April 30, 2025 • 31 mins
Should artificial food dyes be banned? What does science say about this colorful topic? Jorge drinks the kool-aid with food and health scientists to learn the answer.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. My
name is Jorge Champ, and today we are answering the
question is food coloring really bad for you? The Food
and Drug Administration, or FDA here in the US recently
said it's going to try to take out all artificial
coloring from the foods we eat. But what are these
food colorants? How bad are they? And does that mean
(00:23):
we've been poisoning ourselves for decades. We're going to talk
to several experts, including a psychologist of food, a biomedical
cancer researcher, and an epidemiologist whose work was cited in
the FDA announcement. So put down those brightly colored Cheetos,
spit out that fluorescent Gatoray you just drank, and join
us as we answer the question is food coloring really
(00:46):
bad for you? Welcome to Sign Stuff. Hey, everyone, So
the FDA just made that announcement about food dies and
I'm hoping this episode will be a guide for you
to understand what it all means. We'll start with the basics,
and that is the idea that we put color into
our foods. Why do we do that? Where did this
(01:08):
idea come from? And how does color affect how we
taste food. To answer this, I reached out to a
psychologist of food. Doctor Charles Spence is a professor of
psychology at Oxford University, and he's an expert on how
our senses mixed together to give us the experience of eating.
I asked them to give us a rundown on the
history of food coloring. Here's what he said.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
So it goes back a long way. Certainly. Maybe the
first recorded use is in wine making, using the skins
to color the wine. That maybe goes back several thousand years.
Then over the last century or two. And also he
finds the use of saffron urmeric as well. And here
in the UK there's lots of use of coloring pasley
to turn things green. So that's clearly a lot of
(01:53):
interest for a long time. Color is an important part
of the experience.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Can you step us through a little bit of the
psychology of food coloring? How does color effect how we
experience the food?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
So one of the primary factors when we go shopping
is the use of color more than maybe any other cue.
As soon as we see products, then our brain is
immediately predicting what it's going to taste like, what's the flavor?
And that can be from the product to the thing itself.
Maybe that the yellowness on a banana will tell you
something about how sweet it's going to taste, through to
the color on a packet of potato chips. If I
(02:23):
see a pink crisp packet, it's going to be prawn cocktail.
If it's blue and white, it'll be cheese, onion, or
maybe salt and vinegar, depending on the brand. Our brain automatically,
within the blink of an eye predicts do we like it,
how energy dense is it? What flavor is it going
to have?
Speaker 1 (02:39):
So we color food to catch our attention. The ancient
Romans apparently use mulberry juice to color their foods red,
and the Egyptians are said to have used saffron to
dye their foods yellow and gold. But food coloring can
also change what do you think a food tastes like?
And this has been shown in several scientific studies where
people are giving a between see white yogurt and yogurt
(03:03):
would pink dye in it. Here's how Professor Spence describes it.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
The very first studies will done in like nineteen twenties
and thirties, often by chemists confused about how good adding
coloring to a jelly or a candy, or a yogurt
or a cake change the taste. But now in twenty
twenty five there are probably four or five hundred published
research studies looking at the impact of color. Formally, in
the lab, we will just give people maybe three pots
(03:27):
of yogurt, one just playing yogurt, the other two samples
a little bit of sugar added to make them a
bit of sweetness. One of those two samples with the
sugar will also color pink, and then give people the
three samples in a random order and ask them to
say which one is sweetest, or they will the same yes, no, okay,
which one is sweetest, which one is less sweet People
be convinced that the pink one is sweeter, ten percent
(03:49):
sweeter or fifteen percent sweeter just through the use of color.
So in some cases you can have this really strong
reaction that we really do taste what we see.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So coloring is basically used to trick people. If I
gave you three cups of yogurt, one with white yogurt,
another one with white yogurt, with sugar and another one
with white yogurt, sugar and a little bit of food
dye to make it look pink. You're gonna think the
pink one is the sweetest. Food dyes can hould your
brain into thinking something is more ripe, or sweeter, or
(04:20):
more full of flavor then it really is. But, as
Professor Spence says, food coloring can also be fun. In
another set of experiments, scientists tested how the colors of
M and M's affected how much kids eat them.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
The question why M and M's, or in England Europe, Smarties,
these sugar colored chocolate candies. Why do they come in
a variety of colors? It's not for your good health,
but the reason is from research done last century. Way,
if you ask people do you have a favorite color
of M and M's or Smarties? And kids will say yes,
I love the orange ones because it takets orange, or
(04:55):
the red ones because they're sweeter. And if you then
give the little kid a bottle full of their favorite
colored sweet versus a bowl of a mixture of colors,
they'll actually eat more of the mixed colors than of
their favorite color. Because our brain kind of satyates or
gets bored of the same thing over and over again,
saying it's my favorite color. I'll get bored of it sooner.
(05:16):
Whereas by having color variety you can encourage children to
consume more.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Candies that is fascinating. So a big part of why
we color foods is just to keep our brains entertained.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
For violin, for contrastant, because we can.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
What do you mean, Because we can.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
It just adds interest to what we eat and what
we drink. It's not part of the flavor, but I
think it does contribute to our enjoyment.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, coloring foods is fun, and for most of history
this coloring was done with natural ingredients, mostly herbs and
spices like partsley and turmeric. There are also non plant
based food dyes like carmine red, which comes from crushing
the bodies of a cactus eating insect called Dectylopius cocus.
(06:02):
But then in the eighteen hundreds, people got really good
at chemistry, and that's where we started to get into trouble.
To pick up this thread, I reached out to doctor
Lorne Hoffsith, a professor and Associated Dean for Research at
the College of Pharmacy in the University of South Carolina.
Who has a keen interest in artificial food dice. Here's
how he describes what happened next.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
The adulteration started around the eighteen hundreds, where they were
throwing arsenic chalk into food to make it look more white.
And so in eighteen fifty six, guy named Sir William
Perkin discovered as a chemist he was looking at a
chemical that might work on malaria, and this chemical was
(06:46):
purple and he called it mauvine. And that was the
first synthetic food dye that then led to they discovered
they've consynthesized food colors. They have these without getting too nerdy,
aromatic hydrocarbons on their structure that create a color.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Okay. So, starting in the mid eighteen fifties, there was
an explosion of many different kinds of artificial or synthetic
food dies made from chemicals like coal, tar, or petroleum.
But then people started getting sick. Some of these dyes
had harmful chemicals like lead, arsenic, and mercury. Because of that,
(07:23):
between nineteen oh six and nineteen thirty eight, a series
of laws in the US started to regulate what people
could and could not put in foods, and it gave
the power to enforce these laws to the Food and
Drug Administration or FDA. The FDA would review these chemicals
and approve which ones they thought were safe for people
to eat. These dyes were giving names like red number
(07:46):
forty or blue number one. Here's how doctor Hoffseeth describes them.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
At that point, there was round fifteen to twenty artificial
food dyes that were in our food. And then in
nineteen fifty eight eat a very important, very important law
came into place called the Delaney Clause. This clause was
added to the Food Drugs and Cosmetics Act, and the
clause was saying, any food additive that causes cancer in
(08:15):
humans or animals can't be used in our food.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Okay, this part is important. In nineteen fifty eight, there
was an amendment to the Food Drugs and Cosmetics Act
that included a special clause named after James Delaney, the
chair of the committee looking into food safety at the time.
This clause says that while the FDA has the authority
to say which chemicals are safe to eat, it can't
approve quote any chemical additive found to induce cancer in
(08:44):
man or after tests found to induce cancer in animals
end quote. In other words, if anyone finds that a
chemical causes cancer in for example, rats or mice, then
the FDA has to ban it. We'll get to how
that played a role recent fd announcement a little later,
but back in the fifties it had a big impact.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
So allowing scientists to do research on synthetic food dies.
That knocked off around half of them, and so there's
nine remaining, and now there's eight because Red three was
recently knocked out on January fifteenth, twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Since about nineteen sixty to essentially today, there have been
only nine artificial food dyes approved for use in the
United States. They have names like red number forty, Blue
number one, Yellow five, Yellow six. Basically every single food
in the US that is artificially colored, and that is
most brightly colored foods you find in a typical supermarket,
(09:44):
from cheetos to sodas to gatorade, salad dressings with sabi, yogurts,
M and MS, candies, even pickles and some fruits like oranges,
uses one or more of these nine specific dyes. So
if you grew or have been living in the US
in the last sixty five years, you've probably consumed a
(10:05):
lot of these food dies. Okay, So now the question
is are these artificial food dyes dangerous? How bad are
they for us? When we come back, we'll talk about
the link these food dies have to cancer and children's
neuro behavior. Stay with us, you're listening to science stuff.
(10:30):
Welcome back. Okay. We talked about why we put coloring
in our foods and about the history of food dies
and the FDA in this country. There are currently nine
artificial food colorings that are approved to be used in
the US. That's green number three, red number forty, yellow
number five and six, blue number one, blue two, citrus,
red two, and orange b although the FDA just announced
(10:55):
they're going to ban those last two. Next we're going
to talk about whether these food dyes are are bad
for us. Now, doctor Hasseth is a cancer researcher, and
his concern is about what these food dyes are doing
to your DNA.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
So these are chemically synthesized from the foundational component being petroleum. Well,
the foremost popular are red forty, yellow six, yellow five,
and blue one. Red forty, yellow five and yellow six
are called Azo dyes. So AZO dyes have what's called
(11:31):
an azo bond that azobond being there means it can
be metabolized. So imagine red forty coming into your body
through juicy juice or through doritos and gets into your gut,
and your gut has a lot of bacteria. Some of
these have an enzyme called azo reduct dases. Azo reduct
(11:53):
dases they go after the azo bonds and they split
that molecule into two molecules, one called crescidine sulfonic acid
and the other one is the acronym is answa A NSA,
but the essays stands for sulfonic acid too. So we're asking, well,
what are those molecules doing, and they seem to have
(12:15):
a structure that likes DNA and maybe will damage it.
We've done the experiments to ask them why the red
forty damages DNA. We've sprinkled it onto cells and the
answer is yes. We've given it to mice for nine
months for half their lives, and the question we were
asking does it cause colon cancer? But the answer was no,
(12:40):
it didn't. But what we did discover was there was
this long term inflammation and DNA damage that was occurring
in the mice that we're consuming it. So you can
envision if you're consuming doritos which has red forty and
probably yellow five and probably yellow six. Just look at
the pack and all of these molecules that you're consuming
(13:04):
for day after day after day after day, year after
year after year after year, is causing a low grade inflammation.
Why Because these are synthetic. They're foreign to your body,
just like cigarette smoke is, just like other chemicals are.
They're going to stimulate inflammation. Inflammation is intimately linked to cancer,
(13:26):
and any piece of tissue that has chronic inflammation in
it will have a high risk of cancer. So going
back to the door ETOs that have the red forty
in it, you consume it, it's synthetic, it's going to
stimulate this stealthy inflammation in your gut, in your body
that will probably increase your risk of chronic diseases like cancer.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
I see.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
So that's how they're linked.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Doctor Hasset has done experiments with the most commonly used
of the dyes, red forty, and while he didn't find
that it caused cancer in he reported it cause inflammation,
which if it happens for a long time, is linked
to cancer. Now there are some more direct connections to
cancer for some of these other dyes, but sometimes that's
(14:13):
not enough. For example, Red number three, another artificial dyet
that's been in use in the US for over sixty years,
was found to cause thyroid tumors in rats back in
nineteen eighty seven, but the FDA banned it only a
few months ago, with an effective band aid of January
twenty twenty seven. That means it took forty years after
(14:33):
Red number three technically triggered the Delaney clause, the clause
that says a chemical has to be banned if it
is found to cause cancer in animals before it will
actually be taken out of foods in the US. We'll
talk about how the FDA approves or doesn't approve something
is safe a little later in the program, but just
to be clear, the link between cancer and artificial food
(14:56):
dyes is not a slam dunk. According to the Center
for Science and the Public Interests, a nonprofit that at
tracks food and safety, some of the approved food dies
show a possible connection to tumors and some don't. But
what has given a lot of energy to the movement
to ban artificial food dies in recent years is their
(15:16):
connection to children's neuro behavior. In particular, the FDA cited
a study commissioned by the California Office of Environmental Health
and Hazard Assessment titled Potential Impacts of Synthetic food dies
on Activity and Attention in Children. A Review of the
human and animal evidence. To learn more about this study,
(15:37):
I talked to one of the authors of that study,
Professor Asa Bradman. Thank you, doctor Bradman for joining us.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
I'm thrilled to be here. So my name is Asa Bradman,
and I'm a professor of public health at the University
of californiumer said, in the public Health department, and the
focus of my work is environmental health and children. So
I work on a range of issues, looking at environmental
exposures like pesticides, air pollution, and also dietary exposures.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Can I ask you about that study that you published
put on by the California Office of Environmental Health.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
Yes, So, there was a member of the legislature in
California that asked the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment
to conduct this study, and they came to me and
teamed up with my group to develop exposure assessments and
other information about what people are actually being exposed to.
Our major conclusion was that many studies show a relationship
(16:36):
between kids who, when consuming artificial food coloring, had behavioral
or other changes that could put them, for example, in
the category that you might describe as attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder,
or trouble settling down.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Okay, what doctor Bradman and the team of researchers did
was a comprehensive review of different studies related to artificial
food dies and they found two things. One in animals,
high doses of artificial food dice affect their brains and
their ability to remember and learn. And two in kids,
eating artificial food dice affected their behavior and their ability
(17:15):
to focus and pay attention. Here's how doctor Bradman describes
these results. So how did these experiments usually work? Like
you would give some rats a lot of food dye
and some you wouldn't.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
An ideal study and you would have a series of
doses at different levels, and then you would examine the
animals for effects from those doses. For example, you know
there's a lot of standardized rodent studies to look at
how well they can get through a maze. We know
when you have miser rats in your house or in
your basement or in your garage. They're pretty smart animals
(17:49):
and they can find ways to get in or solve problems.
Whilst the same thing with these tests. If you find,
for example, that the ones are exposed don't do as
well in learning to address a challenge you're remembering where
the food might be, then you can make some conclusions
about the impact on the animals. Right, the animal studies
(18:09):
indicate synthetic food dies effect activity, memory and learning, cause
changes in the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve
to the next in the brain, and can cause microscopic
changes in brain structure.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
And then what did the studies find for kids?
Speaker 4 (18:25):
So there have been some studies where psychologists have provided
a drink or beverage to a group of kids and
they don't tell them whether there's an artificial color or
some other color in the food or beverage. And of
course this kind of study has to go through an
ethics review and be approved and there has to be
consent form. But they're not consuming anything different than if
(18:48):
they had, say, gone to the store and bought some
candy or a juice beverage that had red number forty.
So you can give them the artificial food coloring and
then record using standardized methods any changes in behavior.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
So you found that kids who consumed these artificial dies
seemed to have more problems with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Yes.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
And settling down. We have symptoms that we would considered
to be like attention deficit disorder or ADHD attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder. But just to make it clear that it
seemed to me that some kids were more vulnerable than others,
and that we're not talking about necessarily a chronic induction
of ADHD, but rather an episodic, transient effect.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
In other words, the studies found that when kids drank
or ate regular amounts of artificial food coloring, they seemed
to behave as since they had ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
they would have trouble settling down and focusing, at least temporarily.
So in the studies you found the effect was more transient.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
I mean, the analogy would be like if you drank
some alcohol, you might be a little drunk or tipsy
fair period of time, but you're not permanently in that state.
So the idea here is that these kids were given
a beverage, usually with the synthetic dies in them, and
there seem to be a demonstrable result. But on the
next day, when they were given a challenge that did
(20:17):
not have any of the artificial food dies, those changes
in behavior were not seen. So that's what I mean
by transient.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
The effect is temporary. But as doctor Brettman says, the
concern is what these artificial dies are doing to kids
in the long term.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
When you think about you don't want to give kids
alcohol every day, and I'm sure the canyons who's going
to go after me for say something like this, But
younger children are more vulnerable to environmental exposures than older
kids or than adults. You can imagine that if you
take a very young child that's not yet developed, if
there are neurotoxic insults that can disrupt that development. So
(20:58):
one concern about these is that young children may be
getting exposed on a regular basis and could have long
term impacts.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Okay, to recap some of the artificial food dyes have
some possible connection to cancer, and in experiments they also
seem to affect kids' behavior and possibly their development. So
now the question is how much of these food dyes
are we consuming? Is there even an acceptable amount? When
we come back, we'll ask our experts this question, and
(21:29):
we'll talk about the most recent plan by the FDA
to try to get rid of artificial coloring in general.
Stay with us, we'll be right back and we're back. Okay,
we talked about what artificial food coloring can do to
the human body. Now the question is how much of
(21:51):
it are we swallowing? What do we know about how
much kids are consuming these food dies well.
Speaker 4 (21:58):
As part of the work with the state of California,
we looked at concentration of these dyes in many different foods,
and then we looked at a set of data from
something called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey on
what people eat. So what we did is we estimated
the intake in what's called milligrams per kilogram of body
(22:19):
weight actually published in the study, with a relationship of
that intake to what are called the acceptable daily intakes.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Okay, this is worth getting into. When the FDA approves
something like an artificial food dye, they do it as
an acceptable daily intake or ADI, which is how much
of something the FDA thinks is safe to eat or
your weight so if you're bigger and you weigh more,
the FDA thinks you can eat more of it. Here's
how doctor Halseth explains how the FDA sets that number.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
So what happens is an organization called the Joint Food
and Agriculture Organization JEKFA. They put out a report every
year looking at the science behind any food additive. So
the acceptable daily intake, let's look at Red forty for
(23:13):
an example, is seven miligrounds per kilogram per day.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
It's quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
How did they come to that number.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Because in the nineteen sixties and seventies, the government actually
does do these experiments. They do maximum tolerable doses, and
the mice or rats didn't have any significant pathologies at
seven milligrounds per kilogram per.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Day and below.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
They said, okay, based on these old studies that showed
that they've fed read forty at different doses to mice,
they looked and said, it doesn't seem any pathology is happening,
not even inflammation is happening anything below seven milligrounds per
kilogram per day.
Speaker 4 (23:53):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
The way this works is somebody does an experiment where
they see what's the most do they read, or a
mouse will tolerate of a chemical without anything seeming to
happen to it, and then you scale that up for
larger humans. Plus, according to doctor Bratman, a safety factor.
Speaker 4 (24:13):
So the way it works is that when we look
at the very lowest dose that would have very little
effect or almost no effect in a rat or mouse,
and then we take that number and we put on
safety factors and usually put on a factor of ten
or a factor of one hundred.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
The FDA does base their decisions on science, and they
add huge safety factors. So the recommended amount is ten
or sometimes one hundred the amount that's been found to
be safe for test animals. So what did the California
study find? Are we actually consuming more or less than
the FDA acceptable value?
Speaker 4 (24:53):
In general, the ratio of what kids or a pregnant
women we're eating relatively to the acceptable daily intakes was
below one. If it's below one, it means they're getting
exposed at a level that's less than the acceptable daily intake,
although there were some instances where especially younger children could
be eating foods and have exposures that are at or
(25:14):
slightly above the acceptable daily intake.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
In other words, For the most part, people are not
consuming these artificial food dyes above the acceptable daily intake,
and since there's a safety factor, we are consuming them
way below what the FDA thinks is actually a dangerous amount.
And yet the studies say even consuming off the shelf
drinks can give kids attention deficit problems. So what's going on?
Speaker 4 (25:43):
So when we look at those studies and we look
at the doses that they were exposed to, we realize
that the absceptual daily intakes that were developed for the
Food and Drug Administration are based on studies that are
very all thirty five to seventy years old even and
they were designed to look at the kind of behavioral
(26:03):
outcomes that were concerned about. So we would make an
argument that the acceptable daily intakes developed by FDA were
appropriate at the time. But as we've gained more information
about the potential health concerns related to these exposures, they
don't offer an adequate margin of safety for consumption of
these foods.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
They're too high. They're too high, all right, tareikap. Again,
if you've been eating cheetos and red soda and food
with lots of artificial colorance, then you have possibly increased
at least a little bit, your chances of getting cancer,
and if you're a kid, it may be giving you
attention problems which might affect your development. What does this
(26:44):
all mean, Well, it may not matter, because here's the shocker.
As we were editing this episode, the Food and Drug
Administration or FDA made the announcement that they're going to
try to quote phase out petroleum based synthetic dies in
the nation food supply end quote. To make sense of this,
I called doctor Bryman again, who, because of the announcement,
(27:06):
has been inundated with calls from reporters. So after he
hung up with The New York Times, he took my call.
All right, thanks doctor Breman for coming back.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
What did they announce?
Speaker 4 (27:20):
I was really amazed. The FDA commissioner spoke about his
department's concerns about artificial food collery and that as part
of a new initiative, they were moving to ban all
of the artificial food colors.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Now, what are they actually planning it, because it seemed
like they're not actually banning them yet, but they wanted
the food industry to do it voluntarily.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
You're right, it's not totally clear how they're going to
move ahead with this initiative. Health and Human Services Secretary
Robert F. Kennedy also spoke about how they want to
work together with the food industry to phase out these materials,
and the timeframe they were looking at was pretty short,
you know, like a couple of years to accomplish it,
which is short. Having some experience in the food processing
(28:06):
world and understanding what it takes to source ingredients and
put together a recipe you can produce on a mass scale,
it will be challenging.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Yeah, I imagine there's probably a lot of Twinkies on
shelves out there that could have stayed there forever.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
That would be a good point that there's going to
be a process of looking at current inventory. Also, surprisingly,
Commissioner MacRae also talked about alternatives and from any of
these colors. There are alternatives that are from plants that
we normally eat we know are healthy, like blueberries or
beets or other sources. And he even held up a
(28:41):
cup of beeches as an example of a natural color
that is not petroleum derived, comes from a food we
know as healthy.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
I guess my question is why didn't they just outride
bandies who dies? Why make it this kind of voluntary,
fuzzy process.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
They suspect that to actually go through a regulatory process
and develop rules and to revoke the approvals for these
would be a slow and bureaucratic process. But I think
they're using the bully pulpit to raise concerns about these substances,
(29:16):
and hopefully, I think they're trying to engage the good
will of the American food industry to work together with
them and perhaps implement these changes in a way so
that regulatory steps are not necessary or needed.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
So just giving notice to food companies that you better
start moving away from these artificial dies.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
Yes, having observed the food industry much of my career,
often these kinds of voluntary things are not successful. You know,
it'll be interesting to see how they work together and
what they can accomplish.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
What do you think for the average consumer? We get
bombarded by so many things in our feeds, our Facebook
feeds or Instagram feeds. So many it's a little bit
hard to know what to believe. Whether this is good
for you, bet, this is bad for you. What advice
you have for the average consumer about what we can
trust and what we can trust.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
I think what you can trust is encouragement to make
choices to choose you know, whole foods and do your
own cooking. And my whole foods I don't mean the market.
I need you know, buying vegetables, fruits and grains, breads
and meats, dairy products that you know don't fit into
the category of ultra process and take some time to
(30:29):
think about and prepare your meals. If the ingredients of
the food you're looking at are difficult to pronounce and
you don't know what they are, I think that's an
indication that you might want to stick to products that
you can understand and hopefully prepare yourself.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
That's great. Oh wait for I might check from Whole
Foods now. All right, well, thank you so much chick
to Bradman for that perspective.
Speaker 4 (30:54):
Okay, thanks again for reaching out, and I look forward
to hearing the podcast.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
All Right, his artificial food coloring really bad for you.
The science says it's not great for you. The only
reason we've been using it is to give us a
bit of cheap fun. So maybe the answer is to
make eating non artificial foods more fun. Thanks for joining us.
See you next time you've been listening to Science Stuff.
(31:23):
The production of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or
hitch Ham candidate by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland
and audio engineer and mixer Casey Pegram, and you can
follow me on social media to search for PhD comics
and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to
subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
(31:43):
or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your
friends we'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.
Hey, Welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. My
name is Jorge Champ, and today we are answering the
question is food coloring really bad for you? The Food
and Drug Administration, or FDA here in the US recently
said it's going to try to take out all artificial
coloring from the foods we eat. But what are these
food colorants? How bad are they? And does that mean
(00:23):
we've been poisoning ourselves for decades. We're going to talk
to several experts, including a psychologist of food, a biomedical
cancer researcher, and an epidemiologist whose work was cited in
the FDA announcement. So put down those brightly colored Cheetos,
spit out that fluorescent Gatoray you just drank, and join
us as we answer the question is food coloring really
(00:46):
bad for you? Welcome to Sign Stuff. Hey, everyone, So
the FDA just made that announcement about food dies and
I'm hoping this episode will be a guide for you
to understand what it all means. We'll start with the basics,
and that is the idea that we put color into
our foods. Why do we do that? Where did this
(01:08):
idea come from? And how does color affect how we
taste food. To answer this, I reached out to a
psychologist of food. Doctor Charles Spence is a professor of
psychology at Oxford University, and he's an expert on how
our senses mixed together to give us the experience of eating.
I asked them to give us a rundown on the
history of food coloring. Here's what he said.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
So it goes back a long way. Certainly. Maybe the
first recorded use is in wine making, using the skins
to color the wine. That maybe goes back several thousand years.
Then over the last century or two. And also he
finds the use of saffron urmeric as well. And here
in the UK there's lots of use of coloring pasley
to turn things green. So that's clearly a lot of
(01:53):
interest for a long time. Color is an important part
of the experience.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Can you step us through a little bit of the
psychology of food coloring? How does color effect how we
experience the food?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
So one of the primary factors when we go shopping
is the use of color more than maybe any other cue.
As soon as we see products, then our brain is
immediately predicting what it's going to taste like, what's the flavor?
And that can be from the product to the thing itself.
Maybe that the yellowness on a banana will tell you
something about how sweet it's going to taste, through to
the color on a packet of potato chips. If I
(02:23):
see a pink crisp packet, it's going to be prawn cocktail.
If it's blue and white, it'll be cheese, onion, or
maybe salt and vinegar, depending on the brand. Our brain automatically,
within the blink of an eye predicts do we like it,
how energy dense is it? What flavor is it going
to have?
Speaker 1 (02:39):
So we color food to catch our attention. The ancient
Romans apparently use mulberry juice to color their foods red,
and the Egyptians are said to have used saffron to
dye their foods yellow and gold. But food coloring can
also change what do you think a food tastes like?
And this has been shown in several scientific studies where
people are giving a between see white yogurt and yogurt
(03:03):
would pink dye in it. Here's how Professor Spence describes it.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
The very first studies will done in like nineteen twenties
and thirties, often by chemists confused about how good adding
coloring to a jelly or a candy, or a yogurt
or a cake change the taste. But now in twenty
twenty five there are probably four or five hundred published
research studies looking at the impact of color. Formally, in
the lab, we will just give people maybe three pots
(03:27):
of yogurt, one just playing yogurt, the other two samples
a little bit of sugar added to make them a
bit of sweetness. One of those two samples with the
sugar will also color pink, and then give people the
three samples in a random order and ask them to
say which one is sweetest, or they will the same yes, no, okay,
which one is sweetest, which one is less sweet People
be convinced that the pink one is sweeter, ten percent
(03:49):
sweeter or fifteen percent sweeter just through the use of color.
So in some cases you can have this really strong
reaction that we really do taste what we see.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So coloring is basically used to trick people. If I
gave you three cups of yogurt, one with white yogurt,
another one with white yogurt, with sugar and another one
with white yogurt, sugar and a little bit of food
dye to make it look pink. You're gonna think the
pink one is the sweetest. Food dyes can hould your
brain into thinking something is more ripe, or sweeter, or
(04:20):
more full of flavor then it really is. But, as
Professor Spence says, food coloring can also be fun. In
another set of experiments, scientists tested how the colors of
M and M's affected how much kids eat them.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
The question why M and M's, or in England Europe, Smarties,
these sugar colored chocolate candies. Why do they come in
a variety of colors? It's not for your good health,
but the reason is from research done last century. Way,
if you ask people do you have a favorite color
of M and M's or Smarties? And kids will say yes,
I love the orange ones because it takets orange, or
(04:55):
the red ones because they're sweeter. And if you then
give the little kid a bottle full of their favorite
colored sweet versus a bowl of a mixture of colors,
they'll actually eat more of the mixed colors than of
their favorite color. Because our brain kind of satyates or
gets bored of the same thing over and over again,
saying it's my favorite color. I'll get bored of it sooner.
(05:16):
Whereas by having color variety you can encourage children to
consume more.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Candies that is fascinating. So a big part of why
we color foods is just to keep our brains entertained.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
For violin, for contrastant, because we can.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
What do you mean, Because we can.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
It just adds interest to what we eat and what
we drink. It's not part of the flavor, but I
think it does contribute to our enjoyment.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, coloring foods is fun, and for most of history
this coloring was done with natural ingredients, mostly herbs and
spices like partsley and turmeric. There are also non plant
based food dyes like carmine red, which comes from crushing
the bodies of a cactus eating insect called Dectylopius cocus.
(06:02):
But then in the eighteen hundreds, people got really good
at chemistry, and that's where we started to get into trouble.
To pick up this thread, I reached out to doctor
Lorne Hoffsith, a professor and Associated Dean for Research at
the College of Pharmacy in the University of South Carolina.
Who has a keen interest in artificial food dice. Here's
how he describes what happened next.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
The adulteration started around the eighteen hundreds, where they were
throwing arsenic chalk into food to make it look more white.
And so in eighteen fifty six, guy named Sir William
Perkin discovered as a chemist he was looking at a
chemical that might work on malaria, and this chemical was
(06:46):
purple and he called it mauvine. And that was the
first synthetic food dye that then led to they discovered
they've consynthesized food colors. They have these without getting too nerdy,
aromatic hydrocarbons on their structure that create a color.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Okay. So, starting in the mid eighteen fifties, there was
an explosion of many different kinds of artificial or synthetic
food dies made from chemicals like coal, tar, or petroleum.
But then people started getting sick. Some of these dyes
had harmful chemicals like lead, arsenic, and mercury. Because of that,
(07:23):
between nineteen oh six and nineteen thirty eight, a series
of laws in the US started to regulate what people
could and could not put in foods, and it gave
the power to enforce these laws to the Food and
Drug Administration or FDA. The FDA would review these chemicals
and approve which ones they thought were safe for people
to eat. These dyes were giving names like red number
(07:46):
forty or blue number one. Here's how doctor Hoffseeth describes them.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
At that point, there was round fifteen to twenty artificial
food dyes that were in our food. And then in
nineteen fifty eight eat a very important, very important law
came into place called the Delaney Clause. This clause was
added to the Food Drugs and Cosmetics Act, and the
clause was saying, any food additive that causes cancer in
(08:15):
humans or animals can't be used in our food.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Okay, this part is important. In nineteen fifty eight, there
was an amendment to the Food Drugs and Cosmetics Act
that included a special clause named after James Delaney, the
chair of the committee looking into food safety at the time.
This clause says that while the FDA has the authority
to say which chemicals are safe to eat, it can't
approve quote any chemical additive found to induce cancer in
(08:44):
man or after tests found to induce cancer in animals
end quote. In other words, if anyone finds that a
chemical causes cancer in for example, rats or mice, then
the FDA has to ban it. We'll get to how
that played a role recent fd announcement a little later,
but back in the fifties it had a big impact.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
So allowing scientists to do research on synthetic food dies.
That knocked off around half of them, and so there's
nine remaining, and now there's eight because Red three was
recently knocked out on January fifteenth, twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Since about nineteen sixty to essentially today, there have been
only nine artificial food dyes approved for use in the
United States. They have names like red number forty, Blue
number one, Yellow five, Yellow six. Basically every single food
in the US that is artificially colored, and that is
most brightly colored foods you find in a typical supermarket,
(09:44):
from cheetos to sodas to gatorade, salad dressings with sabi, yogurts,
M and MS, candies, even pickles and some fruits like oranges,
uses one or more of these nine specific dyes. So
if you grew or have been living in the US
in the last sixty five years, you've probably consumed a
(10:05):
lot of these food dies. Okay, So now the question
is are these artificial food dyes dangerous? How bad are
they for us? When we come back, we'll talk about
the link these food dies have to cancer and children's
neuro behavior. Stay with us, you're listening to science stuff.
(10:30):
Welcome back. Okay. We talked about why we put coloring
in our foods and about the history of food dies
and the FDA in this country. There are currently nine
artificial food colorings that are approved to be used in
the US. That's green number three, red number forty, yellow
number five and six, blue number one, blue two, citrus,
red two, and orange b although the FDA just announced
(10:55):
they're going to ban those last two. Next we're going
to talk about whether these food dyes are are bad
for us. Now, doctor Hasseth is a cancer researcher, and
his concern is about what these food dyes are doing
to your DNA.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
So these are chemically synthesized from the foundational component being petroleum. Well,
the foremost popular are red forty, yellow six, yellow five,
and blue one. Red forty, yellow five and yellow six
are called Azo dyes. So AZO dyes have what's called
(11:31):
an azo bond that azobond being there means it can
be metabolized. So imagine red forty coming into your body
through juicy juice or through doritos and gets into your gut,
and your gut has a lot of bacteria. Some of
these have an enzyme called azo reduct dases. Azo reduct
(11:53):
dases they go after the azo bonds and they split
that molecule into two molecules, one called crescidine sulfonic acid
and the other one is the acronym is answa A NSA,
but the essays stands for sulfonic acid too. So we're asking, well,
what are those molecules doing, and they seem to have
(12:15):
a structure that likes DNA and maybe will damage it.
We've done the experiments to ask them why the red
forty damages DNA. We've sprinkled it onto cells and the
answer is yes. We've given it to mice for nine
months for half their lives, and the question we were
asking does it cause colon cancer? But the answer was no,
(12:40):
it didn't. But what we did discover was there was
this long term inflammation and DNA damage that was occurring
in the mice that we're consuming it. So you can
envision if you're consuming doritos which has red forty and
probably yellow five and probably yellow six. Just look at
the pack and all of these molecules that you're consuming
(13:04):
for day after day after day after day, year after
year after year after year, is causing a low grade inflammation.
Why Because these are synthetic. They're foreign to your body,
just like cigarette smoke is, just like other chemicals are.
They're going to stimulate inflammation. Inflammation is intimately linked to cancer,
(13:26):
and any piece of tissue that has chronic inflammation in
it will have a high risk of cancer. So going
back to the door ETOs that have the red forty
in it, you consume it, it's synthetic, it's going to
stimulate this stealthy inflammation in your gut, in your body
that will probably increase your risk of chronic diseases like cancer.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
I see.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
So that's how they're linked.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Doctor Hasset has done experiments with the most commonly used
of the dyes, red forty, and while he didn't find
that it caused cancer in he reported it cause inflammation,
which if it happens for a long time, is linked
to cancer. Now there are some more direct connections to
cancer for some of these other dyes, but sometimes that's
(14:13):
not enough. For example, Red number three, another artificial dyet
that's been in use in the US for over sixty years,
was found to cause thyroid tumors in rats back in
nineteen eighty seven, but the FDA banned it only a
few months ago, with an effective band aid of January
twenty twenty seven. That means it took forty years after
(14:33):
Red number three technically triggered the Delaney clause, the clause
that says a chemical has to be banned if it
is found to cause cancer in animals before it will
actually be taken out of foods in the US. We'll
talk about how the FDA approves or doesn't approve something
is safe a little later in the program, but just
to be clear, the link between cancer and artificial food
(14:56):
dyes is not a slam dunk. According to the Center
for Science and the Public Interests, a nonprofit that at
tracks food and safety, some of the approved food dies
show a possible connection to tumors and some don't. But
what has given a lot of energy to the movement
to ban artificial food dies in recent years is their
(15:16):
connection to children's neuro behavior. In particular, the FDA cited
a study commissioned by the California Office of Environmental Health
and Hazard Assessment titled Potential Impacts of Synthetic food dies
on Activity and Attention in Children. A Review of the
human and animal evidence. To learn more about this study,
(15:37):
I talked to one of the authors of that study,
Professor Asa Bradman. Thank you, doctor Bradman for joining us.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
I'm thrilled to be here. So my name is Asa Bradman,
and I'm a professor of public health at the University
of californiumer said, in the public Health department, and the
focus of my work is environmental health and children. So
I work on a range of issues, looking at environmental
exposures like pesticides, air pollution, and also dietary exposures.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Can I ask you about that study that you published
put on by the California Office of Environmental Health.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
Yes, So, there was a member of the legislature in
California that asked the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment
to conduct this study, and they came to me and
teamed up with my group to develop exposure assessments and
other information about what people are actually being exposed to.
Our major conclusion was that many studies show a relationship
(16:36):
between kids who, when consuming artificial food coloring, had behavioral
or other changes that could put them, for example, in
the category that you might describe as attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder,
or trouble settling down.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Okay, what doctor Bradman and the team of researchers did
was a comprehensive review of different studies related to artificial
food dies and they found two things. One in animals,
high doses of artificial food dice affect their brains and
their ability to remember and learn. And two in kids,
eating artificial food dice affected their behavior and their ability
(17:15):
to focus and pay attention. Here's how doctor Bradman describes
these results. So how did these experiments usually work? Like
you would give some rats a lot of food dye
and some you wouldn't.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
An ideal study and you would have a series of
doses at different levels, and then you would examine the
animals for effects from those doses. For example, you know
there's a lot of standardized rodent studies to look at
how well they can get through a maze. We know
when you have miser rats in your house or in
your basement or in your garage. They're pretty smart animals
(17:49):
and they can find ways to get in or solve problems.
Whilst the same thing with these tests. If you find,
for example, that the ones are exposed don't do as
well in learning to address a challenge you're remembering where
the food might be, then you can make some conclusions
about the impact on the animals. Right, the animal studies
(18:09):
indicate synthetic food dies effect activity, memory and learning, cause
changes in the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve
to the next in the brain, and can cause microscopic
changes in brain structure.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
And then what did the studies find for kids?
Speaker 4 (18:25):
So there have been some studies where psychologists have provided
a drink or beverage to a group of kids and
they don't tell them whether there's an artificial color or
some other color in the food or beverage. And of
course this kind of study has to go through an
ethics review and be approved and there has to be
consent form. But they're not consuming anything different than if
(18:48):
they had, say, gone to the store and bought some
candy or a juice beverage that had red number forty.
So you can give them the artificial food coloring and
then record using standardized methods any changes in behavior.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
So you found that kids who consumed these artificial dies
seemed to have more problems with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Yes.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
And settling down. We have symptoms that we would considered
to be like attention deficit disorder or ADHD attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder. But just to make it clear that it
seemed to me that some kids were more vulnerable than others,
and that we're not talking about necessarily a chronic induction
of ADHD, but rather an episodic, transient effect.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
In other words, the studies found that when kids drank
or ate regular amounts of artificial food coloring, they seemed
to behave as since they had ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
they would have trouble settling down and focusing, at least temporarily.
So in the studies you found the effect was more transient.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
I mean, the analogy would be like if you drank
some alcohol, you might be a little drunk or tipsy
fair period of time, but you're not permanently in that state.
So the idea here is that these kids were given
a beverage, usually with the synthetic dies in them, and
there seem to be a demonstrable result. But on the
next day, when they were given a challenge that did
(20:17):
not have any of the artificial food dies, those changes
in behavior were not seen. So that's what I mean
by transient.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
The effect is temporary. But as doctor Brettman says, the
concern is what these artificial dies are doing to kids
in the long term.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
When you think about you don't want to give kids
alcohol every day, and I'm sure the canyons who's going
to go after me for say something like this, But
younger children are more vulnerable to environmental exposures than older
kids or than adults. You can imagine that if you
take a very young child that's not yet developed, if
there are neurotoxic insults that can disrupt that development. So
(20:58):
one concern about these is that young children may be
getting exposed on a regular basis and could have long
term impacts.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Okay, to recap some of the artificial food dyes have
some possible connection to cancer, and in experiments they also
seem to affect kids' behavior and possibly their development. So
now the question is how much of these food dyes
are we consuming? Is there even an acceptable amount? When
we come back, we'll ask our experts this question, and
(21:29):
we'll talk about the most recent plan by the FDA
to try to get rid of artificial coloring in general.
Stay with us, we'll be right back and we're back. Okay,
we talked about what artificial food coloring can do to
the human body. Now the question is how much of
(21:51):
it are we swallowing? What do we know about how
much kids are consuming these food dies well.
Speaker 4 (21:58):
As part of the work with the state of California,
we looked at concentration of these dyes in many different foods,
and then we looked at a set of data from
something called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey on
what people eat. So what we did is we estimated
the intake in what's called milligrams per kilogram of body
(22:19):
weight actually published in the study, with a relationship of
that intake to what are called the acceptable daily intakes.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Okay, this is worth getting into. When the FDA approves
something like an artificial food dye, they do it as
an acceptable daily intake or ADI, which is how much
of something the FDA thinks is safe to eat or
your weight so if you're bigger and you weigh more,
the FDA thinks you can eat more of it. Here's
how doctor Halseth explains how the FDA sets that number.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
So what happens is an organization called the Joint Food
and Agriculture Organization JEKFA. They put out a report every
year looking at the science behind any food additive. So
the acceptable daily intake, let's look at Red forty for
(23:13):
an example, is seven miligrounds per kilogram per day.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
It's quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
How did they come to that number.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Because in the nineteen sixties and seventies, the government actually
does do these experiments. They do maximum tolerable doses, and
the mice or rats didn't have any significant pathologies at
seven milligrounds per kilogram per.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Day and below.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
They said, okay, based on these old studies that showed
that they've fed read forty at different doses to mice,
they looked and said, it doesn't seem any pathology is happening,
not even inflammation is happening anything below seven milligrounds per
kilogram per day.
Speaker 4 (23:53):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
The way this works is somebody does an experiment where
they see what's the most do they read, or a
mouse will tolerate of a chemical without anything seeming to
happen to it, and then you scale that up for
larger humans. Plus, according to doctor Bratman, a safety factor.
Speaker 4 (24:13):
So the way it works is that when we look
at the very lowest dose that would have very little
effect or almost no effect in a rat or mouse,
and then we take that number and we put on
safety factors and usually put on a factor of ten
or a factor of one hundred.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
The FDA does base their decisions on science, and they
add huge safety factors. So the recommended amount is ten
or sometimes one hundred the amount that's been found to
be safe for test animals. So what did the California
study find? Are we actually consuming more or less than
the FDA acceptable value?
Speaker 4 (24:53):
In general, the ratio of what kids or a pregnant
women we're eating relatively to the acceptable daily intakes was
below one. If it's below one, it means they're getting
exposed at a level that's less than the acceptable daily intake,
although there were some instances where especially younger children could
be eating foods and have exposures that are at or
(25:14):
slightly above the acceptable daily intake.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
In other words, For the most part, people are not
consuming these artificial food dyes above the acceptable daily intake,
and since there's a safety factor, we are consuming them
way below what the FDA thinks is actually a dangerous amount.
And yet the studies say even consuming off the shelf
drinks can give kids attention deficit problems. So what's going on?
Speaker 4 (25:43):
So when we look at those studies and we look
at the doses that they were exposed to, we realize
that the absceptual daily intakes that were developed for the
Food and Drug Administration are based on studies that are
very all thirty five to seventy years old even and
they were designed to look at the kind of behavioral
(26:03):
outcomes that were concerned about. So we would make an
argument that the acceptable daily intakes developed by FDA were
appropriate at the time. But as we've gained more information
about the potential health concerns related to these exposures, they
don't offer an adequate margin of safety for consumption of
these foods.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
They're too high. They're too high, all right, tareikap. Again,
if you've been eating cheetos and red soda and food
with lots of artificial colorance, then you have possibly increased
at least a little bit, your chances of getting cancer,
and if you're a kid, it may be giving you
attention problems which might affect your development. What does this
(26:44):
all mean, Well, it may not matter, because here's the shocker.
As we were editing this episode, the Food and Drug
Administration or FDA made the announcement that they're going to
try to quote phase out petroleum based synthetic dies in
the nation food supply end quote. To make sense of this,
I called doctor Bryman again, who, because of the announcement,
(27:06):
has been inundated with calls from reporters. So after he
hung up with The New York Times, he took my call.
All right, thanks doctor Breman for coming back.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
What did they announce?
Speaker 4 (27:20):
I was really amazed. The FDA commissioner spoke about his
department's concerns about artificial food collery and that as part
of a new initiative, they were moving to ban all
of the artificial food colors.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Now, what are they actually planning it, because it seemed
like they're not actually banning them yet, but they wanted
the food industry to do it voluntarily.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
You're right, it's not totally clear how they're going to
move ahead with this initiative. Health and Human Services Secretary
Robert F. Kennedy also spoke about how they want to
work together with the food industry to phase out these materials,
and the timeframe they were looking at was pretty short,
you know, like a couple of years to accomplish it,
which is short. Having some experience in the food processing
(28:06):
world and understanding what it takes to source ingredients and
put together a recipe you can produce on a mass scale,
it will be challenging.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Yeah, I imagine there's probably a lot of Twinkies on
shelves out there that could have stayed there forever.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
That would be a good point that there's going to
be a process of looking at current inventory. Also, surprisingly,
Commissioner MacRae also talked about alternatives and from any of
these colors. There are alternatives that are from plants that
we normally eat we know are healthy, like blueberries or
beets or other sources. And he even held up a
(28:41):
cup of beeches as an example of a natural color
that is not petroleum derived, comes from a food we
know as healthy.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
I guess my question is why didn't they just outride
bandies who dies? Why make it this kind of voluntary,
fuzzy process.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
They suspect that to actually go through a regulatory process
and develop rules and to revoke the approvals for these
would be a slow and bureaucratic process. But I think
they're using the bully pulpit to raise concerns about these substances,
(29:16):
and hopefully, I think they're trying to engage the good
will of the American food industry to work together with
them and perhaps implement these changes in a way so
that regulatory steps are not necessary or needed.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
So just giving notice to food companies that you better
start moving away from these artificial dies.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
Yes, having observed the food industry much of my career,
often these kinds of voluntary things are not successful. You know,
it'll be interesting to see how they work together and
what they can accomplish.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
What do you think for the average consumer? We get
bombarded by so many things in our feeds, our Facebook
feeds or Instagram feeds. So many it's a little bit
hard to know what to believe. Whether this is good
for you, bet, this is bad for you. What advice
you have for the average consumer about what we can
trust and what we can trust.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
I think what you can trust is encouragement to make
choices to choose you know, whole foods and do your
own cooking. And my whole foods I don't mean the market.
I need you know, buying vegetables, fruits and grains, breads
and meats, dairy products that you know don't fit into
the category of ultra process and take some time to
(30:29):
think about and prepare your meals. If the ingredients of
the food you're looking at are difficult to pronounce and
you don't know what they are, I think that's an
indication that you might want to stick to products that
you can understand and hopefully prepare yourself.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
That's great. Oh wait for I might check from Whole
Foods now. All right, well, thank you so much chick
to Bradman for that perspective.
Speaker 4 (30:54):
Okay, thanks again for reaching out, and I look forward
to hearing the podcast.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
All Right, his artificial food coloring really bad for you.
The science says it's not great for you. The only
reason we've been using it is to give us a
bit of cheap fun. So maybe the answer is to
make eating non artificial foods more fun. Thanks for joining us.
See you next time you've been listening to Science Stuff.
(31:23):
The production of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or
hitch Ham candidate by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland
and audio engineer and mixer Casey Pegram, and you can
follow me on social media to search for PhD comics
and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to
subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
(31:43):
or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your
friends we'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.
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