Hey, Welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. My name is Jorge Champ, and today we are answering the question is food coloring really bad for you? The Food and Drug Administration, or FDA here in the US recently said it's going to try to take out all artificial coloring from the foods we eat. But what are these food colorants? How bad are they? And does that mean
we've been poisoning ourselves for decades. We're going to talk to several experts, including a psychologist of food, a biomedical cancer researcher, and an epidemiologist whose work was cited in the FDA announcement. So put down those brightly colored Cheetos, spit out that fluorescent Gatoray you just drank, and join us as we answer the question is food coloring really
bad for you? Welcome to Sign Stuff. Hey, everyone, So the FDA just made that announcement about food dies and I'm hoping this episode will be a guide for you to understand what it all means. We'll start with the basics, and that is the idea that we put color into our foods. Why do we do that? Where did this idea come from? And how does color affect how we taste food. To answer this, I reached out to a
psychologist of food. Doctor Charles Spence is a professor of psychology at Oxford University, and he's an expert on how our senses mixed together to give us the experience of eating. I asked them to give us a rundown on the history of food coloring. Here's what he said.
So it goes back a long way. Certainly. Maybe the first recorded use is in wine making, using the skins to color the wine. That maybe goes back several thousand years. Then over the last century or two. And also he finds the use of saffron urmeric as well. And here in the UK there's lots of use of coloring pasley to turn things green. So that's clearly a lot of interest for a long time. Color is an important part of the experience.
Can you step us through a little bit of the psychology of food coloring? How does color effect how we experience the food?
So one of the primary factors when we go shopping is the use of color more than maybe any other cue. As soon as we see products, then our brain is immediately predicting what it's going to taste like, what's the flavor? And that can be from the product to the thing itself. Maybe that the yellowness on a banana will tell you something about how sweet it's going to taste, through to the color on a packet of potato chips. If I see a pink crisp packet, it's going to be prawn cocktail.
If it's blue and white, it'll be cheese, onion, or maybe salt and vinegar, depending on the brand. Our brain automatically, within the blink of an eye predicts do we like it, how energy dense is it? What flavor is it going to have?
So we color food to catch our attention. The ancient Romans apparently use mulberry juice to color their foods red, and the Egyptians are said to have used saffron to dye their foods yellow and gold. But food coloring can also change what do you think a food tastes like? And this has been shown in several scientific studies where people are giving a between see white yogurt and yogurt would pink dye in it. Here's how Professor Spence describes it.
The very first studies will done in like nineteen twenties and thirties, often by chemists confused about how good adding coloring to a jelly or a candy, or a yogurt or a cake change the taste. But now in twenty twenty five there are probably four or five hundred published research studies looking at the impact of color. Formally, in the lab, we will just give people maybe three pots of yogurt, one just playing yogurt, the other two samples a little bit of sugar added to make them a
bit of sweetness. One of those two samples with the sugar will also color pink, and then give people the three samples in a random order and ask them to say which one is sweetest, or they will the same yes, no, okay, which one is sweetest, which one is less sweet People be convinced that the pink one is sweeter, ten percent sweeter or fifteen percent sweeter just through the use of color. So in some cases you can have this really strong reaction that we really do taste what we see.
So coloring is basically used to trick people. If I gave you three cups of yogurt, one with white yogurt, another one with white yogurt, with sugar and another one with white yogurt, sugar and a little bit of food dye to make it look pink. You're gonna think the pink one is the sweetest. Food dyes can hould your brain into thinking something is more ripe, or sweeter, or more full of flavor then it really is. But, as
Professor Spence says, food coloring can also be fun. In another set of experiments, scientists tested how the colors of M and M's affected how much kids eat them.
The question why M and M's, or in England Europe, Smarties, these sugar colored chocolate candies. Why do they come in a variety of colors? It's not for your good health, but the reason is from research done last century. Way, if you ask people do you have a favorite color of M and M's or Smarties? And kids will say yes, I love the orange ones because it takets orange, or
the red ones because they're sweeter. And if you then give the little kid a bottle full of their favorite colored sweet versus a bowl of a mixture of colors, they'll actually eat more of the mixed colors than of their favorite color. Because our brain kind of satyates or gets bored of the same thing over and over again, saying it's my favorite color. I'll get bored of it sooner. Whereas by having color variety you can encourage children to consume more.
Candies that is fascinating. So a big part of why we color foods is just to keep our brains entertained.
For violin, for contrastant, because we can.
What do you mean, Because we can.
It just adds interest to what we eat and what we drink. It's not part of the flavor, but I think it does contribute to our enjoyment.
Yeah, coloring foods is fun, and for most of history this coloring was done with natural ingredients, mostly herbs and spices like partsley and turmeric. There are also non plant based food dyes like carmine red, which comes from crushing the bodies of a cactus eating insect called Dectylopius cocus. But then in the eighteen hundreds, people got really good at chemistry, and that's where we started to get into trouble.
To pick up this thread, I reached out to doctor Lorne Hoffsith, a professor and Associated Dean for Research at the College of Pharmacy in the University of South Carolina. Who has a keen interest in artificial food dice. Here's how he describes what happened next.
The adulteration started around the eighteen hundreds, where they were throwing arsenic chalk into food to make it look more white. And so in eighteen fifty six, guy named Sir William Perkin discovered as a chemist he was looking at a chemical that might work on malaria, and this chemical was purple and he called it mauvine. And that was the first synthetic food dye that then led to they discovered
they've consynthesized food colors. They have these without getting too nerdy, aromatic hydrocarbons on their structure that create a color.
Okay. So, starting in the mid eighteen fifties, there was an explosion of many different kinds of artificial or synthetic food dies made from chemicals like coal, tar, or petroleum. But then people started getting sick. Some of these dyes
had harmful chemicals like lead, arsenic, and mercury. Because of that, between nineteen oh six and nineteen thirty eight, a series of laws in the US started to regulate what people could and could not put in foods, and it gave the power to enforce these laws to the Food and Drug Administration or FDA. The FDA would review these chemicals and approve which ones they thought were safe for people to eat. These dyes were giving names like red number
forty or blue number one. Here's how doctor Hoffseeth describes them.
At that point, there was round fifteen to twenty artificial food dyes that were in our food. And then in nineteen fifty eight eat a very important, very important law came into place called the Delaney Clause. This clause was added to the Food Drugs and Cosmetics Act, and the clause was saying, any food additive that causes cancer in humans or animals can't be used in our food.
Okay, this part is important. In nineteen fifty eight, there was an amendment to the Food Drugs and Cosmetics Act that included a special clause named after James Delaney, the chair of the committee looking into food safety at the time. This clause says that while the FDA has the authority to say which chemicals are safe to eat, it can't approve quote any chemical additive found to induce cancer in man or after tests found to induce cancer in animals
end quote. In other words, if anyone finds that a chemical causes cancer in for example, rats or mice, then the FDA has to ban it. We'll get to how that played a role recent fd announcement a little later, but back in the fifties it had a big impact.
So allowing scientists to do research on synthetic food dies. That knocked off around half of them, and so there's nine remaining, and now there's eight because Red three was recently knocked out on January fifteenth, twenty twenty five.
Since about nineteen sixty to essentially today, there have been only nine artificial food dyes approved for use in the United States. They have names like red number forty, Blue number one, Yellow five, Yellow six. Basically every single food in the US that is artificially colored, and that is most brightly colored foods you find in a typical supermarket, from cheetos to sodas to gatorade, salad dressings with sabi, yogurts, M and MS, candies, even pickles and some fruits like oranges,
uses one or more of these nine specific dyes. So if you grew or have been living in the US in the last sixty five years, you've probably consumed a lot of these food dies. Okay, So now the question is are these artificial food dyes dangerous? How bad are they for us? When we come back, we'll talk about the link these food dies have to cancer and children's neuro behavior. Stay with us, you're listening to science stuff.
Welcome back. Okay. We talked about why we put coloring in our foods and about the history of food dies and the FDA in this country. There are currently nine artificial food colorings that are approved to be used in the US. That's green number three, red number forty, yellow number five and six, blue number one, blue two, citrus, red two, and orange b although the FDA just announced they're going to ban those last two. Next we're going to talk about whether these food dyes are are bad
for us. Now, doctor Hasseth is a cancer researcher, and his concern is about what these food dyes are doing to your DNA.
So these are chemically synthesized from the foundational component being petroleum. Well, the foremost popular are red forty, yellow six, yellow five, and blue one. Red forty, yellow five and yellow six are called Azo dyes. So AZO dyes have what's called an azo bond that azobond being there means it can be metabolized. So imagine red forty coming into your body through juicy juice or through doritos and gets into your gut, and your gut has a lot of bacteria. Some of
these have an enzyme called azo reduct dases. Azo reduct dases they go after the azo bonds and they split that molecule into two molecules, one called crescidine sulfonic acid and the other one is the acronym is answa A NSA, but the essays stands for sulfonic acid too. So we're asking, well, what are those molecules doing, and they seem to have a structure that likes DNA and maybe will damage it. We've done the experiments to ask them why the red
forty damages DNA. We've sprinkled it onto cells and the answer is yes. We've given it to mice for nine months for half their lives, and the question we were asking does it cause colon cancer? But the answer was no, it didn't. But what we did discover was there was this long term inflammation and DNA damage that was occurring in the mice that we're consuming it. So you can envision if you're consuming doritos which has red forty and
probably yellow five and probably yellow six. Just look at the pack and all of these molecules that you're consuming for day after day after day after day, year after year after year after year, is causing a low grade inflammation. Why Because these are synthetic. They're foreign to your body, just like cigarette smoke is, just like other chemicals are. They're going to stimulate inflammation. Inflammation is intimately linked to cancer, and any piece of tissue that has chronic inflammation in
it will have a high risk of cancer. So going back to the door ETOs that have the red forty in it, you consume it, it's synthetic, it's going to stimulate this stealthy inflammation in your gut, in your body that will probably increase your risk of chronic diseases like cancer.
I see.
So that's how they're linked.
Doctor Hasset has done experiments with the most commonly used of the dyes, red forty, and while he didn't find that it caused cancer in he reported it cause inflammation, which if it happens for a long time, is linked to cancer. Now there are some more direct connections to cancer for some of these other dyes, but sometimes that's
not enough. For example, Red number three, another artificial dyet that's been in use in the US for over sixty years, was found to cause thyroid tumors in rats back in nineteen eighty seven, but the FDA banned it only a few months ago, with an effective band aid of January twenty twenty seven. That means it took forty years after Red number three technically triggered the Delaney clause, the clause that says a chemical has to be banned if it is found to cause cancer in animals before it will
actually be taken out of foods in the US. We'll talk about how the FDA approves or doesn't approve something is safe a little later in the program, but just to be clear, the link between cancer and artificial food dyes is not a slam dunk. According to the Center for Science and the Public Interests, a nonprofit that at tracks food and safety, some of the approved food dies
show a possible connection to tumors and some don't. But what has given a lot of energy to the movement to ban artificial food dies in recent years is their connection to children's neuro behavior. In particular, the FDA cited a study commissioned by the California Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment titled Potential Impacts of Synthetic food dies on Activity and Attention in Children. A Review of the
human and animal evidence. To learn more about this study, I talked to one of the authors of that study, Professor Asa Bradman. Thank you, doctor Bradman for joining us.
I'm thrilled to be here. So my name is Asa Bradman, and I'm a professor of public health at the University of californiumer said, in the public Health department, and the focus of my work is environmental health and children. So I work on a range of issues, looking at environmental exposures like pesticides, air pollution, and also dietary exposures.
Can I ask you about that study that you published put on by the California Office of Environmental Health.
Yes, So, there was a member of the legislature in California that asked the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to conduct this study, and they came to me and teamed up with my group to develop exposure assessments and other information about what people are actually being exposed to.
Our major conclusion was that many studies show a relationship between kids who, when consuming artificial food coloring, had behavioral or other changes that could put them, for example, in the category that you might describe as attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, or trouble settling down.
Okay, what doctor Bradman and the team of researchers did was a comprehensive review of different studies related to artificial food dies and they found two things. One in animals, high doses of artificial food dice affect their brains and their ability to remember and learn. And two in kids, eating artificial food dice affected their behavior and their ability to focus and pay attention. Here's how doctor Bradman describes
these results. So how did these experiments usually work? Like you would give some rats a lot of food dye and some you wouldn't.
An ideal study and you would have a series of doses at different levels, and then you would examine the animals for effects from those doses. For example, you know there's a lot of standardized rodent studies to look at how well they can get through a maze. We know when you have miser rats in your house or in your basement or in your garage. They're pretty smart animals and they can find ways to get in or solve problems.
Whilst the same thing with these tests. If you find, for example, that the ones are exposed don't do as well in learning to address a challenge you're remembering where the food might be, then you can make some conclusions about the impact on the animals. Right, the animal studies indicate synthetic food dies effect activity, memory and learning, cause changes in the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve to the next in the brain, and can cause microscopic changes in brain structure.
And then what did the studies find for kids?
So there have been some studies where psychologists have provided a drink or beverage to a group of kids and they don't tell them whether there's an artificial color or some other color in the food or beverage. And of course this kind of study has to go through an ethics review and be approved and there has to be consent form. But they're not consuming anything different than if they had, say, gone to the store and bought some candy or a juice beverage that had red number forty.
So you can give them the artificial food coloring and then record using standardized methods any changes in behavior.
So you found that kids who consumed these artificial dies seemed to have more problems with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Yes.
And settling down. We have symptoms that we would considered to be like attention deficit disorder or ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But just to make it clear that it seemed to me that some kids were more vulnerable than others, and that we're not talking about necessarily a chronic induction of ADHD, but rather an episodic, transient effect.
In other words, the studies found that when kids drank or ate regular amounts of artificial food coloring, they seemed to behave as since they had ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, they would have trouble settling down and focusing, at least temporarily. So in the studies you found the effect was more transient.
I mean, the analogy would be like if you drank some alcohol, you might be a little drunk or tipsy fair period of time, but you're not permanently in that state. So the idea here is that these kids were given a beverage, usually with the synthetic dies in them, and there seem to be a demonstrable result. But on the next day, when they were given a challenge that did not have any of the artificial food dies, those changes in behavior were not seen. So that's what I mean by transient.
The effect is temporary. But as doctor Brettman says, the concern is what these artificial dies are doing to kids in the long term.
When you think about you don't want to give kids alcohol every day, and I'm sure the canyons who's going to go after me for say something like this, But younger children are more vulnerable to environmental exposures than older kids or than adults. You can imagine that if you take a very young child that's not yet developed, if
there are neurotoxic insults that can disrupt that development. So one concern about these is that young children may be getting exposed on a regular basis and could have long term impacts.
Okay, to recap some of the artificial food dyes have some possible connection to cancer, and in experiments they also seem to affect kids' behavior and possibly their development. So now the question is how much of these food dyes are we consuming? Is there even an acceptable amount? When we come back, we'll ask our experts this question, and we'll talk about the most recent plan by the FDA to try to get rid of artificial coloring in general.
Stay with us, we'll be right back and we're back. Okay, we talked about what artificial food coloring can do to the human body. Now the question is how much of it are we swallowing? What do we know about how much kids are consuming these food dies well.
As part of the work with the state of California, we looked at concentration of these dyes in many different foods, and then we looked at a set of data from something called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey on what people eat. So what we did is we estimated the intake in what's called milligrams per kilogram of body weight actually published in the study, with a relationship of that intake to what are called the acceptable daily intakes.
Okay, this is worth getting into. When the FDA approves something like an artificial food dye, they do it as an acceptable daily intake or ADI, which is how much of something the FDA thinks is safe to eat or your weight so if you're bigger and you weigh more, the FDA thinks you can eat more of it. Here's how doctor Halseth explains how the FDA sets that number.
So what happens is an organization called the Joint Food and Agriculture Organization JEKFA. They put out a report every year looking at the science behind any food additive. So the acceptable daily intake, let's look at Red forty for an example, is seven miligrounds per kilogram per day.
It's quite a bit.
How did they come to that number.
Because in the nineteen sixties and seventies, the government actually does do these experiments. They do maximum tolerable doses, and the mice or rats didn't have any significant pathologies at seven milligrounds per kilogram per.
Day and below.
They said, okay, based on these old studies that showed that they've fed read forty at different doses to mice, they looked and said, it doesn't seem any pathology is happening, not even inflammation is happening anything below seven milligrounds per kilogram per day.
Okay.
The way this works is somebody does an experiment where they see what's the most do they read, or a mouse will tolerate of a chemical without anything seeming to happen to it, and then you scale that up for larger humans. Plus, according to doctor Bratman, a safety factor.
So the way it works is that when we look at the very lowest dose that would have very little effect or almost no effect in a rat or mouse, and then we take that number and we put on safety factors and usually put on a factor of ten or a factor of one hundred.
The FDA does base their decisions on science, and they add huge safety factors. So the recommended amount is ten or sometimes one hundred the amount that's been found to be safe for test animals. So what did the California study find? Are we actually consuming more or less than the FDA acceptable value?
In general, the ratio of what kids or a pregnant women we're eating relatively to the acceptable daily intakes was below one. If it's below one, it means they're getting exposed at a level that's less than the acceptable daily intake, although there were some instances where especially younger children could be eating foods and have exposures that are at or slightly above the acceptable daily intake.
In other words, For the most part, people are not consuming these artificial food dyes above the acceptable daily intake, and since there's a safety factor, we are consuming them way below what the FDA thinks is actually a dangerous amount. And yet the studies say even consuming off the shelf drinks can give kids attention deficit problems. So what's going on?
So when we look at those studies and we look at the doses that they were exposed to, we realize that the absceptual daily intakes that were developed for the Food and Drug Administration are based on studies that are very all thirty five to seventy years old even and they were designed to look at the kind of behavioral outcomes that were concerned about. So we would make an argument that the acceptable daily intakes developed by FDA were
appropriate at the time. But as we've gained more information about the potential health concerns related to these exposures, they don't offer an adequate margin of safety for consumption of these foods.
They're too high. They're too high, all right, tareikap. Again, if you've been eating cheetos and red soda and food with lots of artificial colorance, then you have possibly increased at least a little bit, your chances of getting cancer, and if you're a kid, it may be giving you attention problems which might affect your development. What does this all mean, Well, it may not matter, because here's the shocker.
As we were editing this episode, the Food and Drug Administration or FDA made the announcement that they're going to try to quote phase out petroleum based synthetic dies in the nation food supply end quote. To make sense of this, I called doctor Bryman again, who, because of the announcement, has been inundated with calls from reporters. So after he hung up with The New York Times, he took my call. All right, thanks doctor Breman for coming back.
Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.
What did they announce?
I was really amazed. The FDA commissioner spoke about his department's concerns about artificial food collery and that as part of a new initiative, they were moving to ban all of the artificial food colors.
Now, what are they actually planning it, because it seemed like they're not actually banning them yet, but they wanted the food industry to do it voluntarily.
You're right, it's not totally clear how they're going to move ahead with this initiative. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy also spoke about how they want to work together with the food industry to phase out these materials, and the timeframe they were looking at was pretty short, you know, like a couple of years to accomplish it,
which is short. Having some experience in the food processing world and understanding what it takes to source ingredients and put together a recipe you can produce on a mass scale, it will be challenging.
Yeah, I imagine there's probably a lot of Twinkies on shelves out there that could have stayed there forever.
That would be a good point that there's going to be a process of looking at current inventory. Also, surprisingly, Commissioner MacRae also talked about alternatives and from any of these colors. There are alternatives that are from plants that we normally eat we know are healthy, like blueberries or beets or other sources. And he even held up a cup of beeches as an example of a natural color that is not petroleum derived, comes from a food we know as healthy.
I guess my question is why didn't they just outride bandies who dies? Why make it this kind of voluntary, fuzzy process.
They suspect that to actually go through a regulatory process and develop rules and to revoke the approvals for these would be a slow and bureaucratic process. But I think they're using the bully pulpit to raise concerns about these substances, and hopefully, I think they're trying to engage the good will of the American food industry to work together with them and perhaps implement these changes in a way so that regulatory steps are not necessary or needed.
So just giving notice to food companies that you better start moving away from these artificial dies.
Yes, having observed the food industry much of my career, often these kinds of voluntary things are not successful. You know, it'll be interesting to see how they work together and what they can accomplish.
What do you think for the average consumer? We get bombarded by so many things in our feeds, our Facebook feeds or Instagram feeds. So many it's a little bit hard to know what to believe. Whether this is good for you, bet, this is bad for you. What advice you have for the average consumer about what we can trust and what we can trust.
I think what you can trust is encouragement to make choices to choose you know, whole foods and do your own cooking. And my whole foods I don't mean the market. I need you know, buying vegetables, fruits and grains, breads and meats, dairy products that you know don't fit into the category of ultra process and take some time to
think about and prepare your meals. If the ingredients of the food you're looking at are difficult to pronounce and you don't know what they are, I think that's an indication that you might want to stick to products that you can understand and hopefully prepare yourself.
That's great. Oh wait for I might check from Whole Foods now. All right, well, thank you so much chick to Bradman for that perspective.
Okay, thanks again for reaching out, and I look forward to hearing the podcast.
All Right, his artificial food coloring really bad for you. The science says it's not great for you. The only reason we've been using it is to give us a bit of cheap fun. So maybe the answer is to make eating non artificial foods more fun. Thanks for joining us. See you next time you've been listening to Science Stuff.
The production of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or hitch Ham candidate by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland and audio engineer and mixer Casey Pegram, and you can follow me on social media to search for PhD comics and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.