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FDA bans use of Red No. 3 dye in food, drinks
(abcnews.go.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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I agree with you, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is barely "the good."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythrosine#Safety
Humans are not rats and no one is eating that much Red Dye No. 3 a day.
From reading about it, it’s really a risk/reward call. Red 3 has no nutritional or flavor-enhancing purpose. It’s just a decoration, so why take any risk, however small?
Because this took a hell of a lot of time and effort and taxpayer money that the FDA could have spent on so many other more important things.
They do more than one thing at a time. It isn't like all other evaluations stopped to look at red dye #3.
They have a limited amount of time and resources. What was spent on this could have been spent on something more dangerous.
Without investigating, it could have been more dangerous and we wouldn't know.
These were the results. Not an issue that effects everyone, but enough that it should be banned.
There is nothing to complain about here. Thats how this works for anything being evaluated.
It had already been investigated.
And this is an evaluation of that information.
Of all the things to get hung up on, I have no idea why this specifically bothers you so much.
This is nothing compared to all the other efforts they are involved with, its just media attention.
Yes, it does specifically bother me. I don't think you realize how much time and effort goes into passing a federal regulation. Meanwhile, herbal remedies are giving babies seizures.
I dont think you realize that by red dye #3 getting put up for evaluation, it was going to go through all those hands no matter what.
I'll say again - this is a super weird thing to get hung up on.
Again - other work does not stop. More people <> more quicker (yes, this is intentional).
Again, time and resources are limited.
You're letting your imagination run with this. You're bringing up completely different issues and trying to act like they should be prioritized the way you think they should because you somehow know exactly how much time and resources the FDA has to do anything. Go get some fresh air.
I think they should prioritize what saves the most lives.
Please explain why they should not.
Is anything ever that cut and dry? It may take much more time to come to a conclusion on what you think should be regulated first. Does that mean other recommended regulations should not be made even if the research on those have been completed? It doesn't happen in this single pipeline, one thing after another. There are many different studies happening concurrently and they will finish at different times.
This was studied a long time ago. This is not new information. This is not a major health risk compared to all sorts of things that have also been studied and have not been regulated, which I have already pointed out. Why haven't they been regulated when they are demonstrably more dangerous?
Go look up the creation of bovine growth hormone and its regulatory process and you'll start to see that the FDA is most often dysfunctional at best. I'll give you a nutshell version as best I can. BGH was created by Monsanto (was largely a chemical and pesticide company.) They've repeatedly gone to great lengths to deprioritize human health. Polychlorinated biphenyls are another well documented example of that. Back to BGH, the head researcher and her assistant wrote their paper for approval by the FDA. Immediately quit their jobs, were hired by the FDA for the purpose of reviewing BGH for approval in the milk supply. Sus? Yeah. Of course it was approved. Then was passed to an FDA lawyer to see if it should be labeled for milks that contain it. The FDA lawyer had previously worked for Monsanto. It was decided that not only would it not be labeled, but they would regulate that milk could not be labeled as NOT containing it for fear of "confusing the consumer." It's a big organization though. I'm not claiming that everyone there is corrupt, but I will point out that Clarence Thomas was a former Monsanto lawyer, has never recused himself when the former biotech corporation was involved and always ruled in their favor.
This is only one facet of why regulation is slow to do the things that help the most people.
I'm not going to keep repeating myself. In general, I agree with you on a lot of things.
This is not one of those things. This is a ridiculous hill to die on.
Enjoy your day.
Why are you complaining about the FDA doing their job, rather than the large corps that likely lobbied to avoid this and make it much harder for them?
They banned it in cosmetics in 1990, it seems pretty obvious that if it's unsafe for the outside of our body it shouldn't be inside either.
They're a troll. Don't waste your time.
If they were doing their job, they would remove dangerous "herbal" remedies people are giving to their kids and hurting or even killing them, not something that has a small chance of causing cancer if you feed a shit ton of it to a rat.
As I showed to someone else, it took ten years for the FDA to get a company to voluntarily recall a product that was causing seizures in hundreds of babies. https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/13/homeopathy-tablets-recall/
Are you aware that homeopathics and herbal remedies are completely different things?
In the sense that they are both so poorly regulated that they both have contained all kinds of substances which are actively harmful to people? No, they really aren't.
In fact, some claim to be both.
I don't know where to start to try to explain the differences because you're trying so hard to miss the point. They are not the same thing at all.
Again- in terms of the lack of regulation and the danger the pose, there is no difference. And again, products claim to be both.
Are you arguing that lack of regulation of these products is a good thing?
That's like arguing cars and treadmills are the same thing. You can move in/on both of them!
Between homeopathics and herbal remedies, one is a sugar tablet (or should be unless it wasn't made properly.) The other has been used medicinally in some form likely before Homo sapiens had even evolved. Acting like these things can all "just be regulated" is exceedingly naive. Surely you know there's more nuance and working parts to that argument.
Oh hey, you just figured out my point... which you would have figured out to begin with if you had read the article I posted about the "homeopathic" teething remedy that gave babies seizures because it wasn't made properly and didn't have to be.
That's the big point you're holding into? This is your gotcha moment? You can't possibly be this naive. I'm convinced you're just arguing in bad faith. Take a break dude. There's nothing here to be smug about. This could be a constructive discussion but it feels like you're just stomping your feet and asking why bad things happen in the world. Have a breather. Go cool off.
No, the same thing I have been saying this entire time is not a gotcha moment.
Also, what on Earth makes you think I'm being smug? What would I have to be smug about? I'm pathetic and I've always been pathetic. There is nothing about me that would ever make me feel smug about anything. Feel free to have a sense of smugness over that yourself if you wish. You would be far from the first and it would not be undeserved.
Just give it up. It's okay to be wrong sometimes. I was wrong earlier today. Just take a deep breath and close the tab.
I am wrong most of the time. I am wrong about more things than you could possibly ever imagine, about more things than you will ever be in your entire life.
My basic existence is wrong.
So yeah, I know it's okay to be wrong sometimes. I'd like to be right on occasion though if it's okay with you.
That’s a deflection, not an answer
How is that a deflection? I don't agree that they are doing their jobs.
In the context of this article, they are. Your argument about something else is a straw man and a whataboutism.
If you think the FDA should regulate something else that it currently does not, take it to Congress. They’re the ones who decide what the FDA does and does not regulate.
I’d be curious about what the cost actually is?
Right so I mean—the cost of research and analysis and the entire process of determining the possible risks is money that simply must be spent either way, even on products that are ultimately deemed suitable for market. That’s the entire purpose of the FDA, to find these things out.
So we’re really just looking at the costs associated with the ban itself. Such as the labor hours of FDA employees setting it up? Communicating it to people? I agree with your concerns I’m just trying to get a sense of what we actually spent to arrive here
I can't give you numbers, but it's a federal regulation. A lot of reports have to get written and a lot of research has to be done, especially in the field of federal regulation as a whole, which is so insane that we literally have no idea how many federal laws there are. And then all of that documentation has to be read by other people and approved all the way up the chain. So we are talking a lot of people's time and effort (which translates into taxpayer money) that could have better been spent on things which are causing active harm.
I've genuinely never seen someone play Devil's advocate for a food dye of all things.
I'm not playing Devil's Advocate, I'm saying this is a really minor good in the greater scheme of things and I imagine the cost and time breakdown in terms of what it took to accomplish took a lot away from other, more important things.
Doesn't really matter since food dye is completely unimportant. Candy, cakes, and other foods will taste exactly the same without Red #3.
Better to eliminate any potential risks to ourselves and our pets/livestock than keep it around so Big Company can get better sales with their bright red whatever.
You willing to apply that logic to every unnecessary decoration in your life?
I mean, yeah. Potentially harmful but otherwise useless materials? I try to reduce those whatever possible.
That painting on the wall could potentially fall and break in a hazardous way. The point is: regulation for its own sake is theater and it's impossible to account for every conceivable risk. If a product is plausibly harmful under normal usage, sure. If it causes cancer when force-fed to rats in impossible proportions? Leave it be, study further perhaps.
Well, to be fair, the painting ostensively offers a somewhat unique artistic value. There is a reward to go with the risk.
Red 3 is simply a way to make things red, which we have tons of other ways of doing that don’t have any known risks
That's a solid argument: we have several ways to achieve the same result and should limit the riskiest because market forces aren't going to correct for them. Much better than "get rid of this one possibly risky thing because I don't personally value it."
There's a reason that paint doesn't have lead in it anymore.
Studies have also indicated this dye (and others) could cause hyperactivity and similar problems in children.
https://oehha.ca.gov/risk-assessment/press-release/report-links-synthetic-food-dyes-hyperactivity-and-other-neurobehavioral-effects-children
Any easy way to figure out 4% as grams in a human diet?
Assuming a person eats ~1.8kg of food per day, that would be ~72 grams. Basing that math off of a number I had heard previously stating that adults eat anywhere from 3-5lbs of food daily.
I bet we could tell who is eating 70+grams of Erythrosine by their color.
Thanks, I was wondering what was wrong with it.