Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
"Seeing Red no. 3 - Coloring to Dye For"
Fifteen million pounds of food dyes are sold every year in the U.S. Why?
Foods are artificially colored to make unattractive mixtures
of basic ingredients and food additives acceptable to consumers.
See, food colorings are added to countless processed food products
to conceal the absence of fruits, vegetables and other ingredients
and make the food “appear better or of greater value than it actually is.”
Otherwise cherry popsicles might actually look like they have no cherries in them!
I've talked about the role of food dyes in causing ADHD symptoms in kids,
but what about their role in cancer?
Due to cancer concerns Red dye #1 was banned in 1961.
Red #2 was banned in 1976,
and then Red #4 was banned.
But what about Red #3, used today in everything
from sausage to maraschino cherries.
It was recently found to cause DNA damage in human liver cells in vitro,
comparable to the damage caused by a chemotherapy drug
whose whole purpose is to break down DNA.
But, you know, red #3 was found to influence
children's behavior more than 30 years ago
and interfere with thyroid function over 40 years ago.
Why is it still legal?
This is an article from the New York Times
about Red #3 published way back in 1985.
Already by then the FDA had postponed action
on banning the dye 26 times,
even with the Acting Commissioner of the FDA saying
Red #3 was “of greatest public health concern,”
imploring his agency to “not knowingly allow continued exposure”
(at high levels in the case of Red No. 3)
of the public to color additives “that have clearly been shown to induce cancer.”
“The credibility of the Department of Health and Human Services would suffer
if decisions are not made soon on each of these color additives.”
That was written 30 years ago.
At the end of the day, industry pressure won out.
FDA scientists and FDA commissioners have recommended
that the additives be banned,
but there has been tremendous pressure
to delay the recommendations from being implemented.
In 1990, concerned about cancer risk,
the FDA banned the use of Red #3 in anything going on our skin,
but it remained legal to continue to put it in anything going into our mouths.
Now the FDA said at the time that they were planning on stopping that, too,
and end all remaining uses of Red #3,
lamenting that the cherries in 21st-century fruit cocktail could well be light brown.
That was 1990.
Over 20 years later it's still in our food supply.
After all, the agency estimated that the lifetime risk of thyroid tumors
in humans from Red #3 in food was at most 1 in a hundred thousand.
Based on today’s US population that would indicate
that Red #3 is causing cancer in about 3,000 people.