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Sure. Ban Red Dye No. 3, but let's allow all the homeopathic bullshit we want because hey why regulate that stuff? They just give it to kids.
I agree with you, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is barely "the good."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythrosine#Safety
Humans are not rats and no one is eating that much Red Dye No. 3 a day.
From reading about it, it’s really a risk/reward call. Red 3 has no nutritional or flavor-enhancing purpose. It’s just a decoration, so why take any risk, however small?
Because this took a hell of a lot of time and effort and taxpayer money that the FDA could have spent on so many other more important things.
Why are you complaining about the FDA doing their job, rather than the large corps that likely lobbied to avoid this and make it much harder for them?
They banned it in cosmetics in 1990, it seems pretty obvious that if it's unsafe for the outside of our body it shouldn't be inside either.
They're a troll. Don't waste your time.
If they were doing their job, they would remove dangerous "herbal" remedies people are giving to their kids and hurting or even killing them, not something that has a small chance of causing cancer if you feed a shit ton of it to a rat.
As I showed to someone else, it took ten years for the FDA to get a company to voluntarily recall a product that was causing seizures in hundreds of babies. https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/13/homeopathy-tablets-recall/
Are you aware that homeopathics and herbal remedies are completely different things?
They do more than one thing at a time. It isn't like all other evaluations stopped to look at red dye #3.
They have a limited amount of time and resources. What was spent on this could have been spent on something more dangerous.
Without investigating, it could have been more dangerous and we wouldn't know.
These were the results. Not an issue that effects everyone, but enough that it should be banned.
There is nothing to complain about here. Thats how this works for anything being evaluated.
I’d be curious about what the cost actually is?
Right so I mean—the cost of research and analysis and the entire process of determining the possible risks is money that simply must be spent either way, even on products that are ultimately deemed suitable for market. That’s the entire purpose of the FDA, to find these things out.
So we’re really just looking at the costs associated with the ban itself. Such as the labor hours of FDA employees setting it up? Communicating it to people? I agree with your concerns I’m just trying to get a sense of what we actually spent to arrive here
I can't give you numbers, but it's a federal regulation. A lot of reports have to get written and a lot of research has to be done, especially in the field of federal regulation as a whole, which is so insane that we literally have no idea how many federal laws there are. And then all of that documentation has to be read by other people and approved all the way up the chain. So we are talking a lot of people's time and effort (which translates into taxpayer money) that could have better been spent on things which are causing active harm.
Doesn't really matter since food dye is completely unimportant. Candy, cakes, and other foods will taste exactly the same without Red #3.
Better to eliminate any potential risks to ourselves and our pets/livestock than keep it around so Big Company can get better sales with their bright red whatever.
I've genuinely never seen someone play Devil's advocate for a food dye of all things.
I'm not playing Devil's Advocate, I'm saying this is a really minor good in the greater scheme of things and I imagine the cost and time breakdown in terms of what it took to accomplish took a lot away from other, more important things.
Studies have also indicated this dye (and others) could cause hyperactivity and similar problems in children.
https://oehha.ca.gov/risk-assessment/press-release/report-links-synthetic-food-dyes-hyperactivity-and-other-neurobehavioral-effects-children
Any easy way to figure out 4% as grams in a human diet?
Assuming a person eats ~1.8kg of food per day, that would be ~72 grams. Basing that math off of a number I had heard previously stating that adults eat anywhere from 3-5lbs of food daily.
I bet we could tell who is eating 70+grams of Erythrosine by their color.
At least homeopathic anything is not directly harmful in the context of ingesting it, because it contains no active ingredient.
It's only harmful in that people don't understand that it's bullshit and therefore believe that it works, and might skip actual effective treatment for whatever their ailment is in favor of cheaper (and totally ineffective) homeopathic whatever-the-hell. For that reason it should at least be regulated to the extent of having a big neon warning sticker on it that says, "This product is completely ineffective and accomplishes nothing other than setting your money on fire."
I'm all for outlawing it from a consumer advocacy standpoint because it's a scam, but otherwise it's just expensive water.
Except that it's ridiculously unregulated and it's not even actually "homeopathic" half the time, it contains actual pharmaceuticals or even just straight up poison.
Here's an example. It took ten years for the FDA to get this company to do a voluntary recall despite their product giving babies seizures.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/13/homeopathy-tablets-recall/
I'm amazed people aren't aware of this stuff.
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
Just slapping a "homeopathy" label on something with no oversight can't be an automatic dodge-all to regulation. If Hershey needs to prove what they put in a candy bar, anyone hawking homeopathic products should need to prove what they put in there as well.
That's the neat thing... They don't. Hershey can claim anything new is "generally recognized as safe" and skip all that. It was meant to grandfather in actual foodstuff, but it left a loophole that's frequently used to put in all sorts of substances not proven to be harmful
Homeopathic bullshit has no negative effect, it's literally just water and sugar. As long as they are not prescription pills, the FDA does not regulate them because they are merely false advertising and not actually dangerous.
When done properly, it is just water. Hyland made some homeopathic teething tablets about a decade ago that used too much belladonna which killed several kids and paralyzed a few more because they did not dilute it to nothing.
That's just murder and pretty sure the FDA pulled those.
Why was it allowed to get to market in the first place? Why were they allowed to use belladonna at all ( a known poison) without oversight?
Because Orrin Hatch pushed the “supplements” act back in the 1990s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_Education_Act_of_1994
That's like saying fire extinguishers filled with nothing but air are just false advertising. People have died taking these "treatments" when actual professional medical care would have saved them.
That’s the way homeopathic nonsense is supposed to work. Unfortunately bullshit like this isn’t regulated properly so it often ends up being dangerous.
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/understanding-over-counter-medicines/some-homeopathic-products-may-put-you-risk
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/fda-warns-of-life-threatening-infections-from-contaminated-nasal-spray/
https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety-alerts/standard-homeopathic-company-issues-nationwide-recall-hylands-baby-teething-tablets-and-hylands-baby
They are actually dangerous in the sense that people believe they are buying medicine when they are not, and therefore do not receive proper, actual life saving treatment.
It doesn’t help when this crap is legitimized by being sold in actual drug stores like Walgreens.
Often right next to real medicine.