FDA says companies can claim "no artificial colors" if they use natural dyes
foodpolitics.com
foodpolitics.com
>In the past, companies were generally only able to make such [no artificial color] claims when their products had no added color whatsoever — whether derived from natural sources or otherwise
This is extra confusing because on ingredients lists they distinguish between "natural colors" and "artificial colors." But apparently that's not the same sense that they're using "artificial" as when they say "no artificial colors??"
Seems like this move is just fixing a confusing situation -- so confusing I didn't even know I was confused until just now!
Natural banana does not have little green ponies on red background. If you color it with green and red, you have banana that does not have its natural color. Banana in artificial color.
It's unclear why they didn't say "no added colors" from the beginning, since apparently that's what they meant all along.
It makes sense in other industries, like calling vinyl wrap an artificial cosmetic change on cars compared to painting.
But makes less sense in this situation
Now, "No artificial color" simply means that the chemists involved in producing this food product do not work for the petrochemical industry.
Granted, this labeling was in direct contrast with the ingredient listing. You could have only "natural color" on the ingredients and be unable to claim "No artificial color". This change "fixes" that by making "No artificial color" as meaningless as "Natural" vs "Artificial" color.
As petrochemical and plant feedstock processes produce chemically identical substances that your body is incapable of distinguishing, this takes a label that had some actual value, telling you how adulterated your food was, and replaces it with a label that means nothing. Yay.
However, labeling around "natural" vs "artificial" ends up being a huge educational issue. The FDA's rules are pretty straightforward, but you will never be able to get people who think education is a liberal scam to actually learn them. It also wasn't obvious what they really meant. There's room for improving the names and labeling, but that is not at all what this administration wants to do. They do not respect the sanctity and power and value of labeling regulation.
FDA food labeling regulations are wonderful and trusted and provide immense value. Them being toyed with by morons with a grudge scares me.
>Are they safer? Possibly, but they are not as well studied or regulated. According to Time,
>> …their natural sources of color do not necessarily mean that they are safer or free of potentially harmful compounds. Natural sources may be treated with pesticides and herbicides, and are also prone to contamination with bacteria and other pathogens…To strip natural products of these contaminants, manufacturers process them with various solvents—some of which could remain in the final coloring and contribute to negative health effects…[and] it generally takes more natural color than synthetic color to make the same shade in a final food.
I agree with the sentiment that "natural" doesn't imply something is healthy and consumers should be skeptical of it, but all of the objections exist for both naturally derived dyes (eg. beetroot red) and the underlying natural product (eg. beetroots), so it's hard to make a principled argument against allowing the natural label for the latter but not the former.
>I agree with the sentiment that "natural" doesn't imply something is healthy and consumers should be skeptical of it
Food does not require dyes. You do not need to paint a banana.
This is a debate about what kind of paint is acceptable in marketing ultra processed products that would look gross if you did not paint them.
This is entirely harmless from a scientific point of view, but treads on food purity folk religion.
That may be the extreme example, but there are many processes that involve processing chemicals without any "petrochemicals" being involved...
Also, that arsenic is naturally occurring and our body can handle it.
If you have ever drank apple juice or eaten rice, you have consumed arsenic. If you grow rice in the dirt with zero pesticides, it will have arsenic in it. The FDA sets the limits at the parts per billion level.
The biological half life of inorganic arsenic in a human is about 4 days, which is why people generally don't die from eating a few apple seeds over their lifetime.
If you learn chemistry, you can learn how <Chemical whatever> can be part of your extraction process yet not be part of the final product. It's a standard part of chemistry. It's fallible though, which is why the processes used for chemicals that go into food often use different processes than versions of that chemical not meant for consumption, and they have stricter regulations on purity and contaminants.
We can debate all about what level of processing is "acceptable" or whatever, but arbitrarily gatekeeping the term "natural" just because naturally derived dyes are adjacent to UPF (which you hate) is a terrible way of setting public policy.
Ah, I'm reading that as the process of extracting the color—and not also extracting the pesticides and herbicides-requires processing that may itself be similar to what happens with the 'artificial' dyes.
That seems defensible, and it's a process that only occurs for the dye and not the associated natural product.
Unfortunately, a few cases of negative reactions to cochineal have been documented, and if the coloring is not even indicated in the ingredients, it might make it much harder for people to find out if that turns out to be the cause.
Okay, it may be technically true, but practically speaking, anyone you ask would call it a lie.
Example?
This means that TicTacs, a product which is a sugar tablet with some flavor, can be "Zero Sugar"
Also: that's a completely different issue to "describing its presence as 'artificial'". Needs a new thread.
That's basically what's done for vegetable oils so should vegetable oils be called "artificial" as well? Is there a principled way of defining what amount of scary chemical involvement is needed for something natural to lose its "natural" designation? Are pretzels at risk because they're dipped in lye (ie. drain cleaners)?
Lye is typically not artificial if it’s made from sea shells and wood ash like it has been traditionally. Even the industrial chlor-alkali process just uses salt (NaCl) and water so it’s not artificial.
Likewise if you use steel balls to tumble-crush shells into calcium carbonate powder (don't know if they do, or if it's even a product, but neither are the point here).
"We are required to inform this table that your naturally wild-caught salmon had, briefly, at one time, a small hook inserted into its mouth. It was otherwise wholly without artificial feed nor other additives."
How do you write a law that slices between those ideas and hexane, clearly?
You can probably begin by broadly calling petroleum and petroleum products artificial.
Where does salt fall here?
Why isn't petroleum natural, when it is plant-based?
What makes petroleum artificial compared to any other substance found on (or in) earth?
It seems you are proposing that "any food that has had a petroleum product added to it at any stage is artificial", which is an oddly narrow focus.
For that matter, does this definition of "artificial" extend to the range of substances that can be synthesized with bio-feedstock?
To expand on our discussion, would this mean that ethanol made other feedstock is natural, but made from petroleum is artificial?
There's approximately 0% chance that the typical pretzel you bought is made with dye derived from wood ash.
By that standard is anything artificial? Oil comes out of the ground, after all. At least with "natural" colors you can argue the actual molecule was synthesized by a plant and we're just purifying it, whereas for industrially produced lye it's entirely man made.
Your body cannot tell the difference between a chemical that is "naturally" sourced vs one that is "artificially" sourced. We are at a point in industrial chemistry that the sole difference is "Did the feedstock come from a petrochemical company"
That's exactly my point, because I'm arguing there's no difference between natural colors and vegetable oil, when they're both refined from natural sources using industrial processes.
At the same time, you shouldn't be able to lie to consumers (even if what those consumers care about is wrong and dumb)! You shouldn't be able to label with "This milk from cows not treated with rBST" if you did in fact treat the cows with rBST, even though rBST is not a health risk. Likewise, you shouldn't be able to say "my product is completely natural" when it is in fact produced through chemical synthesis.
Your scenario holds for any part of any food processing, not just food colours. The issue is that the definition of "natural" when applied to food is impossible to pin down. Can we process using solvents? What if those solvents were brewed? At what point does heat and pressure treatment become "unnatural"? Can I use an acid for processing? Can I use vinegar?
The various vegetable, seed and nut oils that form the basis for so many food products are very problematic if you want "natural" food.
1. add turmeric not color extracted from turmeric
2. you don't add the turmeric just to get the color
What this is about is if a company things their rice + turmeric isn't "popping" enough in color they can extract colors from other food or even non eatable plants and then say "no artificial colors" while the color of the end product is very well artificial/not natural.
Add in that "natural sourced" doesn't mean healthy but many people think it does this is pretty deceptive. (E.g. one of the worst pesticides, banned decades ago, was neurotoxin extracted from plants, _and then highly concentrated_. But 100% natural sourced so the FDA would treat it as not "artificial" even if the concentration of it and separation from the plant is not natural at all.)
In an ideal world IMO this would lead to people getting fed up and going back to the dietary heuristics we had before this fad (HFSS, etc). Unfortunately I suspect this will _actually_ result in increasing distrust/refusal to engage with dietary guidelines entirely, and if we do ever identify a novel mechanism by which certain UPFs cause harm that we weren't aware of, no one will engage with it because they're totally exhausted from the current debacle.
is an article that doesn't just quote the press release and actually discusses the previous policy as well as critiquing the change.
No artificial colors can mean "no artificially created (synthetic) color" or "no artificially added (not naturally in the product) color".
We have a precedent with "no added sugar" for things that already contain a lot of it, like fruit juices. So the distinction is between "no added coloring" and "no synthetic coloring".
Indeed. Arsenic is natural.
Ironic.
This is not an application of the naturalistic fallacy, this is just about accuracy in labeling.
I’m really starting to think the only solution is a household mass spectrometer we can run all our foods through. Literally see every constitute of each food.
Maybe we need an X prize for the under $300 molecular food scanning system.
Welcome to the world of broken institutional trust.
I actually think we need to go the other way and look at foods as foods where we have the data, rather than individual components. Most recent dietary guidelines are more "x% of your plate should be vegetables" than "you should consume x% of your energy as cereal fibre", at least in their headline advice.
If this device simply found most bad stuff (when above safe limits) we’d be in a way better position. Eg. Arsenic, lead, pesticides, etc.
* edited to add “above safe limits” since folks seem to be strawmanning my point. In case it really wasn’t clear.
They always contain arsenic. They always have
Then we’d be left with checks for substances at levels lower than regulations are concerned with, but I’m not sure why we’d care about that.
Fish has mercury present in it, but increased consumption seems to be associated with positive health outcomes. If the device said “danger, mercury”, what are we replacing it with? Red meat? Sausage? The current evidence would suggest that would be a retrograde step.
I’m not sure if your claim is specifically around food colouring. If it is, I’ve not seen any compelling evidence that the food colouring allowed under US regulation is actually problematic for health.