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Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

> Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in?

They still aren't regulating it, they just held a press conference announcing, literally "we don’t have an agreement; we have an understanding" (and, as covered in this article, no one in the food industry seems to know who exactly the "understanding" is with).

Meanwhile they're firing anyone at the FDA or HHS that can do anything, and the EPA is trying to not regulate coal plants while the Trump administration uses emergency powers to keep coal plants running even over the economic objections of the power companies running them. And of course the EPA is delaying and relaxing the new limits on PFAS in drinking water from last year.

So...no, not really any sensible regulations here.

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But it is creating real change already? All you have to do is ask, apparently. Regulation is coming, but not going to complain that companies are preemptively taking action.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/hhs-fda-...

I'm not going to complain, but real change of what? It's no apparent loss, so I'm happy to say "cool", but we know we won't even be able to measure any public health benefit of what this non-binding, non-regulatory "understanding" is going to bring about.

Seems more like some number of food companies are happy to go along with something that costs them basically nothing, while anything meaningful won't actually be done or is actually in the process of being reversed.

You should note, that Republicans only decided to go after artificial colors after the industry had already solved this "problem" for a hundred other countries.

Meanwhile, all this hubbub over "artificial" vs "natural" colors is fucking nonsensical. Very very few of the "artificial" colors have some evidence of maybe causing some harm from chronic exposure. Not that you should have chronic exposure to any of these foods in the first place since the sugar and fat and salt content alone is unhealthy and will cause you significant chronic health problems unless you exercise for a couple hours a day.

But it doesn't matter whether a chemical is produced by some process in nature or some process in a lab. What matters is how the human body reacts to it. Do we have tomes of evidence that eating "natural" colors is actually safe? No, we do not. Most of them are just GRAS (Generally recognized as safe, which is an outright misnomer) and therefore have no evidence of any safety other than "We used in the 50s so whatever".

Nevermind that "natural" food dyes aren't even! To make "natural red #4" involves taking large amounts of carminic acid from some bugs and reacting that with aluminum or calcium salts. In fact in the US, you can do pretty much whatever you want to a naturally sourced chemical and still call the product of that chemistry "natural".

Replacing well studied, simple, dyes with less studied dyes just because a core part of their chemistry was able to be sourced from """Nature""" is utterly stupid and pointless and meaningless. What actually matters is replacing ingredients that show some toxicity to chronic exposure with ingredients that have significant data to show they are not chronically toxic. There's no structural system in "natural" dyes to actually do that.

This push will not stop Dupont from extracting curcumin from turmeric, massively modifying it to make it easier for an industrial process to use without fouling up their equipment, accidentally make it cancerous after you eat it for 20 years, and poison us all with a "natural" chemical for decades.

"Natural" has no structural overlap with "Isn't unhealthy". Organic Ricin will kill you just as dead.

I despise the labeling around "Natural" and "Artificial" Colours|Flavours|etc. It's downright misleading to call one highly processed compound natural, while calling another equally processed compound artificial. I absolutely do not care what the feedstocks used were, I care about what the final product is.

On that note, I wish that food companies were forced to disclose which "flavours" they added to their products. Some of the artificial flavourings are the exact same compounds as natural ones (vanilla, cherry, and cinnamon are I'm pretty sure, they're just one isolated compound of many), and some of them absolutely are not. It would be really nice to know what I'm actually putting into my body, especially since so many flavourings are added to "natural" products like tea.

Does that kind of labeling exist in any country? I've never seen it on imported goods I don't think.

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