hckrnws

  >In the past, companies were generally only able to make such [no artificial color] claims when their products had no added color whatsoever — whether derived from natural sources or otherwise

This is extra confusing because on ingredients lists they distinguish between "natural colors" and "artificial colors." But apparently that's not the same sense that they're using "artificial" as when they say "no artificial colors??"

Seems like this move is just fixing a confusing situation -- so confusing I didn't even know I was confused until just now!

The only way I can read it and have it make sense is using "artificial" as in a by-product outside of the usual make-up of the product.

It makes sense in other industries, like calling vinyl wrap an artificial cosmetic change on cars compared to painting.

But makes less sense in this situation

To mean this would be like saying furniture companies can claim their products are made of 'solid wood' when it is in fact just particle board, mdf, and cardboard because those are all made from wood and are all solids.

So, they went from mildly confusing to less regulated overall. Not really an improvement, as now a company can add potentially harmful colors without notice.

The label "no artificial color" meant that there was no color added to the product. This was a useful label. It meant you could expect the food looked like it should. It meant the food was not adulterated.

Now, "No artificial color" simply means that the chemists involved in producing this food product do not work for the petrochemical industry.

Granted, this labeling was in direct contrast with the ingredient listing. You could have only "natural color" on the ingredients and be unable to claim "No artificial color". This change "fixes" that by making "No artificial color" as meaningless as "Natural" vs "Artificial" color.

As petrochemical and plant feedstock processes produce chemically identical substances that your body is incapable of distinguishing, this takes a label that had some actual value, telling you how adulterated your food was, and replaces it with a label that means nothing. Yay.

However, labeling around "natural" vs "artificial" ends up being a huge educational issue. The FDA's rules are pretty straightforward, but you will never be able to get people who think education is a liberal scam to actually learn them. It also wasn't obvious what they really meant. There's room for improving the names and labeling, but that is not at all what this administration wants to do. They do not respect the sanctity and power and value of labeling regulation.

FDA food labeling regulations are wonderful and trusted and provide immense value. Them being toyed with by morons with a grudge scares me.

"No artificial color" meant that food had the color it really had, without additional coloring.

Natural banana does not have little green ponies on red background. If you color it with green and red, you have banana that does not have its natural color. Banana in artificial color.

Right, I got it now. But for literally the entire time I've seen that (now obsolete) label, I've misunderstood it as "no artificial colors" not "no artificially added colors." I can't be the only one!

It's unclear why they didn't say "no added colors" from the beginning, since apparently that's what they meant all along.

The reasoning against this seems questionable:

>Are they safer? Possibly, but they are not as well studied or regulated. According to Time,

>> …their natural sources of color do not necessarily mean that they are safer or free of potentially harmful compounds. Natural sources may be treated with pesticides and herbicides, and are also prone to contamination with bacteria and other pathogens…To strip natural products of these contaminants, manufacturers process them with various solvents—some of which could remain in the final coloring and contribute to negative health effects…[and] it generally takes more natural color than synthetic color to make the same shade in a final food.

I agree with the sentiment that "natural" doesn't imply something is healthy and consumers should be skeptical of it, but all of the objections exist for both naturally derived dyes (eg. beetroot red) and the underlying natural product (eg. beetroots), so it's hard to make a principled argument against allowing the natural label for the latter but not the former.

The premise of this whole thing is bunk.

Food does not require dyes. You do not need to paint a banana.

This is a debate about what kind of paint is acceptable in marketing ultra processed products that would look gross if you did not paint them.

Lots of foods are not raw goods - like cakes, pastries, etc. Presentation is extremely important to food.

This is entirely harmless from a scientific point of view, but treads on food purity folk religion.

>This is a debate about what kind of paint is acceptable in marketing ultra processed products that would look gross if you did not paint them.

We can debate all about what level of processing is "acceptable" or whatever, but arbitrarily gatekeeping the term "natural" just because naturally derived dyes are adjacent to UPF (which you hate) is a terrible way of setting public policy.

How is it bunk? If, say, arsenic is part of your extraction process of a non-petroleum based chemical, how is that safe?

That may be the extreme example, but there are many processes that involve processing chemicals without any "petrochemicals" being involved...

The answer to your question is that chemistry is a science and we know what we are doing.

Also, that arsenic is naturally occurring and our body can handle it.

If you have ever drank apple juice or eaten rice, you have consumed arsenic. If you grow rice in the dirt with zero pesticides, it will have arsenic in it. The FDA sets the limits at the parts per billion level.

The biological half life of inorganic arsenic in a human is about 4 days, which is why people generally don't die from eating a few apple seeds over their lifetime.

If you learn chemistry, you can learn how <Chemical whatever> can be part of your extraction process yet not be part of the final product. It's a standard part of chemistry. It's fallible though, which is why the processes used for chemicals that go into food often use different processes than versions of that chemical not meant for consumption, and they have stricter regulations on purity and contaminants.

I assume this will allow carmine red (cochineal) to be considered as "natural", since it's just "crushing thousands of bugs".

Unfortunately, a few cases of negative reactions to cochineal have been documented, and if the coloring is not even indicated in the ingredients, it might make it much harder for people to find out if that turns out to be the cause.

> and the underlying natural product (eg. beetroots)

Ah, I'm reading that as the process of extracting the color—and not also extracting the pesticides and herbicides-requires processing that may itself be similar to what happens with the 'artificial' dyes.

That seems defensible, and it's a process that only occurs for the dye and not the associated natural product.

I think I would just as soon drop the natural label entirely because it's meant to sound healthier without actually being any healthier. It seems like the only two states that matter are did you add coloring to the product, or not. Same thing with flavorings too.

Enjoy our new smokes with 20% more all-natural nicotine while you’re lining your attic with—also ours—all-natural asbestos! Choose All-Natural WonderTeck products every day!

Cigarettes are unironically "natural", which is why I specifically started my comment with

>I agree with the sentiment that "natural" doesn't imply something is healthy and consumers should be skeptical of it

Borderline off-topic but I'm miffed about all the products in grocery stores lately that loudly proclaim "Zero Sugar" yet their first ingredient is high fructose corn syrup.

Okay, it may be technically true, but practically speaking, anyone you ask would call it a lie.

>I'm miffed about all the products in grocery stores lately that loudly proclaim "Zero Sugar" yet their first ingredient is high fructose corn syrup.

Example?

The US FDA explicitly gives you wiggle room to label something with less than 0.5g sugar per serving as "Zero Sugar"

This means that TicTacs, a product which is a sugar tablet with some flavor, can be "Zero Sugar"

[flagged]

Woah there… likely neither? I was curious too, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this “zero sugar but not actually” label before in stores.

It makes sense, for example, if you use turmeric in a rice dish, would you say it is artificially colored? In a sense rice isn’t yellow, but it is a natural dye.

That is not what this is about. You've always been able to advertise rice with turmeric as free from artificial colors. Here, the FDA is allowing for so-called natural dyes which are just chemicals that have been extracted from plants (usually through solvents). Imagine taking the turmeric, soaking it in gasoline, then distilling the color back out of the gasoline. The only requirement is that the color itself is not petroleum-derived.

>Here, the FDA is allowing for so-called natural dyes which are just chemicals that have been extracted from plants (usually through solvents). Imagine taking the turmeric, soaking it in gasoline, then distilling the color back out of the gasoline.

That's basically what's done for vegetable oils so should vegetable oils be called "artificial" as well? Is there a principled way of defining what amount of scary chemical involvement is needed for something natural to lose its "natural" designation? Are pretzels at risk because they're dipped in lye (ie. drain cleaners)?

I don't know the answer to your question, but it would seem no one involved in this decision making process is even trying.

I believe if you’re using hexane to extract the vegetable oils it should definitely be called artificial. A highly artificial substance was added to the food at some point.

Lye is typically not artificial if it’s made from sea shells and wood ash like it has been traditionally. Even the industrial chlor-alkali process just uses salt (NaCl) and water so it’s not artificial.

Can you define a "highly artifical substance" in this context? As you desctibe it, it seems to be "a subtance that can't be made entirely from feedstock that was once living".

>Lye is typically not artificial if it’s made from sea shells and wood ash like it has been traditionally.

There's approximately 0% chance that the typical pretzel you bought is made with dye derived from wood ash.

Well yeah but I addressed how it’s made industrially as well.

>Even the industrial chlor-alkali process just uses salt (NaCl) and water so it’s not artificial.

By that standard is anything artificial? Oil comes out of the ground, after all. At least with "natural" colors you can argue the actual molecule was synthesized by a plant and we're just purifying it, whereas for industrially produced lye it's entirely man made.

Salt and water are pretty “natural”. You can get pedantic about this but there is enough here to classify these on a case by case basis.

To point out how confusing this is: If you add a knife tip to a cow carcass to extract the steak, that is adding a highly artificial substance to the food at some point.

Likewise if you use steel balls to tumble-crush shells into calcium carbonate powder (don't know if they do, or if it's even a product, but neither are the point here).

"We are required to inform this table that your naturally wild-caught salmon had, briefly, at one time, a small hook inserted into its mouth. It was otherwise wholly without artificial feed nor other additives."

How do you write a law that slices between those ideas and hexane, clearly?

On a case by case basis that generally aligns with common sense. Most people can instantly recognize a hook and knife are very different from adding a solvent to food. Drug laws are a good analog for this. I don’t think the universe of possibilities in this space is prohibitively large.

You can probably begin by broadly calling petroleum and petroleum products artificial.

There's a rich heritage and history of solvent-based foods. Vanilla essence, sloe gin, etc.

Ethanol would probably be classified as a natural solvent. The edge cases fall off very quickly, this can definitely be done on case by case basis without introducing onerous bureaucracy.

Even if it were distilled from petroleum?

Ethanol is not distilled from petroleum. Industrially it is produced by distilling plant sugars and starches.

Why is a solvent that is part of processing but nonexistent in the final product something that anyone should care about?

Your body cannot tell the difference between a chemical that is "naturally" sourced vs one that is "artificially" sourced. We are at a point in industrial chemistry that the sole difference is "Did the feedstock come from a petrochemical company"

>Why is a solvent that is part of processing but nonexistent in the final product something that anyone should care about?

That's exactly my point, because I'm arguing there's no difference between natural colors and vegetable oil, when they're both refined from natural sources using industrial processes.

Tumeric is a chemical that has been extracted from plants!

Your scenario holds for any part of any food processing, not just food colours. The issue is that the definition of "natural" when applied to food is impossible to pin down. Can we process using solvents? What if those solvents were brewed? At what point does heat and pressure treatment become "unnatural"? Can I use an acid for processing? Can I use vinegar?

The various vegetable, seed and nut oils that form the basis for so many food products are very problematic if you want "natural" food.

Where's the boundary between "natural" and "artificial"? If we're allowing processing in the definition of "natural" (e.g. extracting a chemical from a plant using a solvent) then everything is natural: it's all ultimately derived from something that naturally occurred on Earth.

The think is you

1. add turmeric not color extracted from turmeric

2. you don't add the turmeric just to get the color

What this is about is if a company things their rice + turmeric isn't "popping" enough in color they can extract colors from other food or even non eatable plants and then say "no artificial colors" while the color of the end product is very well artificial/not natural.

Add in that "natural sourced" doesn't mean healthy but many people think it does this is pretty deceptive. (E.g. one of the worst pesticides, banned decades ago, was neurotoxin extracted from plants, _and then highly concentrated_. But 100% natural sourced so the FDA would treat it as not "artificial" even if the concentration of it and separation from the plant is not natural at all.)

My thing is why not just spell it out as "Color due to x, not due to some artificial dye" or something reasonable? It should just be descriptive enough, I feel like I've seen similar messaging on some foods.

Color due to X is a statement about causality.

Well whatever wording is clear to the reader as to the source of unexpected coloring would be.

It's a statement about color debt.

Except it has a taste. I think finding something with just the colour and no taste would be a better example of this.

Go find that unicorn. Make your first $100M.

Also: that's a completely different issue to "describing its presence as 'artificial'". Needs a new thread.

I'd prefer to see something like artificially colored with natural colors instead of no artificial colors. I want to know if something has colors added to it, even if those are natural colors.

I'm torn - the anti-UPF crowd is increasingly tying themselves up in knots with this kind of thing. Potentially this causes even more public confusion and avoidance of yet more perfectly healthy things because they're understandably lost trying to navigate what the orchestrators of the moral panic around UPFs, artificial colours, non-organic foods etc claim they should eat. I see people swapping wholemeal UPF bread in favour of homemade white bread on social media all the time already!

In an ideal world IMO this would lead to people getting fed up and going back to the dietary heuristics we had before this fad (HFSS, etc). Unfortunately I suspect this will _actually_ result in increasing distrust/refusal to engage with dietary guidelines entirely, and if we do ever identify a novel mechanism by which certain UPFs cause harm that we weren't aware of, no one will engage with it because they're totally exhausted from the current debacle.

Will RFK next ban artificial Carbon Monoxide (CO) Treatment that keeps the beef he thinks is so important artificially red?

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-additives/no-art...

is an article that doesn't just quote the press release and actually discusses the previous policy as well as critiquing the change.

In the food additive industry, “natural” mostly translates to “artificial, but derived with outdated and roundabout methods”.

Wish they'd eliminate food coloring altogether. Leave the coloring for the packaging.

Which stock goes up ?

Look in the natural aisle. Those products which don’t rely on dyes.

In other words, the foods catering to purity food culture are the ones that benefit.

Mars has committed to removing dyes, at great expense and effort. What if they simply left out dyes for a year?

TBH this is getting so complicated.

I’m really starting to think the only solution is a household mass spectrometer we can run all our foods through. Literally see every constitute of each food.

Maybe we need an X prize for the under $300 molecular food scanning system.

Welcome to the world of broken institutional trust.

Even that wouldn't be sufficient. Look at the heterogeneity in dairy - the same amount of SFA in yoghurt has a markedly different impact on LDL-c compared to butter, likely because of both the calcium content of the yoghurt _and_ the actual molecular structure (non-churned dairy has intact milk fat globule membranes).

I actually think we need to go the other way and look at foods as foods where we have the data, rather than individual components. Most recent dietary guidelines are more "x% of your plate should be vegetables" than "you should consume x% of your energy as cereal fibre", at least in their headline advice.

I agree but I think both approaches are needed.

If this device simply found most bad stuff (when above safe limits) we’d be in a way better position. Eg. Arsenic, lead, pesticides, etc.

* edited to add “above safe limits” since folks seem to be strawmanning my point. In case it really wasn’t clear.

This is what regulation already does (quite effectively too, at least over here in the UK). We already know that harmful substances aren’t likely to be present in our foods thanks to regulatory checks.

Then we’d be left with checks for substances at levels lower than regulations are concerned with, but I’m not sure why we’d care about that.

Fish has mercury present in it, but increased consumption seems to be associated with positive health outcomes. If the device said “danger, mercury”, what are we replacing it with? Red meat? Sausage? The current evidence would suggest that would be a retrograde step.

The whole point of this thread and the past 30 years at least in the US is that those regulations aren’t working.

Well that would depend on what you mean by “not working”. It seems like the US regulations are generally doing a good job of keeping toxic products out of the food supply.

I’m not sure if your claim is specifically around food colouring. If it is, I’ve not seen any compelling evidence that the food colouring allowed under US regulation is actually problematic for health.

So you never eat rice or apples right?

They always contain arsenic. They always have

It probably boils down to the definition of the word artificial, and both options can be correct. Just that in this climate I'll take anything the FDA does as a move with ulterior, probably nefarious, reasons.

No artificial colors can mean "no artificially created (synthetic) color" or "no artificially added (not naturally in the product) color".

We have a precedent with "no added sugar" for things that already contain a lot of it, like fruit juices. So the distinction is between "no added coloring" and "no synthetic coloring".

That would be the right way to make this distinction. But of course the FDA is totally fine letting people be misled by ambiguity if it benefits the companies selling these products.

"Mexican saffron", harvested from a plant unrelated to the crocus family. And completely devoid of saffron's flavor.

Here, have this radium water, carefully collected from natural springs. Natural dyes only. Terms and conditions apply.

A good example of a genuine natural color. Natural doesn't mean good, artificial doesn't mean bad. I dislike this change because if you care about "minimally messed with food" then avoiding extra processing for appearance alone is an easy step to take - this erodes a label that was helpful to some people.

> Natural doesn't mean good, artificial doesn't mean bad.

Indeed. Arsenic is natural.

And yet they called my motives "unnatural".

Ironic.

Poisoning is still illegal though.

This is not an application of the naturalistic fallacy, this is just about accuracy in labeling.

There has been serious erosion in the area of words meaning things.

The category of words used to describe food to give the impression that it's healthy have been abused beyond recognition for my entire life. I assume that's always been the case (radium!) but I'm less certain.

Welcome to America, where over half the population can’t understand words meaning things at a 6th grade level.