What bugs me the most about companies like Kraft is that they could have replaced artificial dyes and ingredients any time they wanted to, but didn't. Clearly these companies are in it to make money, and they will sell the public whatever the public will eat, synthetic ingredients be damned, but maybe.. just maybe the government should be much, much more restrictive on the ingredients that goes into our foods...
> What bugs me the most about companies like Kraft is that they could have replaced artificial dyes and ingredients any time they wanted to, but didn't
They had replaced a lot of them already. Kraft's most iconic product (Mac & Cheese) replaced the artificial dyes years ago and this is only the last 10% of their products.
The fact that this is a legitimate question is very concerning. Some of these dyes are/were ubiquitous and there is very little research about them. IIRC a few have evidence of harm. Nothing should be this widely deployed without understanding them more.
If you were more questioning "Is natural actually better for people or just a nice sounding word" which could also be implied by your question, I agree with that, with the caveat that artificial stuff has more potential for surprises since it doesn't have the history of being used safely "natural" stuff does, and should have a higher bar of research.
It's also an easy thing to focus on. How many products that use dyes are extremely unhealthy for other reasons? If you are buying a cereal loaded with sugar and pretend to care about dyes for health reasons I'm going to laugh at you.
There are a lot of different artificial dyes. Most of them haven't been extensively studied in a rigorous way. It probably isn't even possible to determine whether they have any negative effects on human health because there's no ethical or affordable way to run that experiment. Since dyes are purely cosmetic and there's no actual need for them then it might be better to just avoid the risk.
This is accepting the premise that something synthetic is automatically worse than something extracted more directly from nature. I'm all for researching and banning substances which are actually harmful, but not for paranoia and the automatic assumption that a certain amount of chemistry turns something "natural" into something bad.
For example carmine is crushed up cactus parasite insects which a very small number of people are vulnerable to extreme allergic reactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal
>much more restrictive on the ingredients that goes into our food
How much human testing of every agricultural product do you want?
The greater problem is normalization of unhealthy food across an entire supermarket. Then it becomes unavoidable and invisible to consumers.
My personal bugaboos are added sugar and generous use of weird preservatives. If your supermarket has 20 aisles, 16 of them are loaded with sugary sulfite-preserved stuff, removing choice and visibility to consumers. And breads fortified with folic acid.
Re: preservatives, I remember watching a video a few years ago, where a woman decided that she didn't like all the preservatives in store-bought tortillas, so she was going to make them herself at home. It's a really simple thing to make, so why not?
They all went stale before the day was out. She compared the ingredients between what she had made and what came out of the box at the grocery store, and the ones that she didn't use? They were all preservatives.
Choose your battles wisely.
I will concede that the use of sweeteners in everything in the US is unhinged. It's hard to really understand until you've spent enough time out of the country to where you're buying groceries and looking at the ingredients. You come back to the states and everything tastes weirdly sweet. It was a real "fish don't know they're wet" moment for me, which mostly came about from marrying an Australian.
This is fair, but I think overstated. It's possible to preserve a tortilla for a few days without exotic additives. I'm not even criticizing sodium, although that's not a lot better. And yes, preservatives are better than eating spoiled food.
The problem is when the whole supermarket is full of highly preserved food, then this is normalized and health consequences are obscured. The deeper issue is that for perhaps 80% of people this is fine and profitable, but for let's say 20% it introduces weird, hard to trace health problems, which don't appear to come from the supermarket because all the normal foods are like this.
I'm still upset that I picked up a set of those little fruit cup things advertising "no added sugar", only to be met by intensely bitter and gross flavor. Turns out they added monk fruit extract instead, as an artificial sweetener. To FRUIT. Fruit is naturally sweet!
Del Monte's No Sugar Added line of canned fruits often has Acesulfame Potassium and Sucralose in it. Similar no sugar added generic/house brands are similar.
Flour fortification is one of the great public health successes of the 20th century, and I’m not aware of any data showing that folic acid is any more harmful than any of the other synthetic B vitamins added to our food. I’ve actively looked for such data, as someone with the fairly common genetic mutation affecting MTHFR, and frankly all I find is nonsense.
To expand on "great public health successes": folic acid supplementation is particularly important if you're pregnant, because it significantly reduces the odds of having a baby with neural tube defects like spina bifida (which is one of the milder NTDs, frankly). But it's also important even if you're not pregnant because B vitamin deficiencies will wreck your health.
Yes, the FDA has been emphatic that the folic acid supplementation program is a success and we would be fools to think anything else. The reality, as best I can tell, is more nuanced and for a minority of people it's possible to have too much of a good thing, particularly where 5-MTHF would be more beneficial.[1]
I don't hope to resolve the debate, only to point out it should be possible to eat bread that is not fortified with folic acid, if for no reason than I'm not in the high risk group targeted by the FDA and there are potential benefits from reducing folic acid intake in the context of robust intake of folate from other sources.
Or, even simpler: why can't I buy bread without folic acid?
Right, so I looked at that paper and its citations, and I am still not seeing any studies showing that folic acid supplementation causes problems beyond "can mask signs of B12 deficiency," which is not very compelling. I did see one paper saying "we thought excess maternal folic acid consumption might lead to asthma in children, but nope, it doesn't." To be clear, my bias is actually against folic acid supplementation: we should be using bioavailable folate, at the very least in prenatal vitamins. But I just don't see any data showing actual harm from folic acid.
I can buy unfortified bread at each of the grocery stores in my small town. I can also buy it at the local bakery and at the bread stand at our small farmers market.
It would not surprise me that there are some places in the US that only have easy access to packaged industrial sandwich bread. It would surprise me very much if that was the norm for Americans.
This is interesting to me, because I'm not aware of anywhere I can get unfortified flour. Even the artisan bread at the farmer's market is usually made of flour subject to FDA regulations.
Bread is fortified with folic acid because it turns out it is really important for brain development during pregnancy and it can be too late to take supplements if you wait until you find out that you are pregnant. This is a positive public health intervention.
Absolutely, stop subsidizing corn and glucose syrup through ag policy, and tax sugar consumption. Mexico taxed sugar to mitigate obesity to great success. GLP-1s destroy demand (Walmart already sees this in their purchasing data for consumers who are on GLP-1s), but we should also restrict supply by not subsidizing it in the first place. Why are we paying both to make the poison and then treat the poison? Not very capital efficient!
So if that's your concern, why are you talking about manipulating the market for the supply of one food, rather than taxing high GI foods? Or is it a case of corn syrup being good enough?
I completely agree with removing subsidies. I'm less convinced that ingredients should be banned. Weirdly the entire "supplement" industry can do whatever they want.
Not banned, taxed. These are behavioral economic nudges to encourage healthier outcomes. You can still get a Coca Cola, but the economics shouldn’t make it your primary source of hydration, right? If you’re expecting “will power” to fix this, the evidence is robust [1] that is not going to happen.
We tax alcohol and cigarettes similarly, and I don’t think it’s wild to consider processed sugars close to that same category from a health and reward center perspective.
Yes to the point of having it go under FDA review along with PFAS, BPA, mercury, etc. If sugar can survive their empirical heath analyses, then you can have all you want. Everyone should go and comment on the FDA's public docket if they feel the same: https://www.regulations.gov/docket/FDA-2025-N-1733
> Clearly these companies are in it to make money, and they will sell the public whatever the public will eat,
You are correct, but I find it alarming that anyone would deem this necessary to say out loud. These companies would happily watch us suffer an die from chronic illnesses en masse if it inched up their share value, as would any for-profit enterprise. The phrase "duh" comes to mind. The only thing stopping them is government regulation, though that approach is under perpetual attack by anti-government zealots, the most recent of which being Musk and his child assistants.
They don't care until there is some combination of public and government pressure, so you just have to keep pressuring, forever. Corporations are fundamentally unaccountability laundering profit machines (limited liability, nebulous shareholder ownership), and must be treated accordingly.
Which is the worst part about all of this: It took government pressure and calling them out to force a change. My anger at government is why they didn't do this SOONER? Why did it take someone like RJF jr. to move this needle? After all the people we've had at Sec. of Agriculture, HHS, and FDA Commissioners..
I don't think this was because people were putting pressure, otherwise the sheer numbers of those communities would have done something by now. It only required one person in power to say enough, fix this.
It isn't correct to see these changes a singular improvement. These rules are constantly being fought over, sometimes becoming stricter, sometimes looser.
