Ep 180 Food Dyes: It’s all marketing

This episode, we aren’t asking you to taste the rainbow, but we are scrutinizing the artificial dyes that give it its color. When you’re munching on brightly colored candies or dipping a french fry in purple ketchup, what exactly is it you’re tasting? In this episode, we take you through the story of food dyes, from their serendipitous discovery to their enthusiastic overuse, from much-needed regulation to controversial health findings. You’ve read the headlines, now get the full picture of artificial food dyes.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Blue Smarties were dropped in two thousand and five, only
to return in two thousand and eight as a distinctly
less blue M and ms have come under attack for
their use of red, yellow, and blue artificial dyes. Green
Ketchup was a revelation for Hines when it was introduced
in two thousand. At its launch, then Global Ketchup manager
Casey Kelly said the company was on track to ship

(00:22):
in the first ninety days what we thought we would
sell in the first year. This thing has taken on
a momentum of its own, Kelly said, illustrating with his
use of the term this thing the sinister fascination with
a new inappropriately colored sauce. Soon there was orange Ketchup
and purple Ketchup, and teal and blue and pink. But

(00:42):
it didn't last. Hines withdrew those product lines in two
thousand and six, and the world was left with plain
old red Ketchup. It might well have been the last
hurrah of a generation's rainbow of nonsense food. We might
be healthier for it, but we are less colorful too.
So next time you stroll down the bland cereal or
snack aisle, spare a thought for the proud chemical factories

(01:04):
where scientists in white coats once injected a vast pallette
of colors into everyday foods. Imagine what we could have
been eating by now, Rainbow bread, yellow steak, pink cheese.
Imagine now a gray factory, a decaying factory, windows long
since smashed, roof and disrepair. A laboratory full of test

(01:25):
tubes and conical flasks lying on their sides. A solitary cheeto,
proudly orange blown past in an icy wind. A flash
of color among the dreary scene. It briefly lifts the
spirits before getting caught up in the dust, doomed to
fade and fester. Imagine this and lament.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
You cannot be serious.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
I know, it's the most dramatic render. Like I just
love all of the imagery of that, so I.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Do too, I mean, and like, I really don't think
that it is serious.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
But it's not. It's not serious at all.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
I am not the audience. Like, I'm just thinking my
favorite cereal these days, you know, historically crackling o brand,
but these days just plain.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
Brand, not even crackling out. I love a brand cereal.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
That, by the way, was excerpt from an article in
the Guardian from twenty fifteen by Adam Gabbat, and I
just loved the imagery of it.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
I love a cinnamon too's crunch.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
I know we've talked about this before, but yeah, I
haven't checked lately to see what colors are involved.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
That's fair, That's fair. I mean I think a surprising
number of things do have artificial food colorance. Absolutely, and
it's possible that some of the brands that I have
purchased over the past few years absolutely.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
Do, very very likely. In fact, great ketch up. Hi,
I'm Aaron Welsh and I'm Erin Alman Updyke And this.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Is this podcast will kill you?

Speaker 3 (03:37):
Can you guess? We're talking about food dies today?

Speaker 2 (03:39):
We are this? Oh I'm excited for this one, are you?
I am? Because it's just it's a fun.

Speaker 4 (03:49):
Little story, okay, And it forced me to evaluate the
feelings that I have about food dies and maybe form
some of those feelings.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
Do you want to tell me about those feelings?

Speaker 2 (04:01):
We can do that that later on.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
Oh okay, okay, yeah, yeah, well.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Get I'm sure that there will be plenty of time
to get into the various feelings that we have about
these things. These things substances.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
I can't. Yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be fun.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
We're gonna focus mostly on the synthetic food dies.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah yeah, cold tar dies.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
Coltar dies now mostly manufactured from petroleum. Yeah, it's gonna
if let's just get into it, shout into it.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
First things First.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
It's quarantine any time it is.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
What are we drinking this week?

Speaker 1 (04:33):
We could drink nothing other than over the rainbow? So
many meanings to that.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
So many And of course this is food dies episode,
like what are we supposed to not do? Blue currosol?

Speaker 1 (04:47):
No, there was only one choice and it was blue currosole.
And there is only one other choice, and it must
include Marachino cherries. So, Aaron, you want to tell us
what's in it? I do?

Speaker 4 (04:57):
I do.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
It has of blue curasol, as we have discussed, it
has rum, it has cream of coconut, pineapple juice. Uh
and uh yeah, marishio cherries. It's a blended bev.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yeah, like a little blue situation.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
It is a beautiful drink, which is the purpose that
food does.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
The point t L d R yep, yeah, t LDL
we learned, t LDL.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
We will post the full recipe for over the Rainbow
on our website but also especially on our social media channel,
So make sure you're following us.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yeah, check it out. We're trying to do these like videos,
yeah things these days.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
It's real taken some getting used to.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
Give for it. Come and tell us how much you
like them. You still like button? You know?

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
And if you're not following us yet on social media,
please we'd love it if you did that. Also, if
you haven't yet rated and reviewed and subscribed on wherever
you like to listen. Is it on iHeart podcasts? Is
it on Apple Podcasts? Is it Spotify? I don't know,
but just you know, do the things YouTube were there,
and we have a website, this podcast we Kill You

(06:15):
dot com.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
There's lots of things on it. Check it out.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Wow, nicely done, Thank you, nicely done.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
To get in there.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
I guess there's nothing else that we need to do
before we get started.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, and you're starting right.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
Sure? Okay, I guess did we talk about this?

Speaker 1 (06:35):
I thought I think we talked about it one time
briefly a long time ago, and I was like, man, okay,
I don't have any All my stuff is like current
events so I don't really have a biology section to
tell you about.

Speaker 3 (06:44):
So all right, can we learn about the history of food?

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Don let's do it? Wow? How fun?

Speaker 3 (06:49):
Okay, but totally forgot, totally scripted.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
Let's take a quick break and get started. It's Saturday morning,

(07:29):
and do you feel like cooking a big old breakfast, eggs, pancakes, bacon,
you know, the whole shebang. Yeah, But when you pull
out that pack of bacon shoved into the back of
your fridge for who knows how long, you notice that
it looks kind of off, like it's awfully gray, a
little bit brown. Better not. It's Wednesday evening and you're

(07:53):
in the produce section of your grocery store, picking through
the clamshells of strawberries, trying to find the one that
has the and juiciest looking fruits, while also keeping an
eye up for any signs of mold. It's Friday morning,
and you're eyeing the bananas you got at the beginning
of the week, trying to decide whether the last of
the bunch is still snackworthy or if they're destined as

(08:16):
ingredient in banana bread. How yellow or speckled do you
like your bananas on the scale of things.

Speaker 3 (08:24):
This is a question, is a real question.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
Yeah, much less speckled.

Speaker 3 (08:28):
Like, oh see, I like I like a speckled very
I knew.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
This about us, that we have different banana preferences. No,
I like mine, not.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Green, but like just after wow, that's too that's too
too much for me.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah, I liked it.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
I liked it, but it's just it's a preference.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
Yeah, that's how I feel about the browns.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
But actually, once they start to have like more than
a couple, I'm like, it's just too soft.

Speaker 3 (08:49):
It's the texture.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
See, I like that texture.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
Then they go banana bread.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
I love that. Yeah. For many of us, taste begins
not with our mouth off our taste buds, but with
our eyes. Our visual perception of food has a powerful
influence over the way that we taste that food, even
acting as a deciding factor in whether or not we're
willing to eat something like speckled bananas. Yeah, like this.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
Hide the broccoli in the mac and cheese. It's not
gonna go well exactly.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
This link between vision and taste, along with smell, is
evolutionarily ingrained. Our ability to evaluate food quality based on
its appearance might help us select the most nutritious foods,
like the ripest strawberries, or avoid food that is spoiled
or poisonous, like that gray bacon or moldy bread. But

(09:41):
it's also learned over our lives, we develop strong preferences
for foods or expectations for taste, based on their appearance.
Yellow pudding signals lemon or banana flavor. Anything else would
be weird.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
Right, right, I imagine like yellow strawberry pudding.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
Right, that would be weird.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
It would be jarring. Yeah, light green ice cream, probably
mint or pisaccio. It would be alarming. I guess maybe
alarming is not quite the right word, but it would
be a shock if you got a scoop of green
ice cream and found out that it was actually orange flavored,
like you took your first little bite or lift. Yeah, yeah, strange.

(10:26):
Our expectations of the way that food should taste can
be so powerful that they can lead to disgust or
aversion if the reality does not match those expectations, like
pepsi discovered in nineteen ninety three. When they're highly anticipated,
clear pepsi completely flopped. Yeah, clear soda should taste citrusy, right,

(10:47):
like that is what a clear soda means, right, even
though or I guess cream soda, but even though the brown.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah cream soda, cream soada, Actually it's at least like
a light brown.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, you're right, it's like slightly tan. Yeah, to indicate
that it's not cru right, I'm a lie. But the
brown of cola comes from coloring. Seven up, which is
a clear soda, was initially dyed brown until they removed
the dye to distinguish it from other sodas. That's like
a marketing tactic. Yeah. And then of course, like in

(11:20):
the first hand account, Green and Purple Ketchup, I remember
that my brothers loved green Ketchup. They were so psyched
about it, and I was disgusted. I was like, I
can't eat it.

Speaker 1 (11:30):
I babysat for a family who I remember very distinctly
bought at one point blue and pink margarine like squeezable butter. Yeah,
and it was like, you know, like Barbie pink and
like if there's an equivalent of Barbie pink and blue,
it was like very blue and pink.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Jump scare, Like that's not for butter. I'm not into it.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
Into it.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah, the power of preference the power of Yeah. But
one study demonstrated how strong these expectations can influence our,
you know, overall feelings. When the study they fed participants
at dinner that consisted of steak, peas, and French fries,
but the people who were doing the conducting the study

(12:20):
altered the lighting so that participants couldn't see that the
steak was actually dyed blue, the peas were dyed red,
and the French fries were dyed green. And when they
put the normal lighting back into place so that people
could actually see the true colors of what they had eaten,
some people were so disgusted that they got ill. They

(12:41):
got sick.

Speaker 1 (12:43):
Wow, Like they ate it just fine. They were like, yes,
this was tasty. Then they saw it and they were like.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Who yeah, exactly. But it wasn't just like these colors alone,
like we've encountered blue candy or popsicles before. It was
even though blue is like, as I saw somewhere, like
the not very common color that we find in nature
for food, and so it tends to be reserved for

(13:10):
like fun foods to the foods. Yeah, yeah, but it
was this mismatch between expectation and reality. The relationship between
vision and food color is evolutionarily rooted. Trichromatic color vision
may have evolved to help us detect red fruits against
green foliage or to see snakes. Check out our snake

(13:31):
venom episode from years back.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
Well, and our color vision episode and our color vision episode.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
But oh yeah, that is I was like car else
did we talk about that? Yeah, But it's also something
that we learn and grow preferences for, starting in early childhood.
And these preferences, of course greatly affect which foods we
might select or find appetizing, which has made them a
very relevant issue for those producing the foods, who might
opt to add a bit more of this or of

(13:59):
that color to enhance the appeal of their product. So
that you pick the pink filet of farm raised salmon
that actually gets this pink color not from the carotenoids
in the food that wild salmon eat, but from dyes,
or you pick the orangeist orange whose skin might actually
be dyed to saturate the natural orange coloring. And it

(14:22):
might seem like the controversy surrounding food dies is a
fairly recent one, at least within the past few decades,
and growing in volume every year, but in fact it
dates back millennia, and at the heart of it, the
arguments against artificial food colorants have fallen into the same
two categories throughout that entire time, deception and toxicity. Before

(14:46):
we go back to ancient Egypt, I want to make
a quick note about the language that I'll be using
to talk about food dies, because there are so many
different descriptors for these yes, and so since this episode
mostly focuses on coal tar dies or synthetic dies, I'm
calling these synthetic dyes. And if I say natural dyes,
which I know the word natural meanings meaningless, it's not great.

(15:09):
I'm referring to the dyes derived from nature, plants or
animals like those little cochineal insects used to make red
food dye or saffron which comes from plants, And any
coloring or dye added to food I'm calling artificial.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
That's the perfect and exactly how I was going to
do it.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
Airs.

Speaker 3 (15:27):
I'm glad we're on the same page.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
Excellent, Okay, back to ancient Egypt. Yes, even millennial old
papyri describe colorants added to medicines.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, but the first conclusive evidence or like written descriptions
that humans added artificial dyes to food. Food comes from
ancient Greece and Rome. Dyes were added to wine to
make them look more robust, have bigger body, stronger bodies, yeah,
well rounded by I don't know how you'd talk about wine.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Darker colors, yummier wine.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
There you go, exactly. And then there were things like saffron,
squid ink, paprika, turmeric, beets, etc. So these like naturally
derived colors that were added to various foods. These colors
often carried with them additional meaning. So for instance, the
rarer the colorant like saffron, the more it was valued

(16:37):
or considered to have more nutritious qualities. Often, certain colors
were associated with wealth or royalty or divine healing. You
could easily imagine that someone might judge up their cake
or wine with a sprinkling of natural colorant, which is
exactly what some bakers did in England in the Middle Ages,

(16:57):
teaching us that natural does not necessarily mean better. Oh yes,
white flower at the time was considered top tier, but
if a baker couldn't get their hands on white flower,
they resorted to adding lime, chalk or crushed bones. So
their bread would turn out white.

Speaker 3 (17:17):
Oh, crush bones. I know, who's bones.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
That's a great question. I do not know, do not know.
Does it matter?

Speaker 3 (17:28):
No, it doesn't. But I'm just curious like you.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
Oh yeah, I mean I not regulated, that's for certain. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And this practice actually inspired one of the oldest laws
against food adulteration in the late thirteenth century. Quote, If
any default shall be found in the bread of a
baker in the city the first time, let him be
drawn upon a hurdle from the guildhall to his own house,

(17:55):
through the great street, where there be most people assembled,
and through the streets which are most dirty, with the
faulty loaf hanging from his neck. That's the first offense.

Speaker 3 (18:07):
That's the first off A second, oh my.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
Gosh, there had to be not only a second, but
also a third.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
You're right, dear.

Speaker 2 (18:17):
If a second time he shall be found committing the
same offense, let him be drawn from the guildhall through
the great street of cheap to the pillory, and let
him be put upon the pillary and remain there at
least one hour in the day. And the third time
that such default shall be found, he shall be drawn
and the oven shall be pulled down and the baker

(18:37):
made to forswear the trade in the city forever.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
Oh my gosh, three strikes and you're out totally.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
That's where baseball got the idea. Don't laugh at my
terrible jokes. Yeah, it's not, Oh my gosh. Other laws

(19:05):
that I guess later were repealed based on your story
of babysitting prohibited coloring butter.

Speaker 3 (19:12):
Well, this was margarine technically.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
Well, the margarine thing later became I didn't even go
into it, but this whole episode could have been about
the margarine wars and like coloring margarine and you know,
could restaurants be allowed to serve margarine under the you know,
but pretend like it was butter.

Speaker 3 (19:28):
Oh, there was like butter in the handy margarine exactly.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
Fascinating Well, because like yellow coloring in margarine. Margarine is
not naturally yellow. No, it's like crystal exactly, and so
adding yellow makes it look like butter, and so it's
like it kind of toes a line of deceitful marketing practices,
are deceitful food practices? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (19:50):
Interesting, yep.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
And there were other laws that prohibited adding colors to
pastries that made it look like they contained eggs because
they'd These laws were designed to protect consumers from deceitful
sales as well as poisonous additives, and so there definitely
was some awareness of the addition of dyes and other

(20:13):
substances to foods and drinks to enhance color or impart flavor,
and the potential danger inherent in those practices, but things
remained fairly under control until the seventeen hundreds and into
the eighteen hundreds, and this is when increasing trade and
long distance travel encouraged people to look for ways to

(20:33):
keep food fresher and looking tastier over longer periods of time.
Vividly colored foods came to represent the quote unquote success
of colonialism, since saturated and bright colors were more likely
to be found outside of the sooty streets of Charles
Dickens London, such as in India, the jewel of the

(20:55):
Crown of the British Empire, and the demand for these
brighter colors from quote unquote exotic lands rose. The Industrial
Revolution only deepened this need for food enhancement, as people
moved to cities where food had to be transported into
where it had to have a longer shelf life and
where demand for year round availability was high, and at

(21:18):
the same time it provided a means to develop new
preservatives and colorance through the growth of science and technology.
Whether these substances were safe was of secondary importance. As
long as they kept the pickles of vivid green and
the coffee grounds nice and dark, it was a okay.

(21:39):
Even if that vivid green was achieved through copper or
the coffee color gotten through beef blood for example. Yeah,
that's just a problem for future the future producers.

Speaker 3 (21:53):
Just feel like that wouldn't taste good.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
I don't think that was that mattered.

Speaker 3 (21:58):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
I bought it right, like you already paid for.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
It, Okay, Yeah, yep.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
But this, like you know, quote unquote future problem was
actually the not very distant future, as it would turn out.
As early as eighteen twenty, chemists were ringing the warning
bell for the increasing use of harmful dyes in food products,
but it was largely unheated in much of Europe. Even
if it was heated, chemists were faced with the substantial

(22:28):
challenge of identifying which compounds were toxic and at what
levels they were toxic. That's pretty key, right, you know,
Dose is in the poison? How much lead in your
cayenne is safe?

Speaker 3 (22:40):
Like, hey, that one?

Speaker 2 (22:41):
We know?

Speaker 3 (22:41):
None? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (22:43):
How much arsenic in your candy yet? None? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (22:46):
Easy?

Speaker 2 (22:49):
But things were going to get even more challenging in
the second half of the nineteenth century with the explosion
of coal tar dyes. In eighteen fifty six, eighteen year
old English chemist William Henry Perkin was tasked with creating
a synthetic alternative treatment for malaria to replace quinine, which
comes from Sinchona Park and was expensive and difficult to get.

(23:12):
He didn't succeed, but he did stumble upon a different
breakthrough that would revolutionize food and fashion an industry. In
one of his experiments with anoline, which came from coal tar,
he noticed that swirling inside his flask was a vivid
purplish color, which he later called mauvine. Perkin immediately saw

(23:35):
the potential this could have as a die and enlisted
the help of his friend and his brother to scale
up production. He applied for a patent. This is an
eighteen year old kid, I love this Wow. Left the
academic lab, gathered funds to start a factory, and changed
industrial chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry forever. Wow, this is

(23:57):
basically what kickstarted the dye industry. And this so the
dye industry. I find this fascinating because it's like a
really kind of fun, fun, full circle story where you know,
it started out looking for a replacement for quinine, So
it started out with a pharmaceutical goal goal, right, and

(24:18):
then it turned into this massive dye industry. But then
the dye industry also had still kept its foot in
like the pharmaceutical ventures, which is why you have you know,
Bayer producing, which was started as a dye company producing aspirin.
Oh wow, and then a lot of these like later

(24:40):
then started to develop medications for you know, cancer drugs
and other types of medications that.

Speaker 3 (24:47):
All started as die, that all started to die.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
So do you remember back in our aceidominifin paracetamol episode
and we were like, yeah, these two dudes founded accidentally
because they were looking at coal tar dye. Wh who
knows why were they doing that? My god, That's why
I finally realized.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
Wow, yeah, it is full circle. That's so interesting, and
I mean it kind of makes sense when it's just
like we're just over here doing chemistry and trying to
figure out what these We're doing chemistry stuff and seeing
what kind of chemistry chemicals we can make and then
what we can do with them.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
It's so I mean, like maybe I just don't know
enough about the biochemistry of coal tar.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
I don't know. Yeah, but like, why is it so
pharmacologically active? No clue? Great question. Maybe we should do
a whole episode on it.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
I mean we kind of are. Oh I'm not okay,
Well anyway, that yeah, future episode, that episode, yeah, okay.
But going back to mauvine, Mauvine became I hope I'm
saying that right. Question. It became the first widely produced
commercial synthetic dye, and within a few years of its development,

(25:57):
it was the color to wear the of the season.
Clothes had been dyed with natural dyes before, but mauvine
was much more vivid, color, fast, and importantly, fairly inexpensive
to produce, since coltar is a byproduct of the gas industry.
As Carolyn Cobblt, who's the author of this book, Rainbow

(26:18):
Palette puts it, quote, in a seemingly alchemical act of transmutation,
they synthesized the molecules of coal tar from dead dark
matter that had laid for centuries in the depths of
the Earth into new substances that would transfigure society and science. Quote.
I also just I don't have this in my notes,

(26:39):
but I just like the word natural. I think this
just goes to show how meaningless it is because coltar
comes from the earth right as well.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
It's just dead dinosaurs and stuff. Yeah, just like really
really deep down there.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
Yeah, and the word now, I mean minerals are counted
as natural dyes as well too.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
Lead would be a.

Speaker 1 (27:02):
Natural die, would be counted as a natural dye. Like,
the word does not have meaning. And I'll die into
the problems with that when we talk about how we
regulate synthetic versus quote unquote natural dies today later Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Okay, well, yeah, it's a it's a mess the word
natural is. Yeah. But the invention of coltar dies was
like finding the Philosopher's Stone, only instead of turning mercury
into gold, chemists turned coal tar into a rainbow of colors. Wow.
At first, the explosion in coal tar dies seemed like
a testament to the promise of science. We can make

(27:37):
the world more beautiful, more appealing, more dimensional with this
array of colors. Now, available.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
Songs and poems were written.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
About these dies, how but soon the cracks began to
show these dyes clearly weren't as inert as the chemist claimed,
and some were downright toxic. Initially, Mauvene and the other
coal tar dyes that followed were mostly used to dye fabrics,
but eventually manufacturers began putting them in food, and this

(28:07):
allowed people to more readily make the connection that some
of these dyes could be harmful. It was a faster
sort of intake and toxicity to ingest versus top of one.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
You're just touching it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
And so began a pushback against the widespread use of
these dyes. And it's important here. I feel like I'm
always saying this, but like it is important to put
this pushback in the broader context of food regulation around
this time, say the eighteen eighties or so, because food
dyes were just one issue of many facing the food industry.

(28:41):
More people living in cities, more food trucked in, more
food spoiling, more preservatives and other questionable substances added to foods.
And when I say preservatives, I mean early preservatives that
were not well tested. Combine this with less oversight and regulation.
You've got a disaster on your hands.

Speaker 3 (28:57):
Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
People were cinnamon that was really ground brick dust, arsenic
dyed candy, milk adulterated with formaldehyde, and who knows what else.
I mean, like all the things that we've talked about
before on the podcast.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Yeah, it's actually amazing to me how many times this
has come up on the podcast, like in so many
different episodes.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
So many different episodes.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
This time period was not great for food regulation, no, no,
And I think it really did kind of illustrate how
when you don't have any framework in place to evaluate
and experts, like declared experts, to make these decisions, you're

(29:39):
gonna get a mess on your hands because there are
so many different competing interests, right, and like, at the
bottom line of it, it is manufacturers and people who
are selling us this food whose goal is profit right.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
They are not going to be the ones looking out
for the safety of their food, no of this of
the consumer. That's not their job. Their job is to
make money.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
Yep. Okay, I mean essentially, in this time period, what
you were paying for you weren't really getting, and what
you were really getting was making you sick. Health overall
during the Industrial Revolution deteriorated in many ways, especially for
the working classes who spent long hours in factories, inhaling

(30:26):
toxic dust, living in close quarters, breathing in tuberculosis and
other respiratory infections, and drinking raw milk, consuming the microbes
that would sicken them and kill their children. Germ theory
was catching on, but overall, this quote unquote degeneration was
blamed on modern society and industrialization, and adulterated foods we're

(30:50):
seen as playing an outsized part in this. Fresh food
was a rare commodity for much of the working class,
and inexpensive sugar and adulterated foods were far more accessible.
By the late eighteen hundreds, one third of recipes in
a standard American cookbook were for puddings and cakes.

Speaker 3 (31:09):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
Yeah, okay, I mean this is not a sugar episode.
Maybe someday, but I bring this up or like, I
wanted to share that statistic because it demonstrates a shift
in the types of foods that people could afford, which
tended to be adulterated and cheap, and what they were
wanting to make with that food, And many people blamed

(31:30):
that shift for what they saw as the degeneration of society. Okay,

(31:51):
so it was like, we have this massive change in
the food that people are eating, especially the working classes,
and that is what is causing the downfall of society.
That is what is leading to the tire rate of tuberculosis,
that is what is leading to you know, children in
you know, working in factories.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
I don't really know that is the root cause.

Speaker 2 (32:09):
That was one of the root causes. Yeah, artificial food
dies were part of that shift, included to deceive the consumer.
So like this bright red strawberry jam is totally strawberries,
trust me by it. It's definitely not apples dyed red
with sometimes the side effect of making people sick. I mean,

(32:30):
clearly some type of regulation was needed, but what across
the board. Regulators like Harvey Wiley I've discussed many times
now on the podcast, had a really difficult time drawing
up guidelines for food adulteration, let alone getting people on
board and enforcing these regulations. Part of the challenge for
food dies was determining which were safe to consume and

(32:53):
in what quantities, because at the time, there was no
standardization in the chemical makeup of these dies or any
agreement on the names for them, so dye companies would
sell dies under different names and compositions to food manufacturers
who really had no guidance on how much to put in.
It was just like, I don't know, this is butter yellow.
I don't know what its chemical name is. How about

(33:16):
half a gram per ten pounds or something like that.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
It looks like the yellow that you want it to
be exactly.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
Yeah, And chemists had no way of detecting specific dyes
or their concentrations. The technology just was not there yet.
Color standardization was in its infancy, which I've never really
thought about, but color standardization was a.

Speaker 3 (33:37):
Big part of this interesting because it was like what
yellow is?

Speaker 2 (33:40):
This? Is this butter yellow? Is this a different type
of yellow?

Speaker 3 (33:44):
Having like a naming system and everything? Yeah, pantone? Is
that what it is?

Speaker 2 (33:49):
Pantone?

Speaker 3 (33:50):
Yeah? I really don't know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
But the other thing is that analytical chemistry was just
starting out and really grew in part out of the
need for food and drug regulation during this period. Interesting
to be able to test things and be like that's
what the substance is, that's how much there is in here?

Speaker 3 (34:11):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, And so The testing of individual dies for their
safety was crudely done, mostly through animal studies, like how
should it be administered? Should it be oral? Should it
be injected? Which animal do you want to test? A rat? Mouse,
guinea pig, from whatever? Beagle? I don't know if they

(34:33):
were testing beagles back then, probably at what concentration does
this rat die? At? What point does it cause neurotoxic
symptoms in a mouse? Like more nuanced health outcomes weren't
really considered, and results were generally quite mixed. Some studies
found a dye to be completely safe, while others found
it to be toxic, and were the results even applicable

(34:55):
to humans. Sometimes chemists experimented on themselves, including that a
die was non toxic across the board if they did
not experience what they considered to be significant side effects, okay,
And then there was like what if the die is
interacting with something else, another ingredient in the food, in
the food? Yeah? Whatever the method of testing, The only

(35:16):
consistent thing was how inconsistent the results were. Consensus of
safety among chemists, politicians, consumers, producers, and retailers was a
pipe dream. Different countries handled this in different ways. Some
took an approach that was kind of like considered safe
until found toxic, so they would like ban harmful dyes,

(35:37):
but everything else was kind of like free for all, okay,
while others, including the US, allowed a shortlist of quote
unquote safe dies. So seven were included in the nineteen
oh six Pure Food and Drug Act that could be
added to food and had to be included on the label.
And so this is when I talk about these safe dies,
I'm specifically referring to the cooltar dies. Seven. Yeah. And

(36:01):
in effect, this act that identified the seven safe dies
transformed these dyes from adulterance to ingredients. Wiley, who orchestrated
this act, later said that he regretted including dies because
he felt that, regardless of their safety, artificial colorants were
deceitful to the public just across the board. Interesting but

(36:25):
safety testing of these dies continued over the next decades
and into today, and some were removed from the list.
Others have been added. Demand for more transparency in the
twentieth century led to additional regulations in the US that
required manufacturers to list ingredients by their chemical name or
by the nomenclature created by the FDA. So this led

(36:46):
to things like FD and C yellow number six, and
so that means like that yellow number six. Then FD
and C refers to it being permitted to be used
in food, drug and cosmetics, and then there are other
ones that are just in like drugs and cosmetics and
so on. The unintended consequence of this was that such
scientific sounding names made people more wary of their food,

(37:11):
not reassured as to its safety, and over the following decades,
lawsuits were brought forward, court challenges were heard, and legislation
was introduced or changed to accommodate new information about the
safety of these dies or when and where they can
be used without being considered deceitful to the consumer, like
margarine in a restaurant. Right, this is a constantly evolving landscape,

(37:35):
and you could do textbooks about like the different regulations
and each individual die over the history of the second
half of the twentieth century alone. And so Aarin, I
knew that you were going to like deep dive on
the current concerns with artificial colorance, and so I didn't
go too deep into that literature perfect, But I was

(37:55):
curious about the origin of this purported link between hyperactivity
or eighty eight and food dies. And I know you're
going to talk a little bit more about this, but
it turns out it emerged in the nineteen seventies after
an allergist named Benjamin fine Gold published a book describing
his observation that symptoms of hyperactivity were reduced when children
were fed a diet that did not have artificial food

(38:18):
additives and dies and other things. And he named this
the fine Gold diet.

Speaker 3 (38:22):
Or the Kaiser permanente diet or the Kaiser.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
Permanente diet yep. And it made a big splash. It
was very big news. A lot of people were very
interested in this, and as and the scientific community was
absolutely interested. They immediately set out to further investigate this
possible link. And I won't do any spoilers because I
know you're going to take us through all of that
and sort of like the past few decades and the

(38:45):
current landscape of what's happening with food dives today, and
so I'm going to stop here and when it comes
to like the history of food dies, okay, But I
did want to share a few thoughts that I found
myself have when putting together this episode. And this is
without me knowing what you're about to tell me, and

(39:06):
I can't wait.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
Yeah, that's what I'm most excited about because then I'm
going to tell you my feelings, because that's how I
was going to start my part.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
So it's kind of perfect.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Okay, it's feelings time. Yeah, okay, feelings. But yeah, it
turns out that I have more feelings about this than
I realize. I mean, I think the bottom line is
that like kind of like we talked about, it's not
that deep. But at the same time, the bottom line
as I see it, is that artificial dies, whether synthetic

(39:36):
or quote unquote natural, in part no nutrition to food.
They're there for aesthetics. Many of us have been raised
to expect apples to be shiny and unbruised, tomatoes to
be giant and red and juicy, salmon to be a lovely,
pinky orange. Imperfection will not be tolerated. These expectations have

(40:02):
been formed, in part by the widespread use of artificial dyes.
Do you remember in The Wizard of Oz when the
film switches to color and you can feel the world
getting bigger, like more beautiful, more real. You and I, Aaron,
like many others, grew up in technicolor oz. We don't
know what it's like to exist in monochrome Kansas with

(40:24):
bruised apples and pale oranges, and frankly, it takes them
getting used to. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't right.
To be honest, I don't think I have heard any
convincing argument for keeping food dies natural or synthetic. I
just haven't it, Aaron.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
I don't want to interrupt your flow because it's so good,
but and you can take it one step further, because
you said they have food dies in part no nutritional value.
They also do not extend the shelf life of our foods.
They do not make our foods more cost effective, unless
you're talking about the comparison of synthetic dyes, which are

(41:08):
more cost effective than so called natural dyes, which are
much more labor intensive and expensive and not as potent.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
So you have potentially ecologically damaging Yeah, exactly so.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
But no, there is literally no benefit to our health
or our pocketbooks in any way, shape or form when
it comes to food dies.

Speaker 3 (41:29):
Their only purpose is to make us want to eat
things more because they look better.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
Because they'll look better.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
I genuinely feel like at this point I have no
skin in this game, Like we take them all out, great,
no problem. We keep them there as long as they're
safety testing. Great, yeah, no problem.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
That's how I feel like, Yeah, since we use them,
we should keep evaluating every die included in food and
we jingle. We do keep evaluating. We should continue to
weigh the cost and the benefits, including who is paying
the cost and who receives the benefit. And we should
not assume that replacing synthetic dies with natural ones solves

(42:10):
the issue. Just because something is derived from a plant
rather than cold tar does not make it inherently healthier.
We just did an episode on Strict nine, which comes
from a plant, is not used as a die, but still.

Speaker 1 (42:25):
Like this is the exact This is the conclusion of
the end of this episode as well too. So we
could honestly step here, don't, but we could.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
It's like all food, drug, and cosmetic dies should continue
to be held at the standard that they are, and
we should be wary of companies that claim superiority or
better better nutrition because of quote unquote natural ingredients. And
so I just like, I don't know, I think to

(42:59):
place this in the current context of like the arguments
today It's like I want there to be the reason
that we should take out food dives is because it
doesn't impart nutritional value and if it harms, if there
are harms, then we should take them out. But like
I just it doesn't make sense to me, and I

(43:19):
am open to hearing reasons to keep food dies in,
but I did not come across any in my reading.

Speaker 3 (43:26):
Well.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
It's also what I think is really interesting, Aaron, is
that you brought up that in the past there was
a lot more it seems like emphasis on the idea
that these food dies were deceptive in a way. Yes,
right they are, and today but today that's not the
conversation that's going on. The conversation is only surrounding only

(43:49):
surrounding the synthetic dies. There's really not conversation ongoing about
the natural dyes, which is a problem, yep. And it's
only around the potential for health harms which I'll get
into that come with these synthetic dyes. And there is
no discussion on going about the fact that this is

(44:12):
still a form of You could look at this as
a form of deception, especially like you were saying, Aaron,
the way that we market these so called natural dyes.
A lot of companies are really leaning into that in
a way that makes you assume that a food is
going to be healthier for you because it is dyed
with natural colorance, right, and there's still artificial.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
Colorance just derived from natural sources.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
And the labeling requirements are very different too.

Speaker 3 (44:37):
I can't can we get into it? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (44:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do that.

Speaker 3 (45:06):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
So what I'm gonna get into is how these things
are currently regulated in the US and in other countries.
Because the amount of mis and disinformation out there about
the way that food dies are regulated in the US
versus that you is astounding course. So I'm gonna give
you the truth. And what is the data that exists,

(45:27):
especially for these synthetic diyes, on what harms they could
potentially be causing, and what are we doing about it?

Speaker 3 (45:32):
What is the future going to look like?

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Okay, I'm thrilled.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
Good.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
Just to bring us up to speed from where you
kind of left us off, Aaron in the like mid
to nineteen hundreds ish in the nineteen late nineteen fifties
early nineteen sixties, there was over two hundred food dies,
natural and synthetic that were like approved for use, and
at that point people were like, this feels wrong, there's

(45:58):
too much.

Speaker 3 (45:59):
We need more data.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
So at that point the FDA undertook reviews of all
of those colorants and reevaluated them. And since that time
the list has been whittled down, I think, and I
wish I had written the exact number down, but I
think it's around twenty eight quote unquote naturally derived food
dies and nine synthetic dyes that are approved in the

(46:21):
US currently, And the nine is an asterisk, it's actually eight.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
But let's get there, okay.

Speaker 1 (46:27):
The way that food dies are regulated today is that
they have to be specifically approved for use before they
are allowed to be used as a colorant, which means
that regardless of the source coltar, petroleum meaning synthetic dye
or natural vegetable mineral bugs, whatever, it has to be approved.

(46:51):
The FDA has to receive safety data to be able
to consider the properties of that die, consider the amount
of that dye that somebody might be consuming in their foods,
any possible health effects, impurities or byproducts that might be
in the die as a result of the manufacturing process,
and then the FDA and the European Food Safety Administration

(47:15):
does the exact same thing in Europe. They set an
appropriate level of use determination for every single one of
these food dies, and then they set limits on what
specific foods these dyes or cosmetics or drugs that these
dyes can be used in the maximum amount that you
can use, et cetera. There is no generally Recognized as

(47:38):
Safe or GRAS provision for color additives, which means that
our color additives, any color additives that are in our foods,
are more tightly regulated than a lot of other stuff
that is in our foods and our drugs and our
cosmetics and our supplements. Okay, because remember so many things
that are in supplements fall under this g category. That

(48:02):
is not true for food colorance no matter where they
come from. In the US, these types of color additives
that we all can call artificial colorance are split into
those two groups that we've mentioned a few times now,
synthetic meaning derived from coltar or now petroleum, and so
called natural dyes. But the way that they're actually labeled

(48:22):
in the US is that the synthetic dyes are called
certification required, and all of the other dyes that are
come from natural sources are exempt from certification. So what
does that mean. Yeah, they all still have to have
safety data, but synthetic dyes are subject to batch certification,

(48:46):
which means that manufacturers of these dyes have to send
a sample from every single batch of the dye or
the pigment that they are making to the FDA for
the FDA to analyze it. What the FDA is going
to analyze it for is purity and the presence of
any impurities in the dye. They're going to analyze it

(49:07):
for heavy metals, for moisture, for any unreacted intermediates, because
with the production of these synthetic dyes, especially a lot
of times the intermediates in the reaction do have data
of harm. So that's one of the reasons that a
lot of people don't like these synthetic dyes specifically, is
because the chemical process that it takes to make that

(49:28):
the intermediates can be toxic, including causing cancer, and so
the FDA has to bat certify every single batch of
these synthetic colorants before they can be used in our foods.

Speaker 2 (49:40):
I just find this really interesting that synthetic dyes are
subject to this, but natural dyes are not. When if
you're deriving this from natural sources like a plant. Plants
individually vary so substantially in what they are made of
and the concentrations of various correct compounds.

Speaker 1 (49:59):
Correct correct and all vegetable fruit, animal, mineral, natural based
colorants are exempt from this certification process, which means that
nobody other than the manufacturer, who should be following good
manufacturing practices hopefully, are the only ones that are testing them.
They do again have to provide safety data before they

(50:20):
can be certified for use, but there's no oversight process
of the manufacturing of those colorants because they are exempt
from certification. Also, that means that synthetic colors have very
explicit ways that they have to be identified on our labels.
On our food labels, like you mentioned aaron, they have

(50:41):
to list FD and C yellow number five, right, because
those are batches that have been approved for use. Exempt
colors do not have to be explicitly identified in the US.
They can actually just be listed as added color or
artificial color, like you don't even have to say the
exact thing that's in there, yeah, Or sometimes it can

(51:04):
be listed under a whole bunch of different names, right,
Because some different colorants actually have a bunch of different
like common names that people use, and so you might
have one colorant that has multiple different names, so you'd
have to be able to identify all the different names
that it has. In the EU, the regulation for labeling

(51:24):
in things is different. And every single food additive, whether
it's a colorant or like a preservative or other food additives,
whether it's a synthetic dye or whether it's a naturally
drived dye, it has what's called an E number, so
like E one two three, E one O two, E
one thirty.

Speaker 3 (51:43):
Nine, blah blah blah, everything, every single thing, Okay.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
And that means you know, quote unquote natural colorants that
we might list as paprika or you know, beat dehydrated beats,
they would list as E. I didn't I don't know
the numbers of those, but that's what they would list
it as if it was used as a colorant. So
that is one difference is in the labeling that we
have here in the US versus the EU.

Speaker 3 (52:07):
Okay, right, let us.

Speaker 1 (52:09):
Focus a little bit more specifically on these synthetic dyes. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
there's a lot of different like chemical groupings of them.
If you're looking at like the chemical structure. They're all
derived from coltart or now a days, mostly from petroleum.
Most of the dyes that we use in the US
fall into the AZO dyes group, which means that they're

(52:31):
like usually these like carbon rings and then they've got
two nitrogen groups that are double bonded together. That's what
makes them an AZO. Okay, but there are I know
there's other groups as well too. But there are in
the US only eight slash nine ish of these that
are currently permitted for use for food in the US. Yeah,

(52:56):
and they are. I will list them for you so
we can talk about each one in specif wow, I know,
because there's the true a.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
Lot of them.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
So we've got FD and C they all have that
at the beginning. Blue number one, Blue number two, Green
number three, Yellow number five, most famous, yellow number six,
and red forty. And that's only what six right there.

Speaker 3 (53:23):
Those are the.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
Ones that we are eating because those are the ones
that are really used in the US.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
Okay, okay, the other two are not used.

Speaker 3 (53:32):
There's a couple more.

Speaker 1 (53:33):
Let me tell you about them, because these are also
the subject of some like the April twenty second press
release that the FDA came out with has some information
about some of these, so let's get into it. There's
two more that are likely going to be banned very soon,
but they are still allowed right now. One of them

(53:55):
is called citrus Red number two. This is allowed in
the US, it's banned in the EU. It is only
permitted to be used at really low concentrations. I think
it's like less than two parts per million on the
outside of oranges. This is so specific erin that are

(54:17):
not meant for juicing or processing.

Speaker 2 (54:20):
Okay. Yeah. Also, I did not know that oranges could
be dyed.

Speaker 3 (54:25):
Me neither.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
Okay. It's so disappointed at everything, Like I'm just like
do why, Like.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
Yeah, And it's not super common apparently what I saw,
it's mostly only in Florida oranges. I don't know if
that is just like that's where they use it more,
But it's not used very commonly. It's only permitted because,
again the FDA sets very strict regulations on the amount
that you can use and what foods you can use
it in and in what context. So it is only
permitted on the outside of oranges that are meant for consumption,

(54:53):
where you're not eating.

Speaker 3 (54:55):
The outside of that orange.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Right, right.

Speaker 1 (54:57):
And this is a controversial die because there is some
data at higher concentrations than two parts per million, but
there is some data of cancer. I think it's bladder cancers,
mostly in mice and rats. And so that is one
that the FDA has recently announced that they are planning
to They have not yet, but they are planning to

(55:18):
revoke the authorization for Citrus red number two in the
coming months. Presumably there's another one that is still technically
approved for use that.

Speaker 3 (55:29):
I just find.

Speaker 1 (55:30):
This is where you just get like, this is just silly.
Sometimes it's called orange B and it is technically still
on the approved list only for use in hot dog casings.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (55:46):
But it gets better. It has not been used since
nineteen seventy eight.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
What's being used in hot dog casings today? I don't know.

Speaker 1 (55:55):
Erin probably read forty okay, and like yellow number five, go,
what are.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
You using your hot dogs?

Speaker 3 (56:02):
Costco's all naturally, Aaron, they're using paprika.

Speaker 2 (56:06):
But know that for a fact?

Speaker 1 (56:07):
Oh no, I don't, but I would guess. But but
so this is one that in the nineteen sixties, when
the FDA was reviewing all these things, they actually recommended
I think it was in like nineteen sixty six or
seventy something. They were like, yeah, we should probably revoke
orange be because like there's some data that it's probably
carcinogenic and it's on a list of probable carcinogens. But

(56:30):
the one and only company that was using orange b
for their hot dog casings stopped manufacturing them. So then
the FDA was like, mah, just never followed through on
my probably.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
How to file the paperwork. That sounds exhausting, like this
is pointless. I've got other things to do on this
Friday afternoon.

Speaker 1 (56:49):
So that's the only reason that it is still on
the technically approved list, which is just so silly.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
That I've I've rolled my eyes like now eight times
and they're starting to become strange from me.

Speaker 4 (57:00):
No.

Speaker 1 (57:01):
Sorry, there's probably gonna be a little more of that. Yeah, yeah,
but yeah, So that one is also now actually going
to be banned supposedly in the next few months, but
again it has not been used. No one has been
eating orange Bee since nineteen seventy eight, unless you're eating
really old hot dogs.

Speaker 3 (57:17):
I guess someone somewhere.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
Now there's a ninth one that is now banned, but
it might still be in existence because the manufacturers have
a couple of years to actually remove it from their products,
and that is RED number three. Red number three was
banned officially in January of this year, twenty twenty five,
so it's in the process of being phased out.

Speaker 3 (57:39):
The reason that it was.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
Banned is because of data on the increased risk of
thyroid tumors in and I think it's specifically in male rats.
There is no evidence that directly links RED three to
causing cancer in humans, but because of this what's called

(58:01):
the Delaney Provision, which was what went into effect in
nineteen sixty by the FDA, any evidence of the cancer
causing properties of any food dye means.

Speaker 3 (58:13):
It should be pulled.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Right even in that is like you know, one in
one billion lifetime risk of cancer or something like that.

Speaker 1 (58:21):
Yeah, yeah, even if it's only in animal studies like
et cetera.

Speaker 3 (58:26):
So Red number three is now.

Speaker 1 (58:28):
Banned and companies have to phase it out as of
now by twenty twenty seven for food and twenty twenty
eight for drugs, although the FDA has requested that manufacturers
do this on a speedier timeline, So we'll see if
that happens.

Speaker 3 (58:44):
Okay. Now, of the other.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
Six blue one and two, green three, yellow five, yellow
six and red forty, ninety percent of our synthetic dye
consumption comes from just three colors yellow.

Speaker 3 (58:58):
Number five, yellow number six and red forty.

Speaker 2 (59:03):
I like that.

Speaker 3 (59:04):
I do like that, and I added pink because I
like it.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
Yeah, So those are the three dyes that are ninety
percent of our synthetic dye consumption. We don't really need
to use green that much because we can make it
from yellow and blue, and then we use blue one
and two sometimes. So just looking at what is approved,
I want to address another misconception that always comes up
in talking about these when we look at the regulations

(59:29):
in the US versus Europe, these dyes are not banned
in Europe. People online love to say that all these
dyes are not allowed in Europe, and that is one
hundred percent untrue. Is it just a labeling discrepancy, yes, Aaron,
like I said, the European Food Safety Administration, which is
their version of the FDA, has different labeling requirements. The

(59:52):
only synthetic dye of those six that are used, so
citrus number two and orange bee are not allowed in
the EU red number three still is, so it's banned
now in the US. It's still allowed in the EU,
though only in Marischino cherries.

Speaker 3 (01:00:09):
I believe.

Speaker 1 (01:00:11):
The only synthetic dye though that's approved in the US,
that's banned in the EU is green number three, So
that is banned in the EU, but it's allowed.

Speaker 3 (01:00:20):
Here in the US.

Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
There are three other synthetic dyes Cochineal red, Ponceau four
and quinn Alone yellow that are approved for use in
the EU but are banned in the US. Okay, And
I think that the reason that people say this is
just because they don't understand how labeling laws work, like
the U system is logical and ours is not. And

(01:00:43):
so yellow number five is called E one O two,
Red number forty is called E one twenty nine, Yellow
number six is E one ten. They're all allowed now
when we talk about the hyperactivity stuff, which we'll I'll
get into, I swear eventually. There are some other differences
in labeling laws in the EU and the UK that

(01:01:04):
I think has probably led to differences in the way
that artificial and specifically synthetic dies are perceived in the
EU and the UK, which has led to companies choosing
to manufacture with more of the natural dyes than the
synthetic dies.

Speaker 2 (01:01:21):
I have a question about just dies die use in general.
Give it to me, like what proportion of Okay, the
bottom line is, I'm trying to ask what the difference
in die consumption, artificial die consumption is in the US
versus the EU overall, like our great questions, greater concentrations used?

(01:01:42):
Do more foods have dyes in one place versus another?
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (01:01:46):
Like, yeah, that's a really good question. I don't have
I don't have like hard data on that, okay at all.
The EFSA, the European Food Safety Administration, sets their acceptable
daily limits similar way that the FDA does. They might
have different they might come to different conclusions based on
the safety data. And the EFSA recently went through and

(01:02:08):
reevaluated all of their adis in the last like ten
fifteen years since like twenty ten ish I think, And
so that was like a big process that they undertook.
But yeah, I don't know if we have good data
honestly on the differences in consumption. I think anecdotally, there

(01:02:29):
seems to be more of a shift towards natural guyes
in the EU and the UK compared to in the US,
and I think it might come down to some of
these labeling differences. So let's get more into the health
data so that we can look at those labeling differences
and why those might exist. There's two big categories of
potential for harm that the literature mostly focuses on, and

(01:02:51):
that is the risks of cancer and hyperactivity in kits.
And so there's also, though I'll say, and this is
I think really important and often underappreciated, there's also the
potential for hypersensitivity reactions aka allergic reactions. And there's evidence
that some of these synthetic dyes yellow five, possibly also

(01:03:13):
red forty can cause allergic reactions in some people. Natural
dyes can also cause allergic reactions. A lot of these
natural dyes actually can cause allergic reactions as well.

Speaker 3 (01:03:24):
And they're not as clearly labeled, which is also trickier.

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
Yeah, right in the US, they're not actually labeled, and
so that is tricky because if you have these natural dyes,
like a natto extract is one that definitely can cause
hypersensitivity reactions, but that doesn't necessarily have to be on
a label. That's a problem, but let's focus on the
cancer part and the hyperactivity part. And the cancer part
is kind of short because I already mentioned the big
ones that we know have some associated information or data

(01:03:51):
that suggests an increased risk of cancer, and those are
the dyes that have since been either banned or are
on the chopping block. So Orange b Citrus, Red number two,
and Red number three. Again, none of these have data
for cancer in humans, although I think that Citrus red
number two is on like the IARC list of potentially

(01:04:16):
carcinogenic in humans. But all of these are now either
banned or in theory will be banned soon in theory
by the FDA. Okay, for the other dies that exist
that are still approved, the other synthetic dyes, there's not
any real data of cancer in these. So there's very

(01:04:39):
limited and pretty controversial evidence of reticulo endothelial cancers in
mice but not rats for Red number forty. And it
seems like this data is like based on a lot
of these studies are honestly just not great. Yeah, so
that's a problem in and of itself, right. There was
a study in Blue number two that was like maybe

(01:05:02):
an increased risk of bladder or brain tumors in rats.
But again it was like not a great study, so
people were like, maybe it's not accurate with green number three,
there's no evidence of carcinogenicity, Yellow number five, Yellow number six,
no evidence of carcinogenicity. There's a colorant called Amorants, which
is red number two in the US or E one

(01:05:22):
twenty three in the EU, that is now banned in
the US that did have some increased risk of tumors
in female rats, so that's why it's banned here. It's
still permitted for use in glass a cherries in the
EU and the UK okay, okay, lots of cherries. So overall, like,
there are studies that have looked at the risks of cancer,

(01:05:43):
mostly in mice and rats, in each of these synthetic dyes,
and the evidence is not does not show an increased
risk of cancer for these Thus far might that change
in the future perhaps, But the big one, and of
course that gets I think the most press is not cancer.
It's hyperactivity.

Speaker 3 (01:06:04):
Yeah, so erin.

Speaker 1 (01:06:10):
We will need to do ADHD someday, Yeah, we will,
It's on our list. But the idea that food colorants
might be related to ADHD or hyperactivity stems like you
mentioned Aaron from studies that date back to the nineteen
seventies that were conducted by a guy named Fine Gold.

(01:06:32):
What he did was he put kids who had hyperactivity
and I don't know if it was technically diagnosed as
ADHD at the time.

Speaker 2 (01:06:41):
Not sure what the criteria were, yeah, because.

Speaker 1 (01:06:42):
That they have changed over time, but in any case,
kids who had hyperactivity, put them on pretty restrictive diets,
quite restrictive, very restrictive kind of elimination diets where they
had no artificial colors, no artificial flavors, no preservatives, right,
a very limited diet. And he saw that on this

(01:07:04):
restrictive diet, kids had a reduction in their hyperactivity symptoms.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
And this was was this self assessed? Was this subject?
Was this parental?

Speaker 3 (01:07:16):
This is a really great question. Yeah, great question.

Speaker 1 (01:07:18):
I did not read his study, and so I don't
know exactly what his exact metrics were, but that study
and that book that he published sparked decades of research
into diet and ADHD. Food colorance was one part of
those restrictive diets, and so since then people have also said, okay, well,

(01:07:41):
if we want to parse out food colorance specifically, then
we actually have to look at kind of controlled trials
where we expose people to food colorance, we expose kids
to food colorance and.

Speaker 3 (01:07:53):
Look for behaviors Jesus Yeah, Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:07:56):
So I'm going to just kind of summarize these last
few decades of days great, leaning heavily on some recent
meta analyzes that have been conducted to look at all
of this. The basic summary is this, there is some
evidence that some kids might have an increase in symptoms
related to ADHD, like inattentiveness, fidgeting, impulsivity, over activity, and

(01:08:23):
other symptoms that we see with ADHD with exposure to
synthetic food colorings. So I want to be very clear
about what this data shows and what it does not
show because it's important.

Speaker 3 (01:08:37):
There are no.

Speaker 1 (01:08:38):
Studies that are providing any evidence of a causal relationship.
So there is nothing that shows that food dies or
other additives for that matter, are what are causing ADHD.
ADHD is a condition that has really strong genetic components
that we don't fully understand, and there are likely these
like gene by environment interactions and environmental triggers. There's a

(01:09:01):
really wide spectrum of symptoms. There's not evidence that food
dies are causing ADHD, But there is evidence that for
some kids, some of who might have a diagnosis of
ADHD and some of who might not, exposure to some
of these synthetic colorants might worsen some of those hyperactivity symptoms. Okay,

(01:09:23):
and this seems to be the most pronounced in younger kids. Now,
you asked, Aaron, how are we measuring this? Is it
based on parental is it based on blah blah blah.
There's a really wide range of that. And because these studies,
and there's a number of them, and they've been done
over the last few decades, but they're not a ton
of standardization in the way that all of these studies

(01:09:44):
are done. So in some of these studies, you actually
can't disentangle the effects of food colorant from a preservative
called sodium benzoate that they've used in a lot of
these studies. So some of those like you see in effect.
But is it the sodium bende or is it the colorant?
We don't know for sure. Some of these studies only
show significant effects of increased hyperactivity when we look at

(01:10:08):
parental reports, but not when we look at teacher observations
or clinic observations.

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
And these are like double blind studies.

Speaker 3 (01:10:16):
Or most of them are. They're blinded, and they're.

Speaker 1 (01:10:19):
Crossover studies, Okay, the good ones. And so that means
that you're exposing a kid to you have them go
on a restrictive diet, ideally so that they're not being
exposed to food color in their regular diets. And then
you're giving them usually a juice that has either preservative
or food coloring or both, either one or a mixture.

(01:10:40):
And that's another issue is that a lot of these
studies look at mixtures of food colorance. Many of the mixtures,
because many of these studies were done in the UK,
many of the mixtures contain food colorants that are not
approved for use in the US, So some of those
scithetic colorance that we don't use.

Speaker 2 (01:10:54):
So we don't know, like I like, the specific food
dies that might be associated with.

Speaker 1 (01:10:59):
This yellow Number five is the most implicated. It's the
one that's had the most studies on a single food colorant,
but a lot of them look at a combination, so
we don't know for the other food colorants.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
Gotcha.

Speaker 1 (01:11:09):
And then yeah, so then you expose the kid, you
have them drink this drink that either has food coloring
or doesn't. You observe them. You do these clinic observations.
Parental reports are given and then you do a wash
out period and then you give them something else that
doesn't have it, and vice versa. So you randomize them
to whether they receive that first or whether we receive
that second, and you observe them at both times. Okay,

(01:11:30):
some of these studies, they only really saw an effect
in kids who maybe had a history of atopy, so
like allergies or asthma or something. And in nearly all
of these studies, the effect sizes are pretty small, so
we're looking at and effects sizes are hard to like interpret,
but overall it's like a small increase in these symptoms

(01:11:51):
of hyperactivity. Okay, but that's you know, even a small
increase in hyperactivity in kids. If you're talking about like
a classroom full of kids, that could have a huge effect.

Speaker 2 (01:12:01):
And so just so I understand this is if you
if a kid has been diagnosed with ADHD or not,
this is a deviation, This is an increase in the
symptoms of hyperactivities specifically, yes, and so by putting them
on an elimination diet, it's not going to cure ADHD,

(01:12:24):
it's not going to lead to an alleviation of symptoms.

Speaker 1 (01:12:27):
Well, that is what the fine goal data shows, and
that is what a lot of these restrictive diets show that, Yes,
if you take away food dies, you put a kind
on a restrictive diet, you can improve their symptoms.

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
OKHD.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
So it's not just like food dies lead to increased
symptoms or food dies are associated with increased symptoms, but
it's also that a complete elimination of food dies will
cause alleviation.

Speaker 1 (01:12:52):
Correct, Yes, And so one of the meta analyzes specifically
looking at kids with ADHD suggested that it's about how
maybe eight percent of kids with ADHD have symptoms that
are related to synthetic food colorance was what their estimate
was overall. So that is what the data shows. And

(01:13:13):
because of this data, and because of how much we've
had over the last few years in the EU, and
I believe also in the UK, foods that include some
of these synthetic colorants, especially yellow number five and some
of the others too that we don't use in the
US have to include a warning label on the food
that says, quote may have an adverse effect on activity

(01:13:37):
and attention in children end quote, and that I don't
know the exact year that that went into effect, but
I very much suspect that that has contributed to this
shift that we see in the EU towards natural food
dies rather than synthetic food dice.

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):
Have similar studies been performed on natural food dice?

Speaker 3 (01:14:00):
Not that I found erin that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:14:03):
It is because the restrictive diets are no artificial colorants,
which includes artificial colorance derived from natural sources.

Speaker 2 (01:14:11):
Okay, And what would the possible mechanism of action be?

Speaker 1 (01:14:16):
I knew that you were gonna ask that, so I
have a tiny little paragraph.

Speaker 3 (01:14:19):
To tell you. We don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:14:21):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:14:24):
The studies that have tried to look into this have
not all come to the same conclusions.

Speaker 3 (01:14:28):
Obviously.

Speaker 1 (01:14:29):
They're also all based on like mouse and rat studies,
which is pretty limiting. There's maybe some suggestion like is
it because these are pro inflammatory in some way? Is
it actually the metabolites from these dyes? Is it some
like gut brain.

Speaker 3 (01:14:43):
Axis type of stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:14:44):
The bottom line is we don't know what the possible
mechanism could be here, So it's all based on this,
you know, like these these studies looking just at kids,
and again also no data in adults that there's any
issues with hyperactivity, not that adults don't have ADHD, but
nobody's done those studies. Nobody's looking at adults.

Speaker 2 (01:15:06):
What's what is the degree of impact?

Speaker 1 (01:15:08):
So it's it is a small effect and it is
not all kids with ADHD, and I think that that's
the most important part. So none of these studies and
like the kind of community at large in terms of
how we treat ADHD does not suggest restrictive diets as
a cure. It's not a cure for ADHD. Okay, yeah,

(01:15:29):
point blank, But there is some data that for some
kids a reduction in their exposure to these synthetic colorants
and maybe other food additives. And again there's like there's
more data that needs to be out there, right, because
it's especially when we're looking at like kids with ADHD
being put on these restrictive diets, it's way more than

(01:15:51):
just the food colorance. So there is a lot more
like data that needs to be parsed out in that,
and there are a lot of people that are working
on that. So I'm not here saying that you know,
eliminating food dies is a cure for ADHD. That is
not the case and that is not what the data shows, right,
But there is an increase in hyperactivity symptoms for some

(01:16:12):
kids with exposure to some of these synthetic dies.

Speaker 2 (01:16:16):
How interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:16:17):
Yeah, it's interesting, and it's like really hard to know,
Like what do we make of it?

Speaker 2 (01:16:22):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:16:23):
What do we do about that? What percentage of the
population has to be effective? For the FDA to say
that we think that this constitutes a harm and therefore
these should be banned. The EU and the UK have
not banned them. They've decided that what they're going to
do is put a warning label so that consumers can decide.
You know, I don't want my kid to have this
because I am worried that they might have an increase

(01:16:44):
in difficulties with activity and attention. So it's the question
is how do you decide this? And that's not for
us to answer, it's for the fdata answer. What the
FDA has decided that they're going to do, according to
their press release from April of twenty twenty five, is
ask nicely that manufacturers please stop using these synthetic dyes

(01:17:04):
and instead switch to natural dyes. That's what they said,
and a lot of the press about this was like
FDA banning synthetic dies.

Speaker 3 (01:17:12):
It has not, so it was just like a hey,
would you mind.

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
Yeah, if it's not a problem, you're doing well.

Speaker 1 (01:17:19):
They're asking manufacturers to stop question yeah, these other synthetic
dyes red number forty, yellow five, yellow six, blue one
and two green three, and they're saying will you please,
And the manufacturers apparently are like, yeah, sure, but they've
apparently said yeah sure before. By the way, this is hilarious.
In twenty I think it was twenty sixteen, General Mills,

(01:17:40):
who makes Tricks, was like, we're going to switch to
natural food dies because that's what our consumers want. So
they switch Tricks to be natural food dies and everyone
hated it and they were pissed.

Speaker 3 (01:17:49):
So in twenty seventeen they switched back.

Speaker 2 (01:17:51):
Yeah. I mean like this, this is what I was saying,
is that like it's going to take some getting used to,
and I feel like it needs to happen across the
board if it's going to and otherwise companies will not
be on board.

Speaker 1 (01:18:03):
Well, and here's the other thing that I think is
really important that we need to remember as we're talking
about all of this and the thing that made me
the most, like I guess frustrated with this episode. We've
said already food dyes serve no purpose other than to
make our food look better and make us want to
eat more. Manufacturers have a really strong reason to want

(01:18:27):
to keep as many as cheap and as potent, right like,
so you use as little as possible food dyes available
so that they can keep consumers happy and have us
buy their product instead of someone else's. The FDA absolutely
should have very strict requirements and regulations on what can

(01:18:47):
be approved as a food dye, whether it is derived
from a beat or a beetle's.

Speaker 3 (01:18:53):
Butt, or petroleum totally.

Speaker 1 (01:18:56):
And that means that the FDA needs to be empowered
to do this. They have to have the budget, the
human power, the expertise, the expertise to be testing these dyes,
to be reviewing these studies whether they are natural or synthetic,
And we as consumers should expect a really high degree

(01:19:17):
of safety testing and scientific grigor Because the risk benefit
ratio has no benefit, our risk tolerance should be very low.
This all makes sense, right, But we can first of
all do that without distorting the data that exists right,
without lying about what's approved here in the US versus
the UK.

Speaker 2 (01:19:34):
That's what I think bothers me about this, or like
I was trying to articulate, like I want this. I
want these decisions to be made for the right reasons, exact,
evidence based reasons.

Speaker 3 (01:19:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:19:45):
We can do that without making blatant statements that dies
are poisoning us, right, and with recognizing that natural food
dies are not free from risk. These also need to
have their safety profiles adequately addressed and right now. The
FDA has announced in this press release in April that
they are going to expedite the approval process of at

(01:20:07):
least four new natural based food.

Speaker 2 (01:20:10):
Dies because they're natural.

Speaker 3 (01:20:11):
Because they're natural.

Speaker 1 (01:20:13):
So what it feels like we are doing with food
dyes is the same thing that we have done with
a lot of other issues that we've talked about this
season already. We are pinpointing a single aspect in this
case of our food system, and we are demonizing it.
We are pinpointing something that seems bad because it's synthetic
or it's not natural, and we're putting all of our

(01:20:34):
focus and blame on this one thing, synthetic food dies,
instead of looking at the bigger picture, and the bigger picture,
if we really take a step back, is that these
food dyes, synthetic or natural, are predominantly found in our
ultra processed foods, which account in the US for sixty
percent of our diet. And ultra processed foods are more

(01:20:57):
energy dense and way less nutrient vs Packing more calories
and less nutrition than unprocessed or minimally processed foods. And
yet these are less expensive per calorie, less expensive per
gram of food, and their cost has increased less over
time compared to the cost of unprocessed or minimally processed foods.

(01:21:17):
Hello eggs versus eggos right now, right right, So why
can't we focus more on this? Switching our food dies
from red forty to dehydrated beats or yellow five to
turmeric is not going to change anything about our health
if we're all still eating lucky charms and tricks for breakfast.
It just like feels like a distraction.

Speaker 2 (01:21:39):
You know it is, And I feel like there is
so much it's such a complicated topic because there's so
much to it. There's so much to it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:50):
Yeah, And like you said, Aaron, I hadn't even really
like articulated what you said about this. As we start
switching to quote unquote natural, that's a whole new marketing
gamut for companies. Right, Oh, this is healthier. Oh if
I look at a label and it says it's got
beats in it, now my kid.

Speaker 3 (01:22:06):
Is eating beats. No they're not.

Speaker 1 (01:22:07):
It's just a colorant. It's not beats.

Speaker 2 (01:22:10):
I mean it is. It is just a marketing. It is.
It's all. It's all marketing. I mean, that's the thing.
And and it's a it's a shape because like I
don't know, I love color is huge. I think it
is human to love color and to want to enrich
our world with color.

Speaker 3 (01:22:27):
I mean, look at your shirt, Ook at my shirt,
look at my nail shirt.

Speaker 2 (01:22:31):
Yeah, but I think that Yeah, there needs to be
real consideration with where we are using that color and
why we are using that color when it comes to
the foods that we consume.

Speaker 1 (01:22:45):
So if you would like to read way more about
where we got all of this information from, let us
tell you.

Speaker 2 (01:22:49):
Let us tell you. Okay, I have I have a
bunch of sources, but I'm going to shut up too
right now. One is a book called a Rainbow Palette.
How Chemical Dyes change the West Relationship with Food by
Carol Uncoppled And another is a paper from two thousand
and nine by Burrows titled Palette of Our Palettes, A
Brief History of Food coloring and its regulation.

Speaker 1 (01:23:10):
Love it I relied very heavily on the actual FDA
websites and the EFSA websites to tell me about how
these colors are regulated and what they do. But there
also was a paper from twenty seventeen by Letto at
All that was titled Comparison of Food Color Regulations in
the EU and the US A review of current provisions.

(01:23:32):
And then the meta analyzes. There was a lot of them,
and like bigger studies looking. There was one that was
by Cobby Luski and Jacobsen from twenty twelve called the
Toxicology of Food Dyes.

Speaker 3 (01:23:47):
There was a really great.

Speaker 1 (01:23:49):
Meta analysis from nig at All twenty twelve titled meta
Analysis of Attention deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or Attention deficit hyperactivity
Disorder Symptoms, Restriction diet and Synthetic food color it is,
and there were several others that were more recent as well,
both on restrictive diets as well as food colorantce and
I have some data to back up what I said
about ultra processed foods at the end too. So you

(01:24:11):
can find sources from this episode and all of our
episodes on our website, this podcast will Kill You dot
com under the episodes tab.

Speaker 2 (01:24:18):
Thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this
episode and all of our episodes.

Speaker 1 (01:24:23):
Thank you to Tom and Leanna and Brent and Pete
and Mike and Jess and everyone else, everyone at exactly
right for everything that you do helping us make these episodes.

Speaker 3 (01:24:35):
Thank you, thank you, and thank you to you listeners.
We hope that you enjoyed this episode.

Speaker 2 (01:24:40):
Learn something tell us, tell us.

Speaker 3 (01:24:43):
Please, how do you feel about food?

Speaker 2 (01:24:45):
Gus?

Speaker 3 (01:24:45):
I'm really curious what the like non not just the
internet consensus is. Yeah, so tell us.

Speaker 2 (01:24:51):
And a special thank you to our patrons. Of course,
we appreciate your support so so very much.

Speaker 3 (01:24:58):
Yeah, we do, thank you so so much much. Well,
until next time, wash your hands, you filthy animals.

Speaker 2 (01:25:10):
Um um

Speaker 1 (01:25:28):
Um