FDA bans use of Red No. 3 dye in food, drinks
FDA bans use of Red No. 3 dye in food, drinks
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is moving to ban the use of Red No. 3 dye in food products.
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Sure. Ban Red Dye No. 3, but let's allow all the homeopathic bullshit we want because hey why regulate that stuff? They just give it to kids.
I agree with you, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is barely "the good."
A 1990 study concluded that "chronic erythrosine ingestion may promote thyroid tumor formation in rats via chronic stimulation of the thyroid by TSH." with 4% of total daily dietary intake consisting of erythrosine B.[10] A series of toxicology tests combined with a review of other reported studies concluded that erythrosine is non-genotoxic and any increase in tumors is caused by a non-genotoxic mechanism.[11]
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
That painting on the wall could potentially fall and break in a hazardous way.
... And become like a dozen knives I have on a block 10 feet away? Okay.
The point is: regulation for its own sake is theater
No one is saying that's not true. Why say that as if someone is saying it's not true?
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.
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.
Don’t worry, the republicans will complain about a war on red and it will be available again.
At least homeopathic anything is not directly harmful in the context of ingesting it, because it contains no active ingredient.
It's only harmful in that people don't understand that it's bullshit and therefore believe that it works, and might skip actual effective treatment for whatever their ailment is in favor of cheaper (and totally ineffective) homeopathic whatever-the-hell. For that reason it should at least be regulated to the extent of having a big neon warning sticker on it that says, "This product is completely ineffective and accomplishes nothing other than setting your money on fire."
I'm all for outlawing it from a consumer advocacy standpoint because it's a scam, but otherwise it's just expensive water.
Except that it's ridiculously unregulated and it's not even actually "homeopathic" half the time, it contains actual pharmaceuticals or even just straight up poison.
Here's an example. It took ten years for the FDA to get this company to do a voluntary recall despite their product giving babies seizures.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/13/homeopathy-tablets-recall/
I'm amazed people aren't aware of this stuff.
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
Just slapping a "homeopathy" label on something with no oversight can't be an automatic dodge-all to regulation. If Hershey needs to prove what they put in a candy bar, anyone hawking homeopathic products should need to prove what they put in there as well.
That's the neat thing... They don't. Hershey can claim anything new is "generally recognized as safe" and skip all that. It was meant to grandfather in actual foodstuff, but it left a loophole that's frequently used to put in all sorts of substances not proven to be harmful
Homeopathic bullshit has no negative effect, it's literally just water and sugar. As long as they are not prescription pills, the FDA does not regulate them because they are merely false advertising and not actually dangerous.
When done properly, it is just water. Hyland made some homeopathic teething tablets about a decade ago that used too much belladonna which killed several kids and paralyzed a few more because they did not dilute it to nothing.
That's just murder and pretty sure the FDA pulled those.
Why was it allowed to get to market in the first place? Why were they allowed to use belladonna at all ( a known poison) without oversight?
Because Orrin Hatch pushed the “supplements” act back in the 1990s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_Education_Act_of_1994
Ah, so typical american ignorance
In a way. We’re not all stupid, I promise. Though the billionaires keep trying to make us all ignorant. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hatch or his relatives were heavily invested in the industry at the time. Keep in mind the US isn’t the only country that sells homeopathic bullshit.
Yeah, my mistake. I should have said typical general ignorance.
Belladonna has actual medical use tho. It's applied to dilate the pupils, so maybe they declared it wrong?
Yup, and I still think that any use of belladonna should have oversight from regulatory and medical professionals due to the fact that if you fuck up bad enough you (or others) die.
That's like saying fire extinguishers filled with nothing but air are just false advertising. People have died taking these "treatments" when actual professional medical care would have saved them.
It would be more akin to fire extinguishers filled with air. It doesn't accelerate illnesses any more than doing absolutely fucking nothing would.
A fire extinguisher filled with air can make a fire much larger.
That wasn't a rebuttal, it was an admission of ignorance.
Only if the air is compressed. If you fill a fire extinguisher with literally just air, nothing happens if you pressed the nozzle. Everyone but you understood that. But it's pointless to even type this as you already made up your mind, champ. Feel free to think you are a big mind.
Point in case: the dude I "rebutted" against (lol) agreed that their initial comparison (a fire extinguisher filled with gasoline) was not appropriate.
If we’re talking regular atmospheric air that has oxygen in it, blowing air can absolutely amplify a flame by providing oxygen to replace air that has already been burned. It’s very common to blow on camp fires to add heat, for example.
Needs to be pressurized. Else nothing happens (as in homeopathy where nothing happens; not sure what is hard to understand here honestly). I know how a fire works. But whatever, I'm done with this comment chain.
I wished I wouldn't live on this planet anymore. Fuck all y'all.
Try and put out a fire with an empty fire extinguisher, tell me how far you get and whether it had a positive (less fire) or negative (same or more fire) effect.
The point is the method is not effective and allowing the problem to continue makes the problem harder to deal with.
Edit: a full fire extinguisher is pressurized unless it utilizes a hand pump, so filled with air denotes that it would be pressurized or that the medium used is air and will be pumped (which will behave like a bellows).
An unpressurized extinguisher is considered empty unless it is manually operated.
A drug is typically filled with a working agent unless it's homeopathic and is water. The homeopathy "drug" is water, so the fire extinguisher is empty.
Look, I didn't bring up the fucking fire extinguisher analogy, berate that other dude who initially posted it. But you won't because you are on some kind of crusade because you think I'm defending homeopathy or some shit. No, the FDA just does not regulate advertisement of non-prescription pills. Your excruciatingly bad reading comprehension is not my problem, so stop replying to me multiple times like a badly trained bot. And now complain about ad hominem to make your bullshit feature-complete.
I know you didn't bring up the fire extinguisher, but you displayed a misunderstanding about how they opperate and how that would affect a fire.
I don't know if you normally get this upset when you make mistakes, but calling people bots accusations of ad hominem because you doubled down on a bad analogy just shows that you aren't better than you claim me to be.
ah i see where you said that. bit confusingly written but you are correct.
You apparently don't know how extinguishers work.
Not being able to put out a fire isn't the absence of a negative effect. It allows the fire to grow larger. Which is a negative effect.
Yeah I made an edit literally exactly same time as your comment as I thought about it.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't force people to seek legitimate medical help if they don't want to.
Yeah, but you can regulate misinformation at best, or at worst intentional disinformation, which is what's made these people think its a legitimate path in the first llace.
That’s the way homeopathic nonsense is supposed to work. Unfortunately bullshit like this isn’t regulated properly so it often ends up being dangerous.
They are actually dangerous in the sense that people believe they are buying medicine when they are not, and therefore do not receive proper, actual life saving treatment.
It doesn’t help when this crap is legitimized by being sold in actual drug stores like Walgreens.
Often right next to real medicine.
Homeopathy convinces people to take a mixture that has no active ingredient instead of one that can affect what they're sick with. If it's a cold, eh whatever. If it's cancer, that's incredibly dangerous.