Newsom signs bill to make California first state in nation to ban "toxic" food additives

To me this is amazing news, I am allergic to Red Dye #3. If I eat something that has it, within seconds my throat closes and I can barely breathe. The worst part is that there is no need to use it. Sweet Tarts for example uses beets to get the red coloring in their candy.

Do these cause cancer in the usage and quantity they are consumed in?

Or is this more California "everything causes cancer" BS?

There is, but banning these substances is a political process not a scientific one. It's definitely true that this should be done by experts and not politicians.

The thing is that it's impossible to set up an experiment to show that something is safe. All you can do is collect more evidence that something is not dangerous. This leads to GRAS.

There's also the additional fact that the dosage makes the poison. There is no substance for which a single molecule can harm you meaningfully.

Roundup is about as toxic as tablesalt. Caffeine is vastly more toxic than that. And Tylenol, well, that simply wouldn't be approved if it were invented today. The ratio between the therapeutic dose and the lethal dose is too small.

Then there's tradition and utility.

Plenty of herbal supplements and even foods are quite dangerous but are sold because they always were and they are "natural".

We can all agree that certain substances don't belong in food - either because they are useless or there's strong evidence they're harmful.

It's the useful ones for which there is some evidence that they may cause issues when given in extreme doses, but a vast number of substances exhibit that behavior. Caffeine and Tylenol, for example. You do not think of these as poisons, but they are. Caffeine is so dangerous that you have to go through a lot of trouble to get it in its pure form.

The fact is that those supstances are certainly more dangerous than the substances in the article, but people are not clamoring to ban them.

And all this complexity is before people's individual interests are involved.

This is why when you compare, say, us and eu food regulations you find substances that are on one list and not the other. One is not a superset of the other.

Anyway, these substances are not "toxic" in really any correct usage of the term, and it's probably very unlikely that a ban will make anyone healthier or happier, despite what you may read about when you Google these substances. Even if you go to the scientific level.

Scientists can have their own agenda. They're still people. Or they can just be bad scientists. Or they can just be churning out papers as fast as possible to increase their prestige.

It used to be that the top paper that came up (it may still be up in the list) when you search glyphosate and bees was a bad paper. It did correctly conclude that glyphosate killed the bees when they put it in the honey, but they had to put so much in there in order to see any effect at all that the concentration was high enough to actually kill aquatic weeds. Next it wasn't properly controlled. Do you know what else will kill bees if put it in their honey? Water. And most definitely caffeine. I assure you a very small amount of caffeine in honey will kill a nest.

It's just a political thing with good optics because who can argue with banning a "toxic" substance.

There is the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and normally that’s their purview, but they’re probably a bit more lax and industry-friendly, so more likely to let that stuff slide. California is a bit more progressive and health-conscious, and they’re a big enough market that when they say they’re gonna ban something, it essentially becomes banned for everybody else. Businesses won’t develop CA and non-CA products, they’ll just rework whatever it is to conform with CA’s demands.

The FDA did step in I believe when states starting talking about introducing different labeling standards and having different requirements for what needed to be called out, because it would’ve turned into a nightmare if you had to manage 50 different sets of labeling requirements.

Any state health agency would fall under the executive branch of government. The power of creating laws is under the legislative branch (like the Senate). Executive agencies have the authority to enforce laws and under Chevron Deference the authority to interpret laws where vague, but not form new laws.

For example, if a bill was passed saying cars can't be louder than 110 dBs an executive agency could decide the proper way of measuring volume, if not prescribed by law.

Those agencies are toothless. Even under Biden, they're rebuilding those agencies and just crossing their fingers that they aren't torn apart again in 2024 or 2028.

Isn't this standard procedure for blogs/journalism? I thought the quotes are used to imply a term is not being used because the author thinks it's true, but rather to indicate that that's what the topic is centered on.

brominated vegetable oil - it's found in citrus sodas because the (natural) citrus flavoring is an oil, an orange or citrus oil of some type, and is prone to separating if there's not a way to keep is suspended in water. And I've seen separated sodas in a QA testing lab and they look pretty nasty. I imagine orange sodas that haven't already reformulated will have to, so they might end up tasting different. I know orange Gatorade reformulated to get rid of BVO about 10 years ago or more. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/brominated-vegetable-oil-bvo

As a note, California also forced (by being one of the largest markets) reformulation of dark sodas containing caramel color across the nation. Caramel color is what happens when you brown toast or caramelize sugar. I kinda just scratched my head because it seems you'll get more exposure to the carcinogen they're talking about if you burn your toast. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/questions-answers-about-4-mei . And if burned baked goods were a genuine problem, it seems we would've known it long before now.

I think most industries definitely need more regulation, but California sometimes seems to do banning so often on the slightest sliver of data, and it kinda creates a regulatory "crying wolf" situation, where people become so used to the "known to cause cancer in California" warnings that they start to ignore ALL of them and can't differentiate the ones that are dead fucking serious and the ones that honestly require unusual situations for it to happen like someone eating/consuming a physically unlikely amount of the product constantly.

I personally think it's a problem when people don't have a way to differentiate the warnings about things that'll genuinely fuck you up under current levels of exposure, and things you basically have to go dip yourself in a vat of daily for months before it harms you.

And I think it's a problem because people naturally have short attention spans, and when EVERYTHING has a warning, you know people aren't going to actually do research to figure out which one is dead serious and which is fluffed up and starting at shadows. So you start to get inconsistent heeding of the warnings. Eventually you'll ignore the boy crying wolf because you're so tired of going to to check if the wolf is there, and the wolf'll come eat you then.

I have no solutions for solving it though, given how polarized things are (one side massively under-regulating, and the other sometimes starting at shadows) and how few people are willing to listen to nuance.

Brominated vegetable oil used to be in Mountain dew and it's the reason it's been banned in many countries around the world for decades

Thanks, I've copied the list so I can reference it when I go shopping

I have this app too. It's depressing how many foods I actually enjoy have additives in them.

Free... With limits. Charging a $10 subscription to use a search function is disgusting.

Just a crazy idea, but just throw a strawberry 🍓 on the package near the flavor name. Boom, solved!

I'm sorry, but "how do you convey a food is strawberry flavored?" is a terrible excuse. Pictures and words like we've done for all recorded history. The idea that X taste has to be Y color is an unnecessary human invention. You should be driven more by the content of your food, than how "pretty" it is. Dressing up junk to make it palatable shouldn't be the end goal.

So then we have to wrestle with the packaging because how do you convey that this vanilla-looking food is actually strawberry-flavored?

Raspberries aren't blue. Neither are coconuts.

Why do you need to dye strawberries when they are already red? Fucking dumb as hell.

When I hear stuff like this is makes me sure that food companies are intentionally trying to give us cancer.

"The bromate ingredients are only dangerous if the factory fucked up during production as well. If they're doing their job correctly, there is no bromine in your food."

Idk if that's true or not so not commenting on that portion. However, "I wouldn't bother throwing food away over their presence, personally, but that's just me." We all have different risk tolerances so that's fine. What isn't fine is that the FDA makes a practice of taking corporate bribes, allowing flawed or outright manipulated studies, etc and then suddenly approving foods, additives, drugs, that are known or strongly suspected to be unsafe. For example, Donald Rumsfeld (sound familiar?) was a food company exec who really really wanted aspartame approved but they were having trouble getting through the approval process because it wasn't easily demonstrable that the product was safe. Rumsfeld gets added to Ronald Reagan's transition team and suddenly it's approved. Scary stuff. It's been approved in other countries so mayyyybe it's fine but the history of its approval is appalling and simply proves that the FDA isn't always looking out for the best interest of society at large. So if a state like CA steps in and says "holy shit don't eat this", I'm listening.

One source: "Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president January 21, 1981. Rumsfeld, while still CEO at Searle, was part of Reagan's transition team. This team hand-picked Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., to be the new FDA commissioner. Dr. Hayes, a pharmacologist, had no previous experience with food additives before being appointed director of the FDA. On January 21, 1981, the day after Ronald Reagan's inauguration, Reagan issued an executive order eliminating the FDA commissioners' authority to take action and Searle re-applied to the FDA for approval to use aspartame in food sweetener. Hayes, Reagan's new FDA commissioner, appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the board of inquiry's decision. It soon became clear that the panel would uphold the ban by a 3-2 decision. So Hayes installed a sixth member on the commission, and the vote became deadlocked. He then personally broke the tie in aspartame's favor."

Saturated fats are healthy. Just sayin'.

These aren't the only toxic additives allowed in food in the US by the way but it's a good start. On account of Google no longer being a search engine I have attempted to find you a more comprehensive list and given up after looking at the first 3 links since they don't go anywhere that looks reputable. Maybe someone else knows a good source for us?

There seems to be some disagreement, but TiO2 (a very white pigment powder) is generally considered safe and has been used in everything from wall paint to toothpaste for decades. A few studies have suggested possible genetic toxicity, but it may be only from the extremely small nano-particle form. Another study suggested lung problems much like asbestos, but that might be from breathing high level aerosol concentrations. All in all, there’s no clear consensus, which seems like a pretty good sign for such a commonly used material, but the jury is still out.

Peeps aren't for eating. They're much more enjoyable to light on fire.

Those of us alive in the 80s may never forget the term "anal seepage" associated with it.

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