Name: How Sketchy Chemicals Like Red No. 3 End Up In U.S. Food
Uploaded: 2025-02-26T01:06:33.000Z
Duration: 12 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is Froot Loops sold in the United States, and this is the same product sold in Canada.

But if you take a look at their ingredients list, you'll notice some key differences.

The American version contains several food dyes that don't appear in the Canadian version.

It also contains a substance called BHT, a preservative that faces stringent restrictions for food use by the European Union.

I think it's indicative of how much more lax the rules are here in the U.S.

So there are ingredients that may be used in U.S. products that aren't allowed in the EU or in Canada.

While not all additives are inherently bad, experts have long raised concerns about the lack of regulation over harmful additives in America's food supply.

The Food and Drug Administration announced today that it is banning red dye number three.

That's the synthetic additive that gives certain products their bright cherry red color.

Europe defaults at protecting the population.

The U.S. defaults at actually letting ingredients in and kind of allowing the food industry to police itself.

We know from prior research that over spans of decades, thousands of ingredients are added to the food supply without the FDA knowing about it.

It's impossible to quantify because we don't actually know which ingredients are added.

In 2019, 59.5 percent of foods bought by American households contained some form of additives, an almost 20 percent increase from 2001.

Chemicals and additives in the food supply are not as well regulated as they can and should be.

And I think consumers have a right to expect that they are.

So how are companies getting away with adding potentially dangerous additives to America's food supply?

Many of them are approved and widely consumed in other parts of the world.

The U.S. is a little unique, though, in how our regulatory process works, which has led to a lack of oversight over a lot of these chemicals.

The Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, is responsible for regulating food and health related products to ensure they're safe for public health.

Today, it's estimated to oversee 80 percent of the U.S. food supply.

So the way that it is supposed to happen, based on the law that Congress passed in 1958, is if you, a company, want to introduce a new food additive into the food supply, you would file a petition with the FDA and that petition would trigger an FDA investigation of that chemical.

FDA scientists would look comprehensively at the safety of that ingredient.

There would be a public process where the application would be filed publicly and other scientists and experts and citizens would have the opportunity to weigh in.

And only at the end of that process would you get approval or disapproval from the FDA determining whether or not that ingredient can be used in  Congress.

And its wisdom at that time said, you know, we know there's all these like ingredients used in food like flour or olive oil or pepper or salt.

We don't need FDA to review all of these common substances.

So they made this exemption to that requirement for additives for substances that are generally recognized as safe.

What we have seen over time is that companies are creating new ingredients, having their own scientists or hiring outside scientists to make their own determinations that an ingredient is safe.

And then once they self-declare that their ingredient is safe, they don't have to go through that pre-market process.

Between 2011 and 2021, only one new chemical went through the petition process for pre-market approval.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of companies use the GRASS pathway to determine safety on their own. 756 new food additives have been introduced into the food supply through this loophole by the food and chemical industry between 2000 and 2021.

However, that number only includes additives that companies have voluntarily notified the FDA about.

When a company submits a GRASS notice to the FDA, there are three things that can happen.

The FDA can look at it and say, we have no questions, and they will issue a no questions letter.

They can determine that your ingredient is not actually generally recognized as safe and make that statement.

Or FDA scientists can start asking questions.

And what typically happens when the FDA starts asking questions is the company can ask the FDA to stop their evaluation.

And then there is nothing further that the FDA can do really to stop that company from moving forward in marketing.

Between 2015 and 2024, the FDA ceased to evaluate 113 notices at the notifier's request based on a calculation by CNBC.

There are also countless companies out there that are just putting food on the market without that notification.

Previous research has estimated that about 1,000 substances have been added to food without the FDA ever being notified.

Many of these ingredients may be safe, but we have functionally created an honor system and we shouldn't have an honor system determining what goes into the food that we eat every day, that we feed to our families and that we may be consuming over the course of our lifetime that could potentially contribute to our own chronic disease risk.

However, supporters of the food additive industry argue that gross ingredients are tested with the same rigor as additives that go through the pre-market approval process.

The food industry is highly regulated, and the only way that food and ingredients can come into market is to follow the laws that are in place.

Both processes require the exact same requirements.

There's a plethora of scientific evidence needed to ensure that those ingredients are safe, reliable and effective.

As more additives enter the market, the global food additives industry has seen immense growth, with some research estimating that its market size could reach $106.8 billion by 2029.

Food additives are what make food possible.

There are additional benefits such as extended shelf life, consistency, longevity of products.

And the last thing that we should be doing is trying to say that consumers should be scared about the foods that they're eating.

The FDA's regulatory shortcomings don't end there.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of ingredients in the food supply that FDA had evidence was unsafe and it remained in the food supply for decades.

So it's a quite haphazard post-market review process as well.

The FDA today banning a controversial red dye found in so many foods sold in the U.S.

Red 3 has been around since the early 1900s.

It has been in the food supply for a very long time.

But it took them 34 years to actually take any action after they acknowledged the carcinogenicity of red dye 3.

There is a clause in the law that just says very clearly if there is a link to cancer, you cannot use it.

And so just based on the availability of those studies, the FDA could have banned it right away.

I think it just wasn't an agency priority.

And the vast majority of chemicals in America's food supply haven't been reviewed for safety in decades, according to the Environmental Working Group.

For example, EPA, which regulates pesticides or toxic substances, they have these regular queues where they're like, OK, everything needs to be reviewed again after 10 years or every year we're going to have a list of 40 things we're going to review.

There's not a process like that with FDA.

In response to CNBC's request for comment, the FDA responded that it has issued a pause on mass communications and public appearances that are not directly related to emergencies or critical to preserving health.

During the transition to a new team, as the science is evolving and as more studies come out about particular chemicals, it just makes sense for the government to periodically look back and make sure that those chemicals are still safe.

FDA shortcomings have real impact on consumers' health.

In 2022, a food product from daily harvest caused sickness in hundreds of consumers.

An internal investigation revealed the cause to be an ingredient known as taro flour.

They were told by the manufacturer that taro flour was grass, but no one had ever notified FDA.

Ultimately, it took the FDA almost two years to announce that taro flour does not meet grass standards in May 2024.

The most generous explanation to the FDA is that this part of the FDA is underfunded.

Within the Food and Drug Administration, food program accounts for just 17 percent of the total budget, half as much as the budget for human drugs program.

It's one of the areas where they don't get something called user fees.

They get user fees from other areas that they regulate, not food.

User fees refer to payments from manufacturing companies that help fund the FDA's operations.

Nearly 69.2 percent of the budget for drug programs comes from user fees, compared to just one percent for food programs.

You also have typically over time seen more FDA leadership and commissioners come from a drug background and have a lot more leadership and experience with those products.

As a result, sometimes the F in FDA is referred to as the silent F.

Experts say the priority is closing the grass loophole.

Make grass more transparent and remove secrecy from that equation so that the FDA actually knows what's in our food supply.

I think FDA should be notified of all of them so they can be the one making the decision, like, is this the right pathway?

And then at least knowing they're in the food supply, which would make post-market review much more efficient.

And then we need to support the states that have really done a great job recently to step up and start banning ingredients of concern.

And those state bans might be the most powerful political move.

In 2023, California became the first state to ban four harmful chemicals and eventually six more dyes before some of them were banned at the federal level.

California did a huge service to America by banning four ingredients that were already banned in Europe because the food industry is not going to create new food just for California.

It's one of the biggest economies in the world.

The confirmation of RFK Jr. as the next health secretary could also bring meaningful change, given his outspoken stance on the dangers of chemicals in America's food supply.

Should I be so privileged as to be confirmed, we will make sure our tax dollars support healthy foods.