Comment by bityard

You really don't want to know about GRAS (Generally recognized as safe) then. 700 food substances were grandfathered into the food supply chain and most new things are self-affirmed by the company selling them.

I don't disagree with you, but we don't have heavy scrutiny on the existing and natural chemicals that are in the food chain from all of the plants that we eat.

There is no such thing as proving something "safe". Go back and re-read the parent comment. The important point you are missing is that basically anything can be "linked" to cancer, and if you adopt the argument you are making, there would be nothing left.

Proving something safe is logically equivalent to proving that it is not unsafe, which is the same thing as proving a negative, which cannot be done. I cannot prove there is not a teapot circling Mars, and I cannot prove that even the most inert ingredient, at some dose, will not harm you.

Anyone who has lived in California knows this absurdity more intuitively than most people, because California's stupid laws adopt the logic you are proposing, and basically everything in daily life is labeled as cancer-causing.

There is no way to establish a food as "safe".

Health outcomes are noisy, especially if taken over a long time. Peer reviewed studies are often flawed in various ways and most scientific studies lack the statistical power to be inconclusive.

The fear based approach to human diets can not work. We have to accept risks in our lives if we want to eat at all.

Natural food is not safe. Many natural foods that people eat, specifically plants, contain natural toxins and carcinogens that would probably not pass your threshold for "safe".[1]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2217210/

I don't know about "peer-reviewed gold-standard studies," but what you've described is basically how the EU does it – what goes in food must be proven safe.

It's the opposite of the US approach, which is to ban (only) proven-harmful ingredients.

I don't expect US food-safety laws to become more strict in the next four years, but who knows, maybe the dead-worm guy will surprise us.

It’s impossible to prove a negative.

Have those other been proven safe? Is it possible they too cause cancer?

I'd like to point out that eating charred meat has a clear link with colon cancer, so we can't simply appeal to nature for safety.

> that have much lower risk scores (as they are from plant and animal sources)

This is a fallacy. If anything, there's more reason to expect that a substance evolved to serve a biological function (that happens to be red) would have biological effects in humans than a substance developed specifically to be red and be biologically inert.

That's an argument against all food dyes including natural ones.

Given color improves the enjoyment of food, I'd argue it is useful though.

"Presentation of food" is not "nothing useful". People who see basically eat with eyes. Like plate/food ratio can make you overeat. Or some food can be totally fine, but if it is just made to look bad for example rotten/expired it can be vomit inducing. Just like if someone says you just ate something bad, if you think what you eat is harmful the body will react

If there is no food coloring at all would we eat better? I bet yes. But we can't get there now. It will not pass any vote

Color is important for appeal and flavor. Otherwise we would never color food.

Proven safe against what though?

I'm a big proponent of food safety regulation, but we have to acknowledge that there's no way to prove something is safe against all possible harms it might do. There will always be a risk in food. The question is how much risk will we tolerate?

Well, I guess you should start by banning all fruits and vegetables, because there's evidence that they contain toxins and carcinogens, and we're not sure if they're "safe"[1].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2217210/

It's not extraordinary to state that every single thing we eat[0] can have a study designed around it to show that it might cause cancer -- that is how studies and chemicals (things we eat) work.

[0]Except water, maybe. I'd bet if you shoved enough water into a rat at minimum you could observe an increase in tumor growth rate though.

It's a strawman argument often brought up to argue against banning potentially cancer causing foods.

It's also not true, since many foods - most vegetables, for example, or many types of fiber - do the complete opposite, and reduce your risk of cancer.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvotes for this because it seems to me a highly valid stance. Why do we allow mostly unchecked, highly processed junk food in our society, only banning items that have a high level of risk of being poisonous, if at all? Especially since the main target of a lot of it is children.

Shouldn't we take the opposite approach? Make it very hard to use highly processed unnatural products, to the point where it's cheaper and easier for companies to fall back on less processed "clean label" ingredients.

I work in (well, adjacent to) the F&B sector and I can tell you that every large company knows exactly what clean food means, why it's healthier, and where to source the ingredients, and that they have equivalent food products using these either already on shelves, or waiting to be produced if there's a shift in consumer desires.

The reason that they don't already use them - the reason you mostly only see advertising for processed foods - is because the more highly processed a food is, the higher the profit margins for companies. I've seen it stated as a rule that every level of processing gives a 2x profit margin. So if you can process an item 3 times, you'll 6x your profit margins (obviously a rule of thumb rather than law).