Food is Chemistry: Food Dyes and Risk

As I scroll through the news or social media posts, I see a lot of public fear over “unnatural” or “synthetic” ingredients.

Did you know that the colors found in nature are made up of chemicals?

Often times the very chemicals that produce the color also possess the health benefits. They are part of a group of chemicals we call phytochemicals (“phyto” meaning “plant”).

Think about the spectrum of colors among all fruits & veggies: chlorophylls (green veggies like leafy greens,celery, parsley, basil, and other green herbs), carotenoids (orange fruits and vegetables like sweet potatoes, carrots, mangoes, apricots, cantaloupe), betalains (yellows and reds – beet root, red chard, raspberries) and anthocyanins (blues and reds – salmon, berries, red cabbage), salicylates (are colorless to yellow – legumes, fruits, vegetables).

What do these compounds all have in common? They have antioxidant properties. You may already know that vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is an antioxidant. Why should you consume foods with antioxidants?

Think of antioxidants as guardians. They protect your body’s cells from “free radicals.” At high levels, these unstable “free radical” molecules cause oxidative stress within the body, that can damage your cells at a genetic level. Consuming foods with antioxidants can help keep free radicals in check.

Food is Chemistry

You see, food is chemistry. All food is made up of chemicals. In fact, you are made up of chemicals!

There is this public notion that “natural” is better. You may hear people on social media or in print articles suggesting that you “avoid any foods or ingredients you can’t pronounce” (in fact our own US government has recently taken this stance).

Just because chemical names are hard to pronounce, does not make them harmful.

Let’s take vitamin C for example. Vitamin C is found in many fruits (citrus, cantaloupe, kiwifruit) and vegetables (white potatoes, peppers, broccoli). Whether found in nature or synthesized in a lab, vitamin C has the same chemical structure. Once ingested, your body can’t tell the difference and breaks it down in the same way.

Synthetic Food Dyes

Natural sounds better. Nobody likes the word “synthetic”. In reality, whether two identical compounds are naturally occurring or made in the lab, if they are chemically the same, they are the same compound and are metabolized as such in the body.

So that brings me to food dyes. I think a lot of consumers are hung up on the idea that these ingredients are “synthetic” and may not be aware of the way they have been studied for safety.

The science about Red Dye no.3 shows this:

• Is not genotoxic (do not harm DNA, the genetic material in humans)
• It is carcinogenic only in the male rat thyroid, only at the highest dose tested, and only producing benign (not malignant/cancerous) tumors
• It clearly operates via a secondary mechanism of carcinogenesis related to high-dose thyroid toxicity
• It has a threshold of exposure level below which the risk of human cancer risk is negligible since male rat tumors are not relevant to humans

The FDA does not ban additives or ingredients solely based on a potential hazard in lab rats. Or at least, it didn’t used to. How did Red Dye No 3, previously recognized as safe, get banned?

• Pressure from the CSPI petition and California‘s ban.
• The Delaney Clause: This clause prohibits the FDA from approving the use of any food additive found to cause cancer in animals or humans. Food scientists criticize the clause as being too restrictive by setting a zero level of risk  (keep reading to learn more about risk).

The EU Halo

I often hear people making statements about the food being “healthier” in Europe compared to the United States because Europe “doesn’t put that junk in there food”. In some cases, they actually still use the ingredient, but under a different name. Fun fact: There are actually many dyes and additives approved in Europe that are prohibited in the US.

The EU approaches food policy differently. The EU uses a Precautionary Principle to make decisions about food ingredients, while the FDA uses a Risk Aversion paradigm. In other words, the EU allows regulators to act even when scientific evidence isn’t conclusive. Sort of a ‘better safe than sorry’ approach.

The US paradigm favors a hazard-based approach, taking real-world risk into consideration. That’s an important distinction between these two approaches.

If you enjoy swimming in the ocean, you are taking a risk that sharks (or another hazard) could be nearby. However the fact that sharks live in the ocean does not mean that you will see one every time you swim (or ever in your entire life). Or that they will bite you. Yet the hazard is always there. You may also assess the risk on any given day. (BTW, shark bites are still rare, 1 in 4,332,817, and you are more likely to suffer a fatality from a dog attack)

Hazard VS Risk

The concepts of risk and hazard are important to understand. A hazard is something that has the potential to be harmful or dangerous. A risk is the likelihood of that danger happening.

The EU approach to assessing food additive safety evaluates how much harm can be avoided rather than asking how much risk is acceptable. 

In the US, the evidence for human safety is not considered conclusive based on the evidence from a rat study. We are not rats. In addition, lab rats are often both predisposed to tumors and given large doses of the substance in question. Rodent studies serve to begin investigations, or determine potential mechanisms of harm. The US approach to assessing food additive safety focuses on actual risk, not the potential to cause damage to the body based on high doses given to lab rats. Nonetheless, Red Dye No 3 will be removed from food products by January 2027, according to the new ruling.

The FDA’s approach is rooted in a 1958 legislation that introduced the “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) status for food additives.

“For a substance to be GRAS, the scientific data and information about the use of a substance must be widely known and there must be a consensus among qualified experts that those data and information establish that the substance is safe under the conditions of its intended use.”

You will likely be hearing a lot more about this in the near future. What started out as a productive way to manage the food system, may need an update.

Can Anything in Life Be Completely Risk-Free?

A large part of the framework of the study of toxicology is that the effect (risk) is dependent on the amount of exposure (hazard) and the actual use of an ingredient. Or as we often say: “The dose makes the poison.”

Life is full of risks. Certainly some people are more risk-averse. It’s perfectly fine to make your own judgements in terms of the risks you want to take. The question is, should policy be set based on the potential of something happening, or on distinctive proof that it’s likely to happen in real-life practices or scenarios? I tend to live by the “dose makes the poison” adage, and modify my choices around that principle.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. ~Carl Sagan