California bill would ban sales of Skittles, other ‘toxic’ snacks

I had no idea TiO2 was banned in food in the EU. It’s an incredibly common (and very white) additive in a lot of products in the US and is categorized GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by the US FDA. (The EU ban happened last summer.)

It's a little bit of a misrepresentation(I'm guessing by the food companies) that the products themselves are banned.

I will say that Red Velvet cake (chocolate cake with red dye and white frosting) never did taste the same after they swapped out Red#2 for Red#3.

It was my friends favorite birthday cake and his mom would put 1-2 bottles of dye into the cake batter. I think it was '77 or '78 and he was so disappointed... him mom eventually found some old bottles and he had a "last cake" in 1980 well after it was banned.

And if you're wondering, yes you can get Skittles in Europe.

Did you really read the article to see if you think it's worthy of the same derision? There is a lot of space between concrete evidence of significant harm and the kind of silly worrying that Lowe is mocking.

> I firmly try not to eat things that I couldn't make myself 150 years ago.

Such as (in much of the world) fresh fruit and vegetables in the winter?

It's ambiguous because our knowledge is ambiguous. The definition you found is exactly the definition people use - i.e. a non-specific one. The HN audience skews toward engineer-brain, where there are only two classifications: Well defined and not well defined. But in most contexts, that's unrealistic. The author's opinion can be useful and possibly true even without needing to know exactly what subset of "processed" is bad, in what degrees, in which contexts, etc etc. That knowledge is a goal, and is useless as prerequisite.

This happens all the time. "Chemicals", "organic", "natural", "processed", "additives". In the context of food, these words have no concrete meanings (though 'organic' has some regulatory definition sometimes), but they do have colloquial meanings. Sometimes people use them vaguely because they don't have strong knowledge on the topic, and sometimes they use them to refer to something more real.

For example: "I think the fewer additives in foods and the less processed foods that we eat, the better off we will all be." This sentence sounds vague, but it might be absolutely true. Not everything you might call "additives"/"processing" is bad, but some of it is! It's reasonable to believe that, on average, the things most people would consider "additives"/"processing", have some deleterious effects.

"Processing" is the new "chemicals" (all food is full of chemicals -- it's nothing but chemicals!).

Even peeling and/or cooking fruit and vegetables is processing.

It's a miracle you have somehow survived. What the hell did you guys do when the government wasn't nannying you telling you what to eat? Did you guys just starve???

Oh boy are you gonna love the things we ate before widespread refrigeration.

Does it seem insane to include anything with chemically almost identical chlorine in a food product too?

I dunno. The US Government thinking about what we eat has been around since at least iodized salt, probably earlier. There's a famous 1800s court case about whether or not Tomatoes are fruits or Vegetables.

The bulk of these regulations came after Sinclair's "The Jungle", pointing out all of the problems at food processing plants (albeit in fictional form, but there was truth in fiction)

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Whether or not the US Government "should" care is kind of a settled case for over a century in my eyes.

Now that being said, "processed food" is such an incredibly vague category filled with obvious snake-oil salesmen and fake news that I loathe to give any of that much of my attention. But the government thinking about what foods are safe (or not) to eat? That's literally their job and has been for a long, long time.

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Now we can talk about where the regulations have failed, such as the Peking Duck exemption. (Peking Duck is delicious, and clearly safe. But by 1970s law / understanding of regulations, it was quite illegal). And its important to remember these cases and that regulation is far from perfect. But the overall concept of caring about what foods are safe and not safe is the point of FDA, USDA, and a whole slew of other agencies.

I would love it to be the government's business. I spend most of my time doing W2 work which the government automatically takes a cut from. I don't want to become a nutritionist, and I don't want candy to kill me faster than it would in Europe.

That's certainly one take. They probably shouldn't be able to regulate seatbelt use, or forbid pollutants.

The free market will take care of it, right?

This is, of course, a major philosophical debate. I will just say that there could be reasons this is the government's business.

One issue with modern food production for consumers is that it can be difficult to determine whether a particular ingredient is safe or healthy. Information has public good qualities, and having each consumer make an individual determination about whether each ingredient is safe/healthy is costly. The obvious way to justify government intervention here is that it's more efficient for us to pool resources and empower a third-party to produce the information we need and ban/label products that are likely unsafe. The decisions won't always be right, but the approach might be much preferred to the alternatives.

Plus, conditional on socializing a lot of medical costs, it might make sense to put restrictions on behaviors that affect individual health.

> as they already are in actually functional industrialized democracies

cough Thalidomide.

> Has this actually been confirmed in humans[...]?

There's no way such a study would pass an ethics review board. It is structurally unknowable knowledge.

You should do some research on artificial dyes, and specifically around ADHD and the other effects on children. Red dye 40 and yellow 5/6 are a good starting point.

I have personally seen my children become effected even after a small dose (e.g. eating some Doritos or lucky charms), so we cut it out completely.