WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Banning red food dye is not going to save childrenR
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As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. navigates Capitol Hill this week to meet with senators about his nomination to head up the Department of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration, there will be a lot of conversation about ways to “make America healthy again.” Unfortunately, people should brace for a flurry of articles using the language “linked to” to imply a direct connection between certain foods, additives, and dyes and poor health outcomes. It’s a common form of misdirection media love to use to stoke fear and limit people’s choices.
In 2023, there was a period of several weeks dedicated by the media to the supposed dangers of aspartame, based on a classification by an affiliate of the World Health Organization that declared aspartame “possibly carcinogenic.” The report kickstarted a frenzy to ban the common artificial sweetener deemed safe for consumption by the United States, Canada, and the European Union that would terrify any casual consumer of diet sodas.
It shouldn’t. The research on aspartame’s “link” to cancer hinges on an individual consumer weighing 132 pounds and drinking 12 to 36 cans of diet soda in one day to reach the threshold for meaningful risk.
You have to be voluntarily consuming far more than the reasonable or recommended serving. When studies such as this are done, the obvious media subtitle is going to be “aspartame linked to cancer.”
Such is the case for red dye No. 3, which has long faced the same genre of media coverage.
Consider USA Today, which reported on “concerns that the food dye is linked to cancer and behavioral problems in children.” Only later in the report does the reader learn that cancers only appeared in rats who were given abnormally high doses of the additive as part of FDA-required testing.
In 2022, the Center For Science in the Public Interest issued a press release titled “FDA says it causes cancer. Yet it’s in hundreds of candies” about red dye No. 3 before specifying that no cancer was found in human beings — only animals.
The other popular claim recycled throughout the media about red dye No. 3 is that it causes hyperactivity and ADHD in children. Click into USA Today’s source for the “link” to “hyperactivity” and it’s a story about Fast & Furious actress Eva Mendes expressing dismay over food dyes being banned in Europe and not in the U.S. That same story adds, “Scientists can’t say for sure that there is a proven link, but food dye opponents often point to concurrent rises in artificial coloring consumption and rising ADHD diagnostic rates among children.”
“Linked” is shorthand for a study somewhere in the world concluding, whether accurately or inaccurately, a relationship between an ingredient and a health condition.