Walmart U.S. moves to eliminate synthetic dyes across all private brand foods(corporate.walmart.com) |
Walmart U.S. moves to eliminate synthetic dyes across all private brand foods(corporate.walmart.com) |
There also isn't a fundamental difference between a synthetic and a natural dye. Okay, humans are more likely to have encountered a natural dye during their evolution and adapted to ingesting them. But that is unlikely to matter to all kinds of dyes, and also wouldn't filter out any health effects that don't affect reproductive fitness.
Treating a whole category of molecules this way does not make sense. It makes sense to evaluate the health effects of individual dyes. But that is not unique to synthetic dyes.
If there where significant value that might be different, but there isn’t a great argument for experimenting on millions of people here.
There isn't. The US's FDA allows fewer of them than the EU's EFSA.
A small number of people get anaphylaxis from carmine.
Ban 'em all. If it isn't already in the foods we eat, it doesn't belong.
I'm allergic to Yellow #5 (Tartrazine), but not to Tumeric which seems to do just as good as job of making things yellow/orange.
I wonder if changing the color of food is actually that important.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13411-015-0031-3#...
But yes I think the food color is ultimately important to succeeding in the marketplace and we aren't going to be getting rid of food dyes in manufactured food anytime soon.
[0]: https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5710/6/4/64 [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266615432...
When people -- myself included -- say they have a problem with chemicals in food, they of course mean artificial chemicals: that is, compounds, preservatives, dyes, and flavors that are non-naturally present for that particular food item and were added for their shelf life, taste, aesthetic, or addictive properties.
Next time you visit your grocery store, go read the ingredients list of a few different boxed and frozen items. It's not uncommon to see three- or four- dozen ingredients on items that should have less than 10.
While all of these compounds may have FDA approval and studies verifying their safety for ingestion, please keep several things in mind:
1. Studies use large, population-based sample sizes and their effects are based on their statistical significance on these populations. In other words, "side effects" are a population-level phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon. It is plausible that individual side effects are hidden as statistical noise. This is a problem with pharmacological studies as well and there is no easy solution to it AFAIK.
2. We have a massive obesity crisis in this country (and increasingly globally). Sedentary lifestyles and increased caloric intake is no doubt part of this, but it is blindingly obvious (to me, at least) that the meat of the problem is environmental, primarily diets, and these compounds are wreaking havoc on the endocrine systems of the population causing a massive uptick in obesity and diabetes.
The US parent company is also committing to it as well.
https://www.wkkellogg.com/our-impact/make-eating-well-easy/q...
"Synthetic" dyes being the result of a long chain of steps and intermediate molecules which are usually ultimately sourced from things like air, petroleum, and seawater.
Science literacy is bad so people have problems articulating the issue of concern which is "it is fair to have concerns about novel chemicals making their way into the food supply which evolution has not had a chance to address", not that something not found in nature is automatically bad but that such things need to be introduced carefully.
People don't know science though so everything is turning into "if it's not found in nature it is a monster and unclean", which to be honest is fair to a degree for people who don't know being forced to accept things blindly and asked to trust that everything is fine from people who would gladly disregard dangers in exchange for a fraction of a cent in profit margin.
That doesn't mean they're making good decisions just that their fear is justified.
> To prepare carmine, the powdered insect bodies are boiled in ammonia or a sodium carbonate solution, the insoluble matter is removed by filtering, and alum is added to the clear salt solution of carminic acid to precipitate the red aluminium salt. Purity of color is ensured by the absence of iron. Stannous chloride, citric acid, borax, or gelatin may be added to regulate the formation of the precipitate. For shades of purple, lime is added to the alum.
At this point how natural is it?
Businesses doing things in line with customer preferences is exciting to see.
Also, everything is a chemical.
A subset of both natural and artificial chemicals cause cancer, we should identify those carcinogens and not eat those. At least not too much.
I am not an expert in synthetic vs. natural, but I feel like this decision isn't actually about health (I don't see any reason to believe why Wal-Mart cares at all about the health of Americans) but rather some larger macroeconomic reality.
That is the systemic shift that’s actually important and would have automatically handled the dyes issue as well.
All that is to say, doesn't much matter to me what they regulate, I eat hardly any of that stuff anyway.
Not against removing unnecessary stuff from food, but lets be real about the effects.
(except OTC medication always has that nonsense, but now my advil is also dye-free)
but Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the life-expectancy of people back when everything was natural and organic
I'm sure I'm simplifying things, but I think this ban is common practice at this point in most of the EU, Canada.
Where else is hypercouloring cereal common?
A side effect is these substances may continue to be distributed in other countries.
From there, you then apply the "precautionary principle" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle .
> china
China imports only 21% of it's soy from america. Down from 40% 5y back.
America consistently exports only half of its soy output. The other half is all used domestically.
To be clear, almost all soy in the world is used for animal feed, not for humans to consume. My exact knowledge of poultry is limited, but I believe broiler chickens are made possible (3kg in 50 days) only because of a diet consisting of a certain kind of corn and certain kind of soy.
> We can start planting other things
American farms and the entire supply chain is pretty hardwired to corn and soy, for the same reasons punjab/haryana farms are hardwired to rice (even tho it's arid land, rice isn't even native, thus uses up groundwater too fast).
Government-set/subsidized price floors, insurance, storage programs specifically for 4 program crops, of which one was corn, and to which soy was a later addition. India has the same thing for rice etc.
Soy/corn rotation also caused extreme lock-in, since soy leaves a lot of nitrogen in the soil after harvest, and corn needs a lot of nitrogen.
There are many other factors, but essentially, the entire farm supply chain is locked in to corn/soy in most American farmland similar to how most punjab/haryana supply chain is stuck in rice/wheat alternation and resulting farmland/aquifer overuse.
In america too corn soy are not native. And the excess nitrogen goes down the rivers and causes hypoxia in the gulf of (mexico|america). Very symmetric problem.
It's extremely expensive to get them to grow anything different. For starters, removing the price floors and such is electoral suicide. Most of the farmers (that remain) depend on these things heavily. You can complete the rest...
More random stats: 40% of us corn goes to animal feed, 40% goes to ethanol (for blending with petrol among other things), and the rest is other stuff.
Even more: 70% of soy goes to animal feed, primarily broiler chicken, 15% goes to oil. Margarine, processed crap, lots of fried goods, all use this. I think you can even make plastic with it. I forgot what the other 15% was... And the people actually eating tofu, soy milk, etc are a tiny percentage and don't even register.
Corn was domesticated in Mexico like 10,000 years ago. It is indeed native in so far as an extremely human selected crop can be. (selective breeding over thousands of years not genetic engineering)
THE SAME NUMBER OF SOYBEANS ARE GETTING CONSUMED.
If China is buying South American soybeans instead of US soybeans than whoever was buying from South America is going to buy from the US because it's not like 8 million tons of soybeans per month are magically getting created in Brazil.
It's not that there will be no market effect but it's pretty close to a zero sum game because the global production and consumption of soy really isn't changing that much.
Brazil increase in production this year is 5.3 million metric tons. So looks like Brazil can replace US exports to China without affecting existing customers.
Brazil’s 2025/26 Soy Crop Seen Growing 3% Versus the Previous Cycle
https://www.agriculture.com/partners-brazil-s-2025-26-soy-cr...
At one point NASA tried out things like blue ham.
The decision-makers at Walmart seem to believe artificial colors are no longer important to succeeding with Walmart's customers and prospective customers.
And clearly they're not important to succeeding at Whole Foods, where all artificial colors have been disallowed for many years.
> year
https://www.fooddive.com/news/silly-general-mills-artificial...
I'm curious (as in HN curious discussion) whether this points to something greater about US culture.
Maybe they're smarter than you with money. The same box of cereal that costs less than $2 at Walmart is almost $6 at Whole Foods.
I don't get it, are you trying to imply there might be 0.0001% of people with negative side effects, they're not getting picked up, and for that reason those substances should have never been approved? If so what does that say about allergens? If the Colombian exchange happened today, should we ban peanuts on the basis that a few percent of people get side effects?
>but it is blindingly obvious (to me, at least) that the meat of the problem is environmental, primarily diets, and these compounds are wreaking havoc on the endocrine systems of the population causing a massive uptick in obesity and diabetes.
How is it "blindingly obvious" that it's caused by artificial colors specifically though? Otherwise it's a leap to go from "there must be something in the food" to "we should ban artificial colors".
Peanuts have very clear evidence of harm (at least to those who are allergic), and it's unclear what "benefits" it has besides "it tastes good". Why allow it?
4. Interactions are even harder to establish, since the possible different cocktails and biologies combinatorially explode. This is the primary reason for a precautionary principle in introducing new compounds into our diets.
Know what else is artificial? Insulin and penicillin.
Even if they may have side effects/allergies, we tolerate them because they provide extremely large benefits to the population. You can't compare that to a chemical we use to make the colors of candies pop more.
No one is dying or getting seriously ill because their Fruit Loops had bland and unsaturated colors.
The answer to the above question is not a scientific one. It has to do with how we want to operate as a society, it’s a political or social issue.
When people say this they are obviously not referring the the definition of "chemical" that a chemist would use. Pretending otherwise is exactly the "nerd-snark" mentioned above which makes people distrust experts because they clearly aren't intending to use the term "chemical" in a sense that would include substances like water.
Edit Prior to this administration: Butter yellow, Green 1, Green 2, Orange 1, Orange 2, Orange B, Red 1, Red 2, Red 4, Red 32, Sudan 1, Violet 1, Yellow 1, Yellow 2, Yellow 3, Yellow 4 + some more in the really early days.
EU had a longer list including Titanium dioxide.
It’s a naturally occurring non organic molecule, but it’s not naturally a white pigment. It takes a lot of processing to get that brilliant white powder and as such it’s not something our ancestors dealt with.
[Weed is] jus' a plant
Like poppies and sugar cane
Coca and some science make some good cocaine
I personally have known people who develop migraines after eating food with artificial dyes. We can sit here and snipe and play semantics and argue over pointless details but why bother? Just get rid of them all.
And your anecdote is not scientific data. You cannot draw any conclusions from that.
which has never been been manipulated by funding.
Yeah, my mom was the same way when she had food with MSG in it. But only when she knew there was MSG in it.
We have options and can make our own decisions about what to eat.
2. Because a massive food industry would gladly lie about how unsafe their product is just like tobacco companies and they have far more money than you to befuddle the research.
Its a risk assessment not a measure of absolute certainty.
Tobacco still isn't illegal. We're all free to smoke.
Were given information and we're free to do what we want with it.
How about we mandate physical activity for kids as well, given all the known harms of being inactive? Maybe refer kids to CPS if they're too fat too?
My favorite example of this is orange juice. OJ is kept in long term storage to stretch a seasonal crop into year-round availability. What comes out is brown and flavorless! This brown mush is restored to something a person would drink with the addition of "flavor packs" made by the perfume industry. This has the added benefit of giving brands a consistent and repeatable flavor. Regulatory bodies in their wisdom allow this product to be called "100% juice".
You might say well get rid of that too. I'm not arguing this is the ideal food system. But it has to be said, this goes a lot deeper than the easy ones like frosting and fruit loops.
However, flavoring is a distinct profession. Besides that, very few novel compounds are allowed in food compared to fragrance. If any flavoring is synthetic in origin (which is not the same thing as novel, to be clear) then the product must be labeled as artificially flavored. If they call the product 100% juice and added flavoring is used, then that flavoring in turn has to have been sourced from the fruit.
In other words, they're using extracts from real oranges to reconstitute the flavor lost during pasteurization. They can further adjust which parts of the extract they use (called fractions and isolates) to dial in a particular flavor.
Why are we as a society allowing these paperclip maximizing companies to experiment on hundreds of millions of people for their own profits..