullsh*t problems like the fake ADHD crap they are talking about (which, itself, is a horrific scam that they abuse kids with by the millions) – I have no interest in any “banning” of these dyes.
Also, RFK’s line that “sugar is poison” is just unadulterated BS. There’s nothing wrong with sugar. It’s not “addictive” in any way. It tastes good. Pizza tastes good. If he wants to investigate anything about sweetening then how about really looking into the artificial sweeteners. See the real effects they have. But keep your grubby hands off of my sugar.
And this attack on “highly-processed” food is more BS. I love highly-processed food and there nothing wrong with processing food. If RFK wants to commission studies on all this stuff, then fine – but he does not have the power to just ban anything because he thinks it’s bad. And a lot of stuff, even if it is bad, is still not bannable. We are allowed to buy and eat stuff that’s bad for us. That’s freedom.