News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on US Will Ban Cancer-Linked Red Dye No. 3 in Cereal and Other Foods. Parent comment

Re:US Will Ban Cancer-Linked Red Dye No. 3 in Cereal and Oth... by ninininino on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @11:19AM (#42712855)
No, you assign a risk score as well as a cost score to all the industrial inputs that you can use. In this case, there are readily available red food dyes (eg cochineal from industrially farmed insects) that have much lower risk scores (as they are from plant and animal sources) and not significantly different cost scores.

You also need to ask, what is the cost of not having this substance? In this case, the cost would be - you have food that isn't red. Is that a substantial problem for society?

To treat these as irrelevant and boil it down to "prove it is harmful or shut up" is needlessly reductive.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:US Will Ban Cancer-Linked Red Dye No. 3 in Cereal and Oth... by SketchySeaBeast on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @11:48AM (#42713368)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:US Will Ban Cancer-Linked Red Dye No. 3 in Cereal and Oth... by parineum on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @11:52AM (#42713452)
> 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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:US Will Ban Cancer-Linked Red Dye No. 3 in Cereal and Oth... by ninininino on Thursday January 23, 2025 @01:31PM (#42806576)
No, the bias towards natural isn't because of appeal to nature, it's because we co-evolved and we'd know by now if red insect dye is carcinogenic compared to a new synthetic dye that hasn't had decades of interaction with humans. We have a longer time window of prior experience with the older, natural ingredient.

We could be creating something as dangerous as asbestos artificially.

[ Parent | on HN ]