A KIND Healthy Snacks display in Herald Square, New York City showed how much artificial coloring kids in America are consuming each day. (Photo: Seth Olenick/Courtesy of KIND)
Seth Olenick/Courtesy of KIND
When it comes to food and beverages, can you really “live and let dye”?
Today, KIND Healthy Snacks unveiled a display in Herald Square in New York City to show just how much synthetic dye American kids consume each day. The display consisted of several test tubes, which may not sound like a lot. Ah, but these test tubes were’t your standard issue laboratory test tubes. They were gigantic test tubes, large enough to hold 2,000 gallons-worth of the following eight synthetic dyes that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) currently allows to be put in food and beverages:
- FD&C Blue No. 1: Used in confections, beverages, cereals, frozen dairy desserts, popsicles, frostings & icings
- FD&C Blue No. 2: Used in baked goods, cereals, snack foods, ice cream, confections, and yogurt
- FD&C Green No. 3: Used in cereal, ice cream, sherbet, drink mixers, and baked goods
- Citrus Red No. 2: Only approved for use to color orange peels
- FD&C Red No. 3: Used in confections, beverages, cereals, ice cream cones, frozen dairy desserts, popsicles, frostings & icings
- FD&C Red No. 40: Used in cereal, beverages, gelatins, puddings, dairy products, and confections
- FD&C Yellow No. 5: Used in confections, cereals, snack foods, beverages, condiments, baked goods, and yogurt
- FD&C Yellow No. 6: Used in cereals, snack foods, baked goods, gelatins, beverages, dessert powders, crackers, and sauces
Yes, every day kids in this country essentially drink 2,000 gallons of these colorfully named dyes. Talk about dying young. The only FDA-approved dye missing from this list is Orange B, which sounds a rapper name but was the dye that used to be used more frequently in the skin wrapping around hot dogs and sausage.
Stephanie Csaszar, MS, RD, CDN, a registered dietitian at KIND, described how KIND arrived at this 2,000 gallon number. They started with a study published in Clinical Pediatrics in 2014 by researchers from Purdue University (Laura J. Stevens, MS, John R. Burgess, PhD, Mateusz A. Stochelski, BS, and Thomas Kuczek, PhD).
“The study found that a child on average consumed somewhere between 100 mg to 200 mg a day of synthetic dyes,” Csaszar said. “We took the lower number and multiplied it by 74 million children based on Census data and converted it to gallons.” The 2,000 number may be an underestimate. A lot has changed in the years since the study was conducted, and Csaszar believes that the amount of dye in kids foods has “Definitely been increasing since then.”
If you want to want to completely avoid artificial food colors, you may have to stick to water and produce. In a study published in Clinical Pediatrics in 2016, Ameena Batada, DrPH, from the University of North Carolina-Asheville and Michael F. Jacobson, PhD, from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) had analyzed 810 products the were marketed to children in one grocery store in North Carolina. They found that 350 of these products (43.2%) had contained artificial colors. Produce (i.e., fresh fruits and vegetables) was the only type of food that didn’t contain any artificial colors. Not surprisingly, nearly all candies (96.3%) had artificial colors. Of note, though, most fruit-flavored snacks (94%) contained artificial coloring as well. Surprise, surprise, just because something says fruit doesn’t mean that it consists completely of fruit or even has any fruit. This may come as a shock if you thought that fruit naturally came in the shape of fruit loops cereal.
Why is KIND dying to get the word out on synthetic food dyes? As Daniel Lubetzky, founder and Executive Chairman of KIND, their Herald Square display resulted from the failure of the KIND Fruit Bites product line. “The Fruit Bites, which were made from real dried fruit, were not selling well,” he relayed. Csaszar added, “Market research showed that the problem was that they didn’t look as vibrant as other products.”
As Lubetzky explained, “This helped KIND realize that there is a very big problem. Ninety-eight percent of fruit snacks lead with sugar. They are not really fruit snacks, but instead are ‘Franken-food.’ We couldn’t compete with glow in the dark products.”
KIND had a business decision to make, either reformulate the product to look more colorful and “attractive” or pull the product line completely. “We felt that reformulating was not in line with our company’s core values, so we decided to discontinue this product but decided that we need to share this story.”
The big is question about these dyes is whether they are really to die for, meaning do they have long-term bad health effects? Such dyes are FDA-approved, which suggests that they are safe for consumption. However, a closer look reveals a relative dearth of well-conducted scientific studies. This dearth then may be “coloring” the current assessment of them. In 2010, the CSPI did compile and release a report entitled Food Dyes: A Rainbow of Risks that highlighted some concerns. The report identified studies that suggested there may be links between certain dyes and bladder, thyroid, adrenal, and testicular tumors. Then, there are those who have questioned whether food dyes may have neuro-behavioral effects on children such as Rebecca Bevans, PhD, an instructor at Western Nevada College, in the following TEDx talk:
Are these claims about the health effects of artificial food dyes justified? Again, when it comes to studying these additives, our society has done a bad dye job. There just haven’t been enough good studies. In fact, just last week, the State of California announced that they will take a closer look at the impact of food dyes of children’s.
The other concern is that food dyes are to food what photo-shopping, filters, and plastic surgery are to people, creating very unrealistic expectations about appearance expectations. Anyone used to a rainbow of colors may be disappointed to see what natural food really looks like. This can be like expecting everyone to look like Chris Hemsworth in Thor when Chris Hemsworth may not even look like Chris Hemsworth in Thor. Will kids growing up used to so-called “Franken-food” then not want to eat real food in their natural colors?
Moreover, food dyes have no nutritional value. Why, then, take on unknown risk (i.e., roll the dice) for something that doesn’t make your and your kids’ lives any better? That could be like drinking some unknown chemicals so that your toilet plunger can look prettier. Dyes may help food items get more attention, but these dyes themselves should get more attention. Much more research is needed. People should ask the question: why are these in so much of our food supply? Shouldn’t you be dying to know what the longer-term health effects of consuming all these dyes really may be?