Snack Makers Are Removing Fake Colors From Processed Foods (msn.com) 60
"PepsiCo is launching a new product, Simply Ruffles Hot & Spicy, which uses natural ingredients like tomato powder and red chile pepper instead of artificial dyes," reports Bloomberg. But it's part of a larger trend:
In one of the final acts of President Joe Biden's administration, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned Red No. 3, effective in January 2027 for food, one of a handful of synthetic colors that have become something of a symbol of all that is wrong with the American food system and the ultraprocessed foods that dominate it. Putting Red No. 3 aside, the rest of the colors remain legal, and they're used in tens of thousands of supermarket and convenience-store products in the United States, according to NielsenIQ data. The recent campaign against them became one of the pillars of the "Make America Healthy Again" movement championed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The criticism follows what health advocates have been saying for years: The synthetic colors add nothing to taste, nutritional value or shelf life but make unhealthy foods more visually appealing. Worst of all, there are concerns that the dyes may be carcinogenic or trigger hyperactivity in some kids.
[Ian Puddephat, vice president of research and development for food ingredients at PepsiCo] says PepsiCo is "on a mission to get them out of the portfolio as much as we can"... PepsiCo has a dozen brands, including Simply, that don't have the artificial dyes, and the company is working to pull them out of an additional eight brands in the next year.
Other companies are trying too, according to the article. Though Ironically, "the supply chain for colors like a radish's red or annatto's orange is not as robust as that for Red No. 40 or Yellow No. 6."
But there's also been some success stories: In 2016, Kraft Heinz Foods Co. announced that it'd made good on an earlier promise to get artificial dyes out of its recipe — and apparently, nobody noticed. "We just haven't told that story," says Carlos Abrams-Rivera, Kraft Heinz's CEO. (The lack of artificial dyes is more prominent on the boxes now...)
Thanks to long-time Slashdot schwit1 for haring the article.
[Ian Puddephat, vice president of research and development for food ingredients at PepsiCo] says PepsiCo is "on a mission to get them out of the portfolio as much as we can"... PepsiCo has a dozen brands, including Simply, that don't have the artificial dyes, and the company is working to pull them out of an additional eight brands in the next year.
Other companies are trying too, according to the article. Though Ironically, "the supply chain for colors like a radish's red or annatto's orange is not as robust as that for Red No. 40 or Yellow No. 6."
But there's also been some success stories: In 2016, Kraft Heinz Foods Co. announced that it'd made good on an earlier promise to get artificial dyes out of its recipe — and apparently, nobody noticed. "We just haven't told that story," says Carlos Abrams-Rivera, Kraft Heinz's CEO. (The lack of artificial dyes is more prominent on the boxes now...)
Thanks to long-time Slashdot schwit1 for haring the article.
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Re: Thank you RFK Jr! (Score:5, Informative)
They could do worse...and they have in fact. Remember olestra?
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They could do worse...and they have in fact. Remember olestra?
Although to be fair, the side effects from that showed up rather quickly. The food industry use of Olestra ended up being rather self-limiting since it literally made people shit themselves if they'd eaten too much of it.
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If they showed up quickly when it went to market, it also showed up quickly when it was first tested on humans but somehow miraculously got left out of the FDA approval submission.
Reading articles about Olestra,
one reason why the process of getting olestra approved has taken nearly a quarter-century
In 1987, Procter and Gamble Company (Cincinnati, Ohio) petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to amend the food additive regulations to allow sucrose esterified with fatty acids (olestra) to be used as a replacement for conventional fats.
Again, how did it get "left out" of the FDA approval submission when it had been submitted for approval for a very long time. Many different companies and organizations submitted info including all the "left out" stuff to the FDA during that time. In a shock to no one, RightWing
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Sounds great. Or they could start making GMO variants of oil-bearing seed plants (canola) to produce more omega 3 fatty acids and fewer omega 6 fatty acids.
Re: Thank you RFK Jr! (Score:1)
If the end result is food additives that kill you slowly less than before, I don't really care how they get there.
All organic and locally sourced is nice 'cept we'd all starve if we tried that at scale to the exclusion of evil evil factory farming and petrochemical fertilizers.
Cold pressed seed oils taste absolutely delicuous and aren't full of crap the way the refined stuff is, but cost considerably more than the refined and chemically separated alternatives.
GM seed oils that are a little less bad for you
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Vitamin C is a food additive. So is cinnamon. So is vinagre. If you don't eat vitamin C, you will literally die.
Why do you hate good things? If you don't like "food additives that kill you", then say that, everyone will agree. Food additives in general are a good thing.
Learn to use logic and stop using fuzzy terms you don't understand.
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Yes, Vitamin C is a food additive, but neither cinnamon nor vinegar are; they're ingredients. They're natural products that have been used as flavor enhancers for centuries and I doubt that anybody except possibly you considers them "additives."
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In particular, read the Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] or find any reasonable definition of the term "food additive." People are trying to scare you by making you think it's a bad term.
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I have never in my life visited a food conspiracy website, nor felt the slightest desire to do so. Please stop assuming that everybody you encounter is as enamored of those wacko theories as you are and stop assuming that you know how I think, because you couldn't possibly be more wrong. From what I can tell from your recent posts, you make Detective Sergeant John Munch [wikipedia.org] look like a skeptic.
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Thank you RFK Jr!
I'm fine with letting a broken clock be right once in awhile. I can't drink fruit punch flavored Crystal Light because something in it gives me ocular migraines*, and it's not from the aspartame. My guess would probably be a reaction to the artificial coloring, and to be honest I couldn't care less if my fruit punch flavored beverage isn't red. If they do take the artificial coloring out at some point, I could always try it again.
* Splotches of flashing translucent black-and-white fractal patterns appear
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Unfortunately, he also said this week that if you eat enough broccoli (Vitamin A) you don't have to worry about measles. Actual doctors agree that vitamin A is a good treatment for people with measles, but not that it will prevent** the infection in the first place.
He's kind of waffling on the idea of measles vaccines-- On the one hand, he said the vaccine is a good idea. On the other hand, he's generally anti-vaccine.
**Vaccines don't prevent infection. They teach your body how to fight the infection, so
Tawt I Saw a... (Score:2)
"Puddephat"
Final act of the biden administration? LOL (Score:1, Insightful)
More like "In preparation for somebody not on the payroll taking over the Dept of Health"
American companies were putting toxic colors in American foods, while not putting it in the food they exported because other countries wouldn't allow it.
To say it was the Biden admin is a joke.
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To say it was the Biden admin is a joke.
And yet the Biden headed FDA literally passed a ban on red dye no 3. I'm not sure why you think it's a joke rather than an objective and easily verifiable fact.
Another reason (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll raise prices. First it was covid, but when covid was over prices never went down. Then it was rising wages, but when wages stagnated the prices never went down. Now it will be because they're removing fake colors from food and the replacements are more expensive. Until they're not in which case prices won't go down.
There's always an excuse.
Re:Another reason (Score:5, Insightful)
hmm, Trump is the one that is going to increase the prices, because "tariff is a beautiful word" or rather because he likes being a bully and he thinks that works. Also because he plan on getting rid of people that actually work but are not white. On the positive side, no regulations, so cheaper, if you don't mind getting sick and dying.
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Re: Another reason (Score:3)
Thing is, that's almost EVERYTHING.
You're right, shouldn't buy it, but people won't buy oranges that aren't orange, apples that aren't waxed, carrots that look like real carrots (the rejects are spun down to make "baby carrots"), virtually anything that hasn't had it's appearance Disnified, or its ingredients pre-packaged into ready-to-ingest-and-excrete slurry.
Part is that we're unduly picky, another part is that once quick meals gave us time back, we're loath to lose the time again.
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Because you think the moron that is fighting vaccines is going to get something right ?
Don't forget to take your steroid and your overdose of vitamin A, you don't want to catch that totally normal measles epidemic.
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A broken brainworm clock is right twice a day.
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...but only once a day in the military.
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People in large metro areas normally do more walking since driving is far more expensive and a pain in the ass on many occasions. Even when their diet still sucks, just the daily walking helps. On the other hand, folks in rural areas drive everywhere. There is a far higher percentage of morbidly obese people living in rural America. As for proximity to freshly grown ingredients... that's funny. Yes you'll have more farmers markets in the mid-west but they
Dye Supply (Score:4, Interesting)
About sixteen years ago, I toured the factory of a dairy coöperative in Vermont; they are fairly well-known in New England, and distribute there, but also have had some success further down the east coast of the US. They were talking about their flagship cheddar cheese, and how especially in the midwest, people came to expect cheese to be yellow in color. In New England, they do not add dyes, but when they ship their products elsewhere, they would use carrot juice to give it the more yellow/orange color.
I had wondered how that would affect the taste, but I also thought that it was nice that they did not use artificial dyes. I had not considered the supply chain issue, though; this was a smaller group of independent dairy farmers who came together to make products in order to share costs and to reach a wider market, but being smaller, they probably have an easier time getting things like the yellow-orange dye from carrots. But it also raises the interesting marketing question... there is no reason that cheese needs to be dyed in the first place. People in certain areas became used to it, and then expected it, because of lower-quality cheeses that had been produced there for ages. But to add dyes purposefully to make a food product appealing that otherwise would not be is another level - one wonders with the potential supply-chain issues how long some of those items will last and be popular.
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... there is no reason that cheese needs to be dyed in the first place. People in certain areas became used to it, and then expected it, because of lower-quality cheeses that had been produced there for ages.
I have this problem with my wife - she wants her cheddar cheese to be yellow. Drives me nuts... if I buy the white version of the exact same cheese (same brand, same sharpness level), invariably she complains.
Re: Dye Supply (Score:2)
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A man should not have to choose between sex and cheese!
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I smell an opportunity for a cheese flavoured condom startup!
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I have this problem with my wife - she wants her cheddar cheese to be yellow. Drives me nuts... if I buy the white version of the exact same cheese (same brand, same sharpness level), invariably she complains.
What you gotta do is change out the light bulbs for some of these. [walmart.com] 2200K lighting will make the cheese (and everything else) look quite yellow.
If you wanna get really fancy, you can buy smart bulbs with adjustable color temperature and just turn 'em down when there's white cheese in the fridge. Maybe set up a small shell script to do it automatically.
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If you wanna get really fancy, you can buy smart bulbs with adjustable color temperature and just turn 'em down when there's white cheese in the fridge. Maybe set up a small shell script to do it automatically.
THIS is the sort of content I still come to Slashdot for.
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If you're making a house rule against dyes, that's just good leadership.
If it's only the cheese, well, buy two bars of cheese - these women have a 10-yr advantage anyway and might be trying to kill us off early.
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It's funny how people expect food to be certain colors when it makes no difference in the taste. I vaguely remember Breyers ice cream running a commercial for their mini chocolate chip ice cream where they said if you wanted it to be green, to wear green-tinted glasses.
At least to me, once I saw that mint extract is perfectly clear, I thought of green colored ice cream as some kind of Frankenfood abomination. The proper color for mint-flavored ice cream is white.
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At least to me, once I saw that mint extract is perfectly clear, I thought of green colored ice cream as some kind of Frankenfood abomination. The proper color for mint-flavored ice cream is white.
So, two things.
First off, the mint leaf is green. Even if the extract is clear, far more people would associate green with a mint flavor for that reason.
Second, it's a visual cue that distinguishes mint chocolate chip from regular chocolate chip. For those who have a strong preference or aversion, it helps in the decision making process regarding whether to consume, or how much.
To your point, I'd probably prefer a tint of green closer to a mint leaf, or perhaps actual mint leaves in the ice cream to accompl
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But it also raises the interesting marketing question... there is no reason that cheese needs to be dyed in the first place.
Part of it is consistency. A dairy cow's diet in the winter often has less beta carotene and so will produce a lighter color butter or cheese as opposed to their summer diet with all other aspects of production being equal.. Coloring is often added just to make the product more visually consistent from season to season.
Besides carrot, annatto is also popularly used for this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Okay , but remember ... (Score:3)
Natural dyes can come from things like crushed beetles (Google it). ...
Which I'm okay with, though don't know if vegans are
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Natural dyes can come from things like crushed beetles (Google it).
Which I'm okay with, though don't know if vegans are ...
"Actually, I've lost my taste for beetle snuff. It might be fun for you and me, but it's no fun for the beetles! - Grand Nagus Zek
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"Less visually appealing"??? (Score:2)
Sorry but some of us don't think bright red is an "appealing" food color.
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I'm not sure I could bring myself to eat brown catsup.
My Concern (Score:2)
...is that they "improve things" in the same manner they did when "doing something about pollution" in the late 70's and early 80's. Cars became undesirable. If it goes that way again, I expect our foods will have the color and texture of cardboard as well as tasting like it too. Marching to the beat of a "safety drummer" instead of "lets make something insanely enjoyable to eat" will result in things not enjoyable to eat, I'm afraid. Lets see what happens.
Looks like you live to eat (Score:1)
https://www.obesityaction.org/... [obesityaction.org]
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Roger that. I do live to eat, and obesity is a decades long battle. I'm winning the battle lately, losing 47.5 lbs last year with an overly-expensive, club-level used elliptical crosstrainer, a Life Fitness 95 XL, Nutrisystem, and a spreadsheet. Spreadsheet assumes about a 1700 calories metabolism and tracks food calories. I've sneaked on about 10 lbs since last year because I don't track food when traveling, and I travel a lot, so am trying to dump that 10 lbs without going the whole way with calor
Colorists... (Score:2)
"Fake" colours (Score:2)
The colours are real, and usually vibrant. The colours' origins might be a petrochemical-based, or something else. Arguably the only way to use "natural" colour is to, err, not use colour.