Let's Talk About Food Dyes...

On January 15, 2025, the FDA officially banned the use of FD&C Red dye #3 in food products. Wow, really? Just now?
FD&C stands for Food, Drug and Cosmetics.
Ruth Winter has been writing and reporting on food additives since 1978, and in this edition from 1994, she describes Red #3 as, “a coal tar derivative …used in toothpaste, canned fruit cocktail, ice cream, cereals, gelatin desserts, maraschino cherries among other things. Has been determined to be a carcinogen (causes cancer).” In 1981, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reported that Red #3 may interfere with transmission of nerve impulses to the brain.
Winter reports that, “In 1990, the lakes of Red #3 were removed for all uses from the approved list. (More about lakes in colors in a minute). The color itself was also removed in 1990 for cosmetic and external use. It is still as of this writing (1994) approved for food and ingested drugs.”
The FDA was supposed to permanently removed Red #3 in 1988, but, according to Winter, “but has postponed the ruling ‘to allow the agency additional time to study complex scientific and legal questions about the color before deciding to approve or terminate its use in food.’”
Apparently, 37 years was the additional time needed to determine that this carcinogen should be removed from our food, after deeming it unsafe to use on our skin.
It’s a meager start, but Red #3 is just the tip of the iceberg on the poisons still added to the United States of America’s food supply. According to Winter, there are over 10,000 “legal” food additives, with less than half having ANY toxicity information, and only 5% have complete health hazard assessment. Today, I will only focus on food dyes and in future blogs I will discuss the other types of additives.

Winter reports that, “In 1990, the lakes of Red #3 were removed for all uses from the approved list. (More about lakes in colors in a minute). The color itself was also removed in 1990 for cosmetic and external use. It is still as of this writing (1994) approved for food and ingested drugs.” 
The FDA was supposed to permanently removed Red #3 in 1988, but, according to Winter, “but has postponed the ruling ‘to allow the agency additional time to study complex scientific and legal questions about the color before deciding to approve or terminate its use in food.’” 
Apparently, 37 years was the additional time needed to determine that this carcinogen should be removed from our food, after deeming it unsafe to use on our skin. 
It’s a meager start, but Red #3 is just the tip of the iceberg on the poisons still added to the United States of America’s food supply. According to Winter, there are over 10,000 “legal” food additives, with less than half having ANY toxicity information, and only 5% have complete health hazard assessment. Today, I will only focus on food dyes and in future blogs I will discuss the other types of additives. 
 In 1992, when my younger son was 3, I drove to Alaska with him and his older brother who was 7 so we could see their Dad who was commercial fishing out of Kodiak. I knew I needed to drive long days with two kids in the back seat and to keep them entertained (mollified?), I broke my own rule of not feeding them junk food, and went to Costco and bought cases of chips, and gummy bears and other mostly unhealthy snacks. When they got restless, I would flip them each a bag of something and get another hour of driving. At night in the motel my 3 year old would bounce on the bed and I chalked it up to being strapped in a car seat for 12 hours. After several days we arrived in Anchorage and stayed a couple of days with our friends. On the second day my friend asked if I knew what ADD (attention deficit disorder) was and she thought my son had it. I explained to her that he had been in a car for over a week and he needed to burn off energy. When we got to Kodiak, I was visiting another friend who owned a barbershop. I was telling her about my Anchorage friend thinking my son had ADD, and my Kodiak friend showed me a book about food colors and it said the dyes cause hyperactivity and cancer. I was shocked. I then made sure my son didn’t get anything with artificial colors to eat and it took about a week but he slowly became my “normal” son. I then gave him a bag of gummy bears and in only about 20 minutes he reverted to that “other” boy with compulsive behavior. What an eye opener! I promptly taught him to read the numbers 5 and 40 so when he asked me at the grocery store if he could have this or that, I would ask him to read the label and he would be so disappointed if it had one of those numbers on it! This episode also started me on a path to educate myself about what’s in our food and ultimately to pursuing a Master’s degree in Holistic Nutrition.

About 20 years ago, I was putting together a lecture, and for illustration, I took photos of some common products for children and the ingredients in those products.  It wasn’t surprising to see that they were full of artificial colors. For today’s blog, I decided to go get new picture of the same products to see what had changed, if anything.  Guess what? Essentially nothing had changed. Here’s the rundown on these two products. ​

As you can see, Froot Loops don’t contain any actual fruit, but they do contain a few of these artificial colors. A study published in the British journal the Lancet established that hyperactivity is associated with the colors in Froot Loops. In 2021, the state of California, in conjunction with the University of Berkely, issued a report on hyperactivity in kids who ate artificial colors.  
https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/news-media/research-highlights/new-report-shows-artificial-food-coloring-causes-hyperactivity-in-some-kids 
Food Dyes (Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6, Red No. 3, Red No. 40 are banned in Europe https://www.everydayhealth.com/diet-nutrition/why-are-some-food-additives-that-are-banned-in-europe-still-used-in-the-us/ 

Here is the list of ingredients for Froot Loops in Australia.  
Kellogg's® Froot Loops® 
Kellogg's® Froot Loops® are fruit-flavoured cereal rings of corn, wheat and oats – and the number one breakfast treat for Toucan Sam®! He has the magical power to find the delicious flavours of Froot Loops. Froot Loops are a tasty treat with no artificial colours or flavours. 
Ingredients:  
Cereals (60%)(maize flour, wheat flour, oat flour), sugar, vegetable oil, salt, natural colours (paprika extract, carmine, curcumin, vegetable carbon, copper chlorophyll), minerals (iron, zinc oxide), vitamins (niacin, vitamin B6, riboflavin, folate), natural flavours (orange, lemon, lime) 

Ok, here’s the other product I wanted an update on. Label on top is from 2012. Label on bottom is 2025. Remember there are colors that have Lake in their name? Lake colors are mixed with aluminum to make them insoluble. These are the most toxic of all colors.