Serious question:
If there's even a slight chance it causes cancer, and it adds nothing to the food other than a slightly more appealing color, why risk it? What is the benefit?
The correct (and scientifically valid) thing to do is to only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done. Otherwise, anyone can simply say X is harmful and pass regulations to get their pet bogeyman pulled off the market, and that is basically what is happening here.
You also need to ask, what is the cost of not having this substance? In this case, the cost would be - you have food that isn't red. Is that a substantial problem for society?
To treat these as irrelevant and boil it down to "prove it is harmful or shut up" is needlessly reductive.
I'd like to point out that eating charred meat has a clear link with colon cancer, so we can't simply appeal to nature for safety.
This is a fallacy. If anything, there's more reason to expect that a substance evolved to serve a biological function (that happens to be red) would have biological effects in humans than a substance developed specifically to be red and be biologically inert.
We could be creating something as dangerous as asbestos artificially.
I agree with most of what you are saying. However, I think it's valid to also apply heavy scrutiny on new chemicals being added to the food chain. The default being to not allow it if it's not proven safe.
Red dye 3 probably shouldn't have been added to the food supply chain with that criteria but since it's already been there for decades with no strong link to negative outcomes there's little reason to ban it now.
- What functional groups does it have?
- How many functional groups does it have?
- How much electron delocalization does it have?
- How much of that electron delocalization is PAHs?
- Does the molecule participate in redox reactions?
Etc.
Basically check to see which molecules can generate free radicals, strip DNA, convert to dangerous metabolites, etc.
I wish it was as easy as this - while there are known toxicophores/no-go functional groups in medchem, there is going to be a big dearth of data on non-acute (e.g. not hERG, hepatotoxicity, etc) toxicity, which is really what the question is here: what are the marginal risks/rewards from eating existing food X (since we know it's probably not acutely toxic).
Sometimes no bugs are allowed at all, people be getting upset if their pop tarts have bugs in them.
Sometimes it's like some bugs are allowed and just part of it like when I buy organic broccoli at the farmers market and need to soak it to get whatever those things are in there out. Or when I get those little mummified bugs in the bottom of oatmeal tins.
Sometimes it's like the food is literally coated in bugs like all that stuff that's coated on schellac. Which, finally to bring it back to a callback to your point, is both GRAS and also made of bugs.
I also learned today that the harvesting process kills the lac beetles.
Because we're talking about food I would actually like to see the opposite. Provide peer reviewed, gold standard studies showing that what you want to put in food is in fact safe.
Proving something safe is logically equivalent to proving that it is not unsafe, which is the same thing as proving a negative, which cannot be done. I cannot prove there is not a teapot circling Mars, and I cannot prove that even the most inert ingredient, at some dose, will not harm you.
Anyone who has lived in California knows this absurdity more intuitively than most people, because California's stupid laws adopt the logic you are proposing, and basically everything in daily life is labeled as cancer-causing.
Really? You have some studies linking wheat and whole grains to cancer? And I don't mean wheat crops sprayed with glyphosate, just straight up wheat? Raspberries? Strawberries?
The reality is, very little of the actual natural food in our food chain is directly linked to cancer. All the additives we pile on top, on the other hand, are.
I would argue if we can't show a direct benefit to the consumer, it shouldn't be in the food chain. So, what is the direct benefit to a human consuming red-5? "It looks better on store shelves" isn't a direct benefit.
A shelf stabilizer? Sure, plenty of instances that makes a lot of sense. Food coloring that happens to be cheaper than natural alternatives? Just... no.
Natural things aren't inherently safer. Are alcohol and red meat both considered natural? Alcohol is a group 1 carcinogen (same as tobacco and asbestos) and red meat is group 2A (probably linked to cancer). A cursory search shows some studies linking fish consumption to cancer, though I have no idea how accurate those studies are.
Alcohol isn’t a natural food, it’s a result of food rotting. Much like rotten meat, you can naturally assume negative side effects
Red meat has positive benefits from its consumption, as does fish.
What is the benefit of red5? If aren’t going to address that, I’ll assume you aren’t interested in anything but whataboutism and aren’t actually engaging in a good faith discussion.
Which goal posts did I move? Directly addressing a foundational claim isn't moving goal posts. You said that very few natural foods are directly linked to cancer. That's demonstrably false, as red meat almost certainly is. To your next point:
> Alcohol isn’t a natural food, it’s a result of food rotting.
I genuinely have no idea what you mean by natural then. At what point does something become unnatural? Alcohol certainly occurs in nature quite a bit, and I don't know that I'd call all the instances "rotting". Leavening bread with yeast produces noticeable amounts of alcohol. Orange juice famously contains a surprisingly high level of alcohol.
> Red meat has positive benefits from its consumption, as does fish.
Of course they do and that's why I never claimed they didn't. I would assume all foods have health benefits (beyond the obvious one of course). However, you claimed that most natural foods don't have links to cancer in particular.
> What is the benefit of red5?
I only just realized you said "red 5" earlier. I assume you're referring to red 3 (erythrosine), though I don't think the specific dye matters here.
> If aren’t going to address that, I’ll assume you aren’t interested in anything but whataboutism and aren’t actually engaging in a good faith discussion.
I'm not an expert on the dye in question and know little about it so I purposely didn't comment on it. I don't think I need to do so in order to address your central claim, which seems to be--and correct me if I'm wrong--that to lower our cancer risk we shouldn't add things to our food chain which aren't naturally in our food chain. That claim relies on 1) being able to distinguish what is natural to our food chain, and 2) for natural things being less likely to cause cancer than unnatural things. I believe 2 is flawed for the reasons I already gave. 1 is a famously thorny subject. Even pre-history human diets were varied enough for adaptations for different regions to evolve.
Anyway, I'm an idiot on the subject of dyes but if you want my argument: adding regulations isn't a zero-cost thing. We shouldn't add them without solid justification. I don't have enough knowledge about this subject to know whether or not such justification exists for the red dye in question here. However, your proposed alternative doesn't sound well-defined enough to be argued without you being clearer about what you mean.
Yes they are.
We have been exposed to, and made adjustments for, things in our environments.
Novel chemicals have novel effects.
There are plenty of dangerous natural things, and there are safe artificial things (I suppose).
But there is a clear basis for eating food that your great grandparents would recognise.
There is also a slowly mounting volume of evidence that there is something wrong with ultra processed foods, hard to say what, but it is becoming clear they are bad for us.
So natural things are inherently safer, all else equal
I’m quite confident every health metric is better for the Red-3-eating cohort than the great grandparent cohort. Being a great grandparent is associated with cancer, dementia, and near-unity death rate.
Also I agree that not every thing natural is good. It is a rule of thumb, not a strict rule.
Mēh! The hippies were right (again): Eat food. Mostly plants. As unprocessed as you can.
The better alternative is to eat non processed food, but only early after reaping. Otherwise the natural (!) chemical reactions like oxidation makes them unhealthy.
The plants in my garden are all natural. I don't use chemicals. Still half of them contain poison like blueacid.
Just to say, natural doesn't mean healthy. Processed doesn't mean unhealthy.
https://www.fda.gov/food/process-contaminants-food/acrylamid...
Strawberries are also linked to cancer, because they contain sugar.
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/62/15/4339/508983...
Almost all natural foods are linked to cancer. The important question is, how large is the risk?
Dark toast is obviously much riskier than Red dye No. 3. We should think about that when we consider what to ban.
Also: I've never bought this, but I just found this premade product, which is sold in my grocery store and is known to the state of California to cause cancer.
https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.197151007.html?...
Toasting just increases the amount present.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
You could be enjoying some all natural peanuts and be exposing yourself to a highly carcinogenic byproduct of a fungus that grows on them.
Hell, people were doing that for millennia until some scientists actually discovered it.
So, let’s stop pretending it’s not possible. We require drug companies show their products are safe and efficacious, and there is both a scientific and a legal framework by which we do this. Let’s debate whether or not the same framework should be applied to food additives (I would argue it should) rather than claim it is not possible.
If the FDA actually required every drug to be proven safe at any dose for everyone, we'd have no modern drugs.
We don’t do this.
What the FDA requires is acceptable safety in light of the benefit provided.
The FDA approves highly toxic drugs all the time. Including ones with the risk of death. I don’t think anyone would call chemotherapy “safe”.
Is that not what NCAP does?
Or what NTSB and FAA do with aviation?
You can prove that some things are safe. Does not mean infallible, means safe.
The thing we could prove is “no detectable increase versus control, in our test data”. There is no way to prove “x does not cause cancer” any more than there is a way to prove “x does not cause meteors” or “x does not cause spontaneous human resurrections” or “x does not cause humans to turn into unicorns”.
Because, sure there can be errors either way. But a study produces new knowledge, not just knowledge or "just as much a mystery"
Proof by contradiction is just that, assume P -> get contradiction, therefore proof that !P.
People really need to retire this canard.
Let's set workable standards for when something can be called safe and enforce them.
Proofs don't apply in biology. Nothing in biology is a truly logical system that can be proved or disproved. That's true for chemistry and physics too- the only system where anything can be proved is math.
In science, instead we gather evidence and evaluate it, and often come to the conclusion that it is so unlikely something is dangerous (given the data) that we presume it's safe. People use the term "scientific proof", but I'm not aware of any in biology that would truly be classified as proof.
Health outcomes are noisy, especially if taken over a long time. Peer reviewed studies are often flawed in various ways and most scientific studies lack the statistical power to be inconclusive.
The fear based approach to human diets can not work. We have to accept risks in our lives if we want to eat at all.
It's the opposite of the US approach, which is to ban (only) proven-harmful ingredients.
I don't expect US food-safety laws to become more strict in the next four years, but who knows, maybe the dead-worm guy will surprise us.
I've see the labels at Starbucks, by the chocolate at the grocery store, and by the balsamic vinegar.
I'm a big proponent of food safety regulation, but we have to acknowledge that there's no way to prove something is safe against all possible harms it might do. There will always be a risk in food. The question is how much risk will we tolerate?
How about only put things in food that are contributing to the actual food? It's not just nutritional value, it's absolutely taste and texture as well. But visuals? Surely you can agree the balance of "is it worth it" is different for the color of a fruity loop than for nutritional value and taste.
You're correct that the "acceptable" line needs to be somewhere because risk isn't absolute, but that line can be in different places for different purposes. (And you can't just write off all cancer concerns because some of them probably aren't legitimate.)
Shouldn't we take the opposite approach? Make it very hard to use highly processed unnatural products, to the point where it's cheaper and easier for companies to fall back on less processed "clean label" ingredients.
I work in (well, adjacent to) the F&B sector and I can tell you that every large company knows exactly what clean food means, why it's healthier, and where to source the ingredients, and that they have equivalent food products using these either already on shelves, or waiting to be produced if there's a shift in consumer desires.
The reason that they don't already use them - the reason you mostly only see advertising for processed foods - is because the more highly processed a food is, the higher the profit margins for companies. I've seen it stated as a rule that every level of processing gives a 2x profit margin. So if you can process an item 3 times, you'll 6x your profit margins (obviously a rule of thumb rather than law).
What is the scientific basis of this claim ?
It's pretty extraordinary that every single thing we eat is carcinogenic.
It's also not true, since many foods - most vegetables, for example, or many types of fiber - do the complete opposite, and reduce your risk of cancer.
[0]Except water, maybe. I'd bet if you shoved enough water into a rat at minimum you could observe an increase in tumor growth rate though.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/panel-s-advice-cance...
This provides useful insight in that you should cool down tea/coffee before drinking
Given color improves the enjoyment of food, I'd argue it is useful though.
If there is no food coloring at all would we eat better? I bet yes. But we can't get there now. It will not pass any vote
I prefer the EUs precautionary principle that enables action to be taken when there is uncertainty over something.
"Hmm, there is an unknown risk with it, do I really need this unhealthy candy" no
"Do i really need this vegetable" yes
For an analogy, if your neighborhood is unsafe, you don't stop going to school altogether, you probably just won't go out for a night stroll.
This kind of absolute logical statement is very stupid.
Also, consider that when faced with unsure studies, the fact that fruits and vegetables are part of healthy human diet for centuries longer than a dye has been, is a major factor.
Yes - which includes vegetables. Humans can generally survive indefinitely on an all-meat diet.
> "Do i really need this vegetable" yes
No.
So, your general statement is correct, but you missed the basic fact that vegetables also fall into the category of "mostly unnecessary" things - so, my point stands.
Sounds like a good way to kill a lot of people
PP Paper :
Actual food, meaning plants, animals, fungus is one thing.
Novel chemical substances should IMHO be guilty until proven innocent.
I realize there's a grey area between say, a plant, and some chemical isolated from the plant. There is a spectrum of whole fresh plant, dried plant, powdered plant, and then chemically isolated constituent of the plant powder. There are useful distinctions to make along that spectrum. And eating quantities of an extracted chemical from a plant that would be impossible to consume by eating the whole plant is one such useful distinction. (e.g. I could extract cyanide from apple seeds and concentrate it, and kill myself, when there's no way I could eat enough whole apples to kill myself with the cyanide.)
But synthetic chemicals not found in nature are entirely outside of that spectrum.
Nothing in this world is truly free of all risk. We have to make judgement calls with every single substance. Yes, coloring food is a legitimate use with real benefits that we need to weigh against the risks. And we also need to consider the very real costs of enforcement and burden of compliance. Bans are an extreme option that does not come without costs for the government and society.
The water thing is even more unserious so I'll ignore it.
Thousands of ppl die every year from being other end of DUI. I didn't choose to be on the road with ppl who choose to drink. It was forced on me.
Everyone knows alcohol is a toxin. It is regulated. You have to be of certain age to buy it. It isn't normally in things you consume daily as a secondary ingredient in doses that would be harmful. You can taste it if it is. If you cannot taste it, you can recognize the effects from drinking it.
The dose makes the poison with any substance, that is a base tenant of toxicology. Not many people are unintentionally poisoning themselves with water.
Food and drug regulations save lives. If you want to argue against them, please at least do so in a manner that doesn't rely on absurdist examples.
Who is being absurd now?
Only because that's so far down on the list of immediate issues it causes.
At the end of the day, the safest thing (in terms of avoiding cancer) is probably to plant some potatoes in your backyard and eat them unspiced and unbuttered for the rest of your life. Most of us prefer food that is a bit more appealing than that, however. Appealing in all aspects - taste, texture, and appearance.
I mean, we absolutely do that already. There's plenty of folks on a low sodium diet because while the salt tastes great, it's bad for them.
In this case we aren't talking about eliminating the color red entirely, we're arguing about a slightly different color. You can get red from a strawberry, raspberry, cherry skin, etc. which will work just as well. It just won't be the neon-red that red-5 produces.
> 1. A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect, as in I could sleep for a year or This book weighs a ton.
> 2. A figure of speech in which the expression is an evident exaggeration of the meaning intended to be conveyed, or by which things are represented as much greater or less, better or worse, than they really are; a statement exaggerated fancifully, through excitement, or for effect.
> 3. Extreme exaggeration or overstatement; especially as a literary or rhetorical device.
From DuckDuckGo, quoting Wordnik, quoting The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
There've been ridiculous attempts to get rid of perfectly innocent flavor enhancers before, like the fight against MSG. Take out MSG, and food tastes less good. But take out a borderline red dye, and what's the worst that happens? Factories have to sell soda that's slightly less pretty in the bottle?
Tuna
Pickles
Oranges (apples as well, but I can't find an old article)
Wasabi
Apricots
Ginger
Salmon
https://www.treehugger.com/foods-youd-never-guess-were-artif...
A paper on it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...
To paraphrase Shakespeare, “Would a Cheeto by any other color taste as savory?”
In many cases[0][1][2] it's treated with carbon monoxide to make it look redder.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5848116/
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=3801706&page=1
[2] https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2005/11/17/FDA-ask...
Probably all of them. We are super sensitive to colors.
Red meat and fish like tuna and salmon have carbon monoxide and sodium nitrate treatment just to keep them red because that's how people think they can judge quality.
> Consumers will pay up to $1 per pound more for darker colored salmon compared to salmon with lighter hues, according to research by DSM, a company that supplies pigmenting compounds to the salmon feed industry.
Seriously?
Alternatively, if we stopped dyeing fish, a year later people will have totally recalibrated what they think fresh, healthy fish looks like.
Wild salmon eat krill and other smaller organisms, many of which provide the components to turn the salmon meat a shade of pink.
Farmed salmon don't get the same components in their feed, so their meat isn't the same colour. So the farmers add some of those components into the salmon feed, et voila - pink salmon meat.
see https://www.dal.ca/news/2023/03/21/farmed-salmon-colour-heal...
Red dye 3 might cause cancer (maybe) but it's admittedly such a weak effect that studies aren't finding a link in humans.
Meanwhile, there are carcinogenic things like alcohol which anyone can buy (over 21).
Heck, we can't even mandate that alcohol must contain B12, which would absolutely save lives and prevent some of the serious injuries of alcoholism.
But we can ban this dye that may or may not in some very small percentage of people cause cancer.
What does B12 in alcohol do?
As for what that does [1], wet brain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke_encephalopathy
If someone you know is an alcoholic, try and get them to take b vitamins.
Call it risk reduction.
Should we ban alcohol? I think people should stop drinking it, but in general I don't think the sale of things that may be harmful in some ways should be entirely prohibited, it would just be good if we minimized the amount of potentially harmful ingredients in our general food supply. e.g. if someone wanted to buy/sell Red Dye No. 3 on its own I don't think that would be a big concern.
Plenty of things you eat would kill you if you ate thousands of times as much per day. Most spices. 100 cups of coffee will likely kill you.
> By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products that had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, mascara that could cause blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law did not get through the Congress of the United States for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.
Why other than you? Because you have an impact on society. Your actions affect others.
Here's a better question, then: what health and safety decisions do I get to make on your behalf. What can I dictate to you that you can't do, or have to do? Can I mandate that you have to run 5 miles every day? It will be good for you to do, and it will impact others by increasing your productivity and lowering the cost of your healthcare on society. Is it reasonable that I should be able to use the threat of violence to induce you to exercise? Because that's all that regulation is: it's an outline of behaviors for which the threat of violence is a legitimate response.
Any of these scenarios should make it obvious there has to be some sort of regulation around these things, as no one individual is an encyclopedia of toxic substances, and we exist in a bazaar of choices.
There could be a compromise, much like there is with alcohol and tobacco, that if you absolutely wanted to buy something toxic, you could do so. However, that wouldn't really necessitate that you couldn't use it to harm someone else.
https://www.google.com/search?q=do+humans+eat+plastic
Less than 500ms on my end. This is turning into a knock-on bad faith argument. I'll end it here, before I need to defend that the earth isn't flat
But that does not mean that humans don't eat any plastic. Tiny pieces of plastic gets transferred to the food by contact with plastic containers. Some processes like microwave ovens, radically increase the amount transferred as well. Previously it was thought that these microplastics would just be eliminated from the body through typical waste functions, but evidence is increasingly mounting that The microplastics actually stay in the body long term and destroy cells they come in contact with. Given we have found nontrivial levels of microplastics in all of our vital organs (including testicals!), that's a scary proposition.
A crude analogy might be germs. Humans don't eat germs directly either, but by nature of their size and invisibility to us, we end up consuming plenty of them.