Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

The reasoning against this seems questionable:

>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.

The premise of this whole thing is bunk.

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.

Lots of foods are not raw goods - like cakes, pastries, etc. Presentation is extremely important to food.

This is entirely harmless from a scientific point of view, but treads on food purity folk religion.

How is it bunk? If, say, arsenic is part of your extraction process of a non-petroleum based chemical, how is that safe?

That may be the extreme example, but there are many processes that involve processing chemicals without any "petrochemicals" being involved...

The answer to your question is that chemistry is a science and we know what we are doing.

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.

>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.

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.

I think I would just as soon drop the natural label entirely because it's meant to sound healthier without actually being any healthier. It seems like the only two states that matter are did you add coloring to the product, or not. Same thing with flavorings too.

I assume this will allow carmine red (cochineal) to be considered as "natural", since it's just "crushing thousands of bugs".

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.

> and the underlying natural product (eg. beetroots)

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.

Enjoy our new smokes with 20% more all-natural nicotine while you’re lining your attic with—also ours—all-natural asbestos! Choose All-Natural WonderTeck products every day!

Cigarettes are unironically "natural", which is why I specifically started my comment with

>I agree with the sentiment that "natural" doesn't imply something is healthy and consumers should be skeptical of it

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