It's a miracle you have somehow survived. What the hell did you guys do when the government wasn't nannying you telling you what to eat? Did you guys just starve???
"The chemicals, currently banned in the European Union, are found in numerous snack staples including Skittles, Mountain Dew, Ding Dongs (with red heart sprinkles) and a host of other ubiquitous food items."
The issue here is that we have a chemical which is deemed dubious enough when it comes to human safety than it is banned in the EU, but food companies would rather keep using it above any of the safer alternatives to save cents on the dollar instead of protecting the US population.
I believe this comes down to the difference in the US vs EU. The US focus more on the probability of something being harmful whereas the EU focus more on the possibility of something being harmful.
edit: to explain more. There is always a possibility that a meteor is going to crash through my roof and kill me this instant but the probability of that happening are very very very tiny.
No, the difference is that in the EU, you have to prove your product isn't harmful to use it, in the US you have to prove the product is harmful to ban it.
I think the critical difference between US and EU here is that the regulators in EU who are supposed to protect people actually work to protect people.
The regulators who are supposed to protect people in the US work to set themselves up for their next job going to work at the companies they're currently regulating.
I will say that Red Velvet cake (chocolate cake with red dye and white frosting) never did taste the same after they swapped out Red#2 for Red#3.
It was my friends favorite birthday cake and his mom would put 1-2 bottles of dye into the cake batter. I think it was '77 or '78 and he was so disappointed... him mom eventually found some old bottles and he had a "last cake" in 1980 well after it was banned.
First three, including one with "real" in the title of the recipe, all call for food coloring.
Wikipedia says the actually-real version achieves its color by using non-Dutch-process cocoa powder, but basically no-one makes it that way, especially not home bakers (nor cheap grocery store bakeries, which is where probably 80+% of non-homemade red velvet comes from).
Wikipedia further notes that it didn't become a popular dessert to make at home until the arrival of red food coloring.
I've had red velvet cake or cupcakes probably 30+ times in my life, and I doubt a single one was made the "real" way. Food coloring, in every case, I'd bet.
More or less. It’s hard to compare as the tax environment is completely different and distribution is a huge part of the cost. Skittles are priced as other candies here.
> In one study cited by Gabriel’s office, titanium dioxide, used in Skittles as a colorant, was found to be associated with decreased immune responses in rats.
Maybe we should just keep people from giving skittles to rats?
Has this actually been confirmed in humans and what quantity would need to be consumed to actually be harmful to us?
In sufficient quantities nearly everything is toxic to humans.
With enough accurate data (and time, as these toxins aren't really fast acting) you could get to causality with the right kind of statistical analysis. Typically, counterfactual analysis and some DAGs.
Wow, I never thought about it from that perspective.
Maybe studies about normal intake volumes of GRAS[0] food and additives should have some more leeway than a naive ERB might otherwise consider were it any other chemical. If they're already legal and in the food system (in some cases, in MASSIVE volumes), there should be very few barriers to gathering good data on it about humans.
Maybe there is some ethical concern about testing a hypothesis that includes harm to humans, but at the same time, many people are already eating this stuff. I'm not sure how to reconcile those -- I do know that my feeling of "Come on! Look at reality!" correlates well with making some logical or ethical fallacies, but in this case, I'm not sure haha.
> Maybe there is some ethical concern about testing a hypothesis that includes harm to humans, but at the same time, many people are already eating this stuff.
People are already eating this stuff, so it’s obviously not “drop dead dangerous”. In order to test it, we’d either need to change dosage/frequency or try some longitudinal study by tracking what people eat more exhaustively.
Increasing dosage/frequency can make something “drop dead dangerous”, which is where the ethical qualms arise. Doing a long term longitudinal study is just really hard to draw statistically significant outcomes considering the variety we eat and the massive amount of bad things in the world.
I agree with the central point that testing legal things (for public safety) is a thing we may need to do.
You should do some research on artificial dyes, and specifically around ADHD and the other effects on children. Red dye 40 and yellow 5/6 are a good starting point.
I have personally seen my children become effected even after a small dose (e.g. eating some Doritos or lucky charms), so we cut it out completely.
Hmm. I don't think that's what I said. Even tylenol or cough medicine with red 40 has had an effect on my kids. You should do some research on the topic before dismissing my concerns.
There's a reason these dyes are banned in a myriad of places outside the US.
“Overall, I think the fewer additives in foods and the less processed foods that we eat,” she said, “the better off we will all be.”
Can't really argue with that I suppose. That being said, this headline is a bit on the click baity side, I think this would just ban the USE OF "red dye no. 3, titanium dioxide, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil and propyl paraben"
I had no idea TiO2 was banned in food in the EU. It’s an incredibly common (and very white) additive in a lot of products in the US and is categorized GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by the US FDA. (The EU ban happened last summer.)
I have no idea how these things work, but what struck me is the "restrictive" tone in the EU ("We couldn't find an adequate study proving or disproving, therefore we assume it's dangerous until proven otherwise") vs. what I view as a "permissive" view in the US ("We couldn't find an adequate study proving or disproving, therefore we assume it's safe until proven otherwise").
When it comes to things I put in my body, I would personally prefer the EU approach.
Realistically if alcohol had been discovered today instead of millennia ago it never would be sold without some kind of research or industrial license, at least not the type that humans can consume. A brand new chemical that's lethally toxic, causes acute brain impairment, is highly addictive, and ALSO ignites extremely easily and can be used to start or accelerate fires.
It’s also really interesting to compare the discourse surrounding alcohol, a socially acceptable drug, to the one used to describe other milder but illegal stimulants.
That depends on your standard which is necessarily subjective. By some reasonable standards, a lot of things you consume has not had a formal study proving safety. For example, I'm not aware of studies proving the safety of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, etc. No, history/"common sense" is not a replacement for a controlled/experimental double-blind study.
I'm worried less about the lettuce (which we have little control over) and more about what's sprayed on the lettuce (which we do have control over). It seems like man-made chemicals added to food have a significantly higher probability of harming humans than digging something straight out of the ground and eating it, even if it's GMO.
The ground is actually pretty dirty -- by definition. And since you don't cook lettuce, you risk eating whatever was on the ground (and the hands of the picker, and everybody else along the line).
You usually don't drink water the way we pull it out of the ground, either.
That doesn't automatically make the chemicals safe. But it highlights that there is a tradeoff. The environment is full of things that make you sick.
Remember that GRAS means that the substance has never been tested for safety. It's a grandfather clause -- it's just saying that it's already been used for a long time and nobody noticed any large public health consequences from doing so.
GRAS is about burden of proof. If you want to introduce a novel food ingredient in the US, you need to demonstrate it's safe. GRAS grandfathers in everything, but there is still room for evidence to demonstrate that it is unsafe. This is how Sassafras root was banned in the '60s.
What I don't know is if the evidence for TiO2 chromosomal damage meets the bar for banning it.
TiO2 is also allowed in the UK and Canada. Canada just completed a food safety review of TiO2 in 2022. The Court of Justice of the European Union overturned the EU ban in November 2022 based upon flaws in the study the ban was based upon. France has appealed the ruling and until the appeal is settled the ban and labeling requirements will remain in place.
Did you really read the article to see if you think it's worthy of the same derision? There is a lot of space between concrete evidence of significant harm and the kind of silly worrying that Lowe is mocking.
Yes! There was only one actual scientist quoted in the article:
> “And that brings up the question of, why bother testing in animals and showing that some of these [chemicals] cause cancer in animals if we are not going to somehow relate that to human health,” Hunnes said. Still, Hunnes said that removing some of the chemicals from Californians’ diets would be a good thing. "Overall, I think the fewer additives in foods and the less processed foods that we eat,” she said, “the better off we will all be.”
They never actually confirmed the danger of these ingredients and stuck with a very generalist response.
Some of the ingredients on the banned list were included in Lowe's article - and much of Lowe's post is an explanation about how lots of causal links to cancer in animal trials don't actually correlate to causes of concern in humans.
Like another commenter pointed out, it's one thing to place the burden of proof on the consumer - to prove it's harmful (the US way) and another to make the producer do the homework - to prove it's not harmful (the EU way). And before somebody says "think of the economy" I rather take an economy not based on poisons I don't have the means to prove.
PS this reminds me an older topic about Nestle warning that guaranteeing their cocoa is slavery-free would increase the price for the customers. Well thank you I prefer my chocolate also slavery-free (and the world too).
> to prove it's harmful (the US way) and another to make the producer do the homework - to prove it's not harmful (the EU way)
This is a huge oversimplification of the difference between US and EU food rules - and I would argue pretty inaccurate. Both regions just prioritize things differently.
The US arguably has much stricter rules about food when you consider all of the requirements around preventing food-borne illness (part of the reason we have so many additives is because US regulators have pretty high bars for pantry goods not making consumers sick).
An example of this would be the European horse meat scandal from a few years back - something like that would have been almost impossible to happen in US facilities for how often they get USDA inspectors.
Do you actually have a source that this was Nestle's official opinion? The irony of your example (to me at least) is that the actual Nestle slavery scandal referring to actually involved the palm oil industry. Palm oil is really only used en masse in the European market because of ... EU restrictions on hydrogenated oils! And in almost every way (environmental, human rights, even health) palm oils are probably worse than what they replaced!
I'm not sure if I understand you correctly: do you mean that the US has a much better control of their rules, while the EU might have stricter rules but is lacking proper implementation? Anyway, here's what I mean about Nestle https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/nestle-says-slavery-...
I'm just saying the rules are aimed at different perceived problems.
The article you linked is actually very favorable to Nestle. Their actual statement was that Australia's reporting requirements were unnecessarily different than others'. And they actually reprimanded the Australian government for not including penalties in their version of the bill!
This is such a misleading headline. They are banning toxic ingredients, which should be banned, as they already are in actually functional industrialized democracies. This is just another example of the total regulatory capture that pervades the United States. Even the author states explicitly that the goal is for the manufacturers to reformulate.
I dunno. The US Government thinking about what we eat has been around since at least iodized salt, probably earlier. There's a famous 1800s court case about whether or not Tomatoes are fruits or Vegetables.
The bulk of these regulations came after Sinclair's "The Jungle", pointing out all of the problems at food processing plants (albeit in fictional form, but there was truth in fiction)
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Whether or not the US Government "should" care is kind of a settled case for over a century in my eyes.
Now that being said, "processed food" is such an incredibly vague category filled with obvious snake-oil salesmen and fake news that I loathe to give any of that much of my attention. But the government thinking about what foods are safe (or not) to eat? That's literally their job and has been for a long, long time.
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Now we can talk about where the regulations have failed, such as the Peking Duck exemption. (Peking Duck is delicious, and clearly safe. But by 1970s law / understanding of regulations, it was quite illegal). And its important to remember these cases and that regulation is far from perfect. But the overall concept of caring about what foods are safe and not safe is the point of FDA, USDA, and a whole slew of other agencies.
I would love it to be the government's business. I spend most of my time doing W2 work which the government automatically takes a cut from. I don't want to become a nutritionist, and I don't want candy to kill me faster than it would in Europe.
Seatbelts were gaining adoption pretty damn fast before they got mandated. Ditto for safety glass, brake lights and airbags. I think if we didn't mandate them the only cars without them these days would be those ultra basic trims that they only make five of so they can advertise a low "starting at" number.
ABS and traction control are the questionable ones that saw their adoption plateau and probably wouldn't have the adoption they do without government. Modern collision avoidance stuff appears to be making its way through the market lightening quick without mandate.
This is, of course, a major philosophical debate. I will just say that there could be reasons this is the government's business.
One issue with modern food production for consumers is that it can be difficult to determine whether a particular ingredient is safe or healthy. Information has public good qualities, and having each consumer make an individual determination about whether each ingredient is safe/healthy is costly. The obvious way to justify government intervention here is that it's more efficient for us to pool resources and empower a third-party to produce the information we need and ban/label products that are likely unsafe. The decisions won't always be right, but the approach might be much preferred to the alternatives.
Plus, conditional on socializing a lot of medical costs, it might make sense to put restrictions on behaviors that affect individual health.
* If a person puts a substance into their their body that the governement doesn't like? Incarcerate them? Fine them to take away their means of buying more food?
> Overall, I think the fewer additives in foods and the less processed foods that we eat, the better off we will all be.
Can someone define what a processed food is?
Bread is processed. So is orange juice. Impossible Burgers are probably the most processed food you can find.
I see this phrase used all the time, as if there is some universal understanding of what processed food is. But what's the actual definition?
WebMD unhelpfully classifies anything but raw food as processed:
> Processed foods refer to any food that’s changed from its natural state. This can include food that was simply cut, washed, heated, pasteurized, canned, cooked, frozen, dried, dehydrated, mixed, or packaged. It also can include food that has added preservatives, nutrients, flavors, salts, sugars, or fats.
It's ambiguous because our knowledge is ambiguous. The definition you found is exactly the definition people use - i.e. a non-specific one. The HN audience skews toward engineer-brain, where there are only two classifications: Well defined and not well defined. But in most contexts, that's unrealistic. The author's opinion can be useful and possibly true even without needing to know exactly what subset of "processed" is bad, in what degrees, in which contexts, etc etc. That knowledge is a goal, and is useless as prerequisite.
This happens all the time. "Chemicals", "organic", "natural", "processed", "additives". In the context of food, these words have no concrete meanings (though 'organic' has some regulatory definition sometimes), but they do have colloquial meanings. Sometimes people use them vaguely because they don't have strong knowledge on the topic, and sometimes they use them to refer to something more real.
For example: "I think the fewer additives in foods and the less processed foods that we eat, the better off we will all be." This sentence sounds vague, but it might be absolutely true. Not everything you might call "additives"/"processing" is bad, but some of it is! It's reasonable to believe that, on average, the things most people would consider "additives"/"processing", have some deleterious effects.
I firmly try not to eat things that I couldn't make myself 150 years ago.
I spend a lot of time reading ingredient lists wondering why everything has added sugar, or a list of ingredients that is longer than the average CVS receipt.
And this actually results in homemade food, every day, and a healthier lifestyle.
I eat apples. Most varieties didn't exist 150 years ago. But apples did.
So did pineapple, and bananas, albeit different.
But that's not the point. The point is that realistically speaking 150 years ago people were eating apples, bananas, pineapples, potatoes.
Example of how simple things can be, and how other producers basically break down everything, and re-assemble only the bits they need for the sole purpose of maximizing profits:
94 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadGo ahead, munch on some uranium if you like. That's on you. What's not OK is some company putting it in my food.
The issue here is that we have a chemical which is deemed dubious enough when it comes to human safety than it is banned in the EU, but food companies would rather keep using it above any of the safer alternatives to save cents on the dollar instead of protecting the US population.
edit: to explain more. There is always a possibility that a meteor is going to crash through my roof and kill me this instant but the probability of that happening are very very very tiny.
Precautionary principle or something like this.
The regulators who are supposed to protect people in the US work to set themselves up for their next job going to work at the companies they're currently regulating.
It was my friends favorite birthday cake and his mom would put 1-2 bottles of dye into the cake batter. I think it was '77 or '78 and he was so disappointed... him mom eventually found some old bottles and he had a "last cake" in 1980 well after it was banned.
First three, including one with "real" in the title of the recipe, all call for food coloring.
Wikipedia says the actually-real version achieves its color by using non-Dutch-process cocoa powder, but basically no-one makes it that way, especially not home bakers (nor cheap grocery store bakeries, which is where probably 80+% of non-homemade red velvet comes from).
Wikipedia further notes that it didn't become a popular dessert to make at home until the arrival of red food coloring.
I've had red velvet cake or cupcakes probably 30+ times in my life, and I doubt a single one was made the "real" way. Food coloring, in every case, I'd bet.
Maybe we should just keep people from giving skittles to rats?
Has this actually been confirmed in humans and what quantity would need to be consumed to actually be harmful to us?
In sufficient quantities nearly everything is toxic to humans.
There's no way such a study would pass an ethics review board. It is structurally unknowable knowledge.
I think a mechanism of action in vitro plus a biologically confirmed trial in rats plus correlation in statistical analyses is fairly convincing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZtbCOpx8Sk
How many skittles does it take to....
Maybe studies about normal intake volumes of GRAS[0] food and additives should have some more leeway than a naive ERB might otherwise consider were it any other chemical. If they're already legal and in the food system (in some cases, in MASSIVE volumes), there should be very few barriers to gathering good data on it about humans.
Maybe there is some ethical concern about testing a hypothesis that includes harm to humans, but at the same time, many people are already eating this stuff. I'm not sure how to reconcile those -- I do know that my feeling of "Come on! Look at reality!" correlates well with making some logical or ethical fallacies, but in this case, I'm not sure haha.
[0] https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/generall...
People are already eating this stuff, so it’s obviously not “drop dead dangerous”. In order to test it, we’d either need to change dosage/frequency or try some longitudinal study by tracking what people eat more exhaustively.
Increasing dosage/frequency can make something “drop dead dangerous”, which is where the ethical qualms arise. Doing a long term longitudinal study is just really hard to draw statistically significant outcomes considering the variety we eat and the massive amount of bad things in the world.
I agree with the central point that testing legal things (for public safety) is a thing we may need to do.
It shows how brazenly ethical concerns are subverted by profit motives.
I have personally seen my children become effected even after a small dose (e.g. eating some Doritos or lucky charms), so we cut it out completely.
Do you think there could be any potential confounders here?
There's a reason these dyes are banned in a myriad of places outside the US.
Here's the Bill, it's VERY short:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
When it comes to things I put in my body, I would personally prefer the EU approach.
You usually don't drink water the way we pull it out of the ground, either.
That doesn't automatically make the chemicals safe. But it highlights that there is a tradeoff. The environment is full of things that make you sick.
It is not actually saying the substance is safe.
What I don't know is if the evidence for TiO2 chromosomal damage meets the bar for banning it.
However, in general, I trust the EU's food safety rules a whole lot more than the US's rules.
Good.
> “And that brings up the question of, why bother testing in animals and showing that some of these [chemicals] cause cancer in animals if we are not going to somehow relate that to human health,” Hunnes said. Still, Hunnes said that removing some of the chemicals from Californians’ diets would be a good thing. "Overall, I think the fewer additives in foods and the less processed foods that we eat,” she said, “the better off we will all be.”
They never actually confirmed the danger of these ingredients and stuck with a very generalist response.
Some of the ingredients on the banned list were included in Lowe's article - and much of Lowe's post is an explanation about how lots of causal links to cancer in animal trials don't actually correlate to causes of concern in humans.
PS this reminds me an older topic about Nestle warning that guaranteeing their cocoa is slavery-free would increase the price for the customers. Well thank you I prefer my chocolate also slavery-free (and the world too).
This is a huge oversimplification of the difference between US and EU food rules - and I would argue pretty inaccurate. Both regions just prioritize things differently.
The US arguably has much stricter rules about food when you consider all of the requirements around preventing food-borne illness (part of the reason we have so many additives is because US regulators have pretty high bars for pantry goods not making consumers sick).
An example of this would be the European horse meat scandal from a few years back - something like that would have been almost impossible to happen in US facilities for how often they get USDA inspectors.
Do you actually have a source that this was Nestle's official opinion? The irony of your example (to me at least) is that the actual Nestle slavery scandal referring to actually involved the palm oil industry. Palm oil is really only used en masse in the European market because of ... EU restrictions on hydrogenated oils! And in almost every way (environmental, human rights, even health) palm oils are probably worse than what they replaced!
The article you linked is actually very favorable to Nestle. Their actual statement was that Australia's reporting requirements were unnecessarily different than others'. And they actually reprimanded the Australian government for not including penalties in their version of the bill!
cough Thalidomide.
Plenty of European examples on that list.
This is literally none of the government's business
The bulk of these regulations came after Sinclair's "The Jungle", pointing out all of the problems at food processing plants (albeit in fictional form, but there was truth in fiction)
--------
Whether or not the US Government "should" care is kind of a settled case for over a century in my eyes.
Now that being said, "processed food" is such an incredibly vague category filled with obvious snake-oil salesmen and fake news that I loathe to give any of that much of my attention. But the government thinking about what foods are safe (or not) to eat? That's literally their job and has been for a long, long time.
-------
Now we can talk about where the regulations have failed, such as the Peking Duck exemption. (Peking Duck is delicious, and clearly safe. But by 1970s law / understanding of regulations, it was quite illegal). And its important to remember these cases and that regulation is far from perfect. But the overall concept of caring about what foods are safe and not safe is the point of FDA, USDA, and a whole slew of other agencies.
So who is making your eat skittles?
The free market will take care of it, right?
ABS and traction control are the questionable ones that saw their adoption plateau and probably wouldn't have the adoption they do without government. Modern collision avoidance stuff appears to be making its way through the market lightening quick without mandate.
One issue with modern food production for consumers is that it can be difficult to determine whether a particular ingredient is safe or healthy. Information has public good qualities, and having each consumer make an individual determination about whether each ingredient is safe/healthy is costly. The obvious way to justify government intervention here is that it's more efficient for us to pool resources and empower a third-party to produce the information we need and ban/label products that are likely unsafe. The decisions won't always be right, but the approach might be much preferred to the alternatives.
Plus, conditional on socializing a lot of medical costs, it might make sense to put restrictions on behaviors that affect individual health.
* Your body, not your choice
* If a person puts a substance into their their body that the governement doesn't like? Incarcerate them? Fine them to take away their means of buying more food?
Can someone define what a processed food is?
Bread is processed. So is orange juice. Impossible Burgers are probably the most processed food you can find.
I see this phrase used all the time, as if there is some universal understanding of what processed food is. But what's the actual definition?
WebMD unhelpfully classifies anything but raw food as processed:
> Processed foods refer to any food that’s changed from its natural state. This can include food that was simply cut, washed, heated, pasteurized, canned, cooked, frozen, dried, dehydrated, mixed, or packaged. It also can include food that has added preservatives, nutrients, flavors, salts, sugars, or fats.
This happens all the time. "Chemicals", "organic", "natural", "processed", "additives". In the context of food, these words have no concrete meanings (though 'organic' has some regulatory definition sometimes), but they do have colloquial meanings. Sometimes people use them vaguely because they don't have strong knowledge on the topic, and sometimes they use them to refer to something more real.
For example: "I think the fewer additives in foods and the less processed foods that we eat, the better off we will all be." This sentence sounds vague, but it might be absolutely true. Not everything you might call "additives"/"processing" is bad, but some of it is! It's reasonable to believe that, on average, the things most people would consider "additives"/"processing", have some deleterious effects.
Even peeling and/or cooking fruit and vegetables is processing.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I spend a lot of time reading ingredient lists wondering why everything has added sugar, or a list of ingredients that is longer than the average CVS receipt.
And this actually results in homemade food, every day, and a healthier lifestyle.
Such as (in much of the world) fresh fruit and vegetables in the winter?
There weren't any weekend jets to Cancun 150 years ago.
I eat apples. Most varieties didn't exist 150 years ago. But apples did.
So did pineapple, and bananas, albeit different.
But that's not the point. The point is that realistically speaking 150 years ago people were eating apples, bananas, pineapples, potatoes.
Example of how simple things can be, and how other producers basically break down everything, and re-assemble only the bits they need for the sole purpose of maximizing profits:
Ingredients in a bread I bought:
Organic Unbleached Wheat Flour, Water, Sea Salt, Organic Barley Malt
Compare that to another bread:
Unbleached Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Sugar, Yeast, Contains 2% or Less of Each of the Following: Calcium Carbonate, Wheat Gluten, Soybean Oil, Salt, Dough Conditioners (Contains One or More of the Following: Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Calcium Stearoyl Lactylate, Monoglycerides, Mono- and Diglycerides, Distilled Monoglycerides, Calcium Peroxide, Calcium Iodate, DATEM, Ethoxylated Mono- and Diglycerides, Enzymes, Ascorbic Acid), Vinegar, Monocalcium Phosphate, Citric Acid, Cholecalciferol (Vitamin D3), Soy Lecithin, Calcium Propionate (to Retard Spoilage).
And the first one tastes better...
You weren't eating bananas and pineapples if you lived in Britain or anywhere else in Europe.
In fact, you weren't eating fresh fruits or vegetables of any kind in the winter if you lived in temperate regions.