FOOD TO DYE FOR!

This is a great cartoon from NaturalNews.com about the food and drug industries and the mega-power entity which brings them both together called the FDA (shouldn't food and drugs be separated like church and state?). Click on the small image to see it up close and personal.

Do you know what is actually in the food you feed yourself and your kids. Try this great write-up by Shula Edelkind from The Feingold Association on for size:

The current official FDA page on colorings is at http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/col-regu.html and states the following in its third paragraph under the heading Historical Perpectives:

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By 1900, many foods, drugs, and cosmetics available in the U.S. were artificially colored. However, not all of the coloring agents were harmless and some were being used to hide inferior or defective foods.

A careful assessment of the chemicals used for coloring foods at the time found many blatantly poisonous materials such as lead, arsenic, and mercury being added. In many cases, the toxicities of the starting materials for synthesizing coloring agents were well known and could be toxins, irritants, sensitizers, or carcinogens.
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It is now more than 100 years later.  Let's take this one sentence at a time.

"...and some were being used to hide inferior or defective foods."

Coloring is STILL used to hide inferior or defective foods.  In case you haven't thought about it before, take a look at ... oh ... let's say Kellogg's Blueberry Pop Tarts, advertised as a healthy breakfast.  Look at the ingredients on the back.  Notice that powdered blueberries (yum?) are listed as "2% or less" of the ingredients.  Oh, yes, there is more fruit; there are also (under 2% each) powdered apples and powdered grapes, probably because apples and grapes are cheaper than blueberries. The nice blue color and yummy texture you think are mashed blueberries is actually gelatin, four different listings of sugar, oil, starch, artificial blueberry flavoring, and enough Red #40, Blue #1, and Blue #2 to make a nice blueberry color.   

Now you know blueberries are blue.  And they taste like blueberries.  So why do they need to be colored and flavored?  Because they don't put enough real blueberries in the product and they need to make you think that they did. If you don't call that "hiding inferior or defective foods," then what is it?

Back to 1900:

" A careful assessment ... found many blatantly poisonous materials such as lead, arsenic, and mercury"

Makes you think that today the FDA would never allow such things in your food, right?  Wrong.  The synthetic food dyes today actually do contain all three of these "blatantly poisonous materials" but although they were "blatantly poisonous" in 1900, they are apparently "safe" in 2008.

You can see amounts of these contaminants allowed in each color at http://www.feingold.org/Research/color.html   ... and note that the D&C colors (used for drugs and cosmetics) often allow twice the level of lead.

According to studies, the amounts of benzidine (a carcinogenic chemical also found in food coloring) actually found in commercial samples of Tartrazine is sometimes up to 200 times the allowed amount.  No published studies seem to look at the amount of lead, mercury and arsenic actually present in the "certified" colorings.  And according to the FDA itself, they get paid for every pound certified (not, apparently, for every pound tested) ... in their nice buildings built by the food industry. Get the picture?

Last, in 1900, the FDA says:

"... toxicities of the starting materials for synthesizing coloring agents were well known and could be toxins, irritants,  sensitizers, or carcinogens."

Today they are mostly made from petroleum. Need I say more?

Moving forward in their own history, they say that the Color Additive Amendments of 1960 were written because "many children became ill" after eating Halloween candy containing 1-2% FD&C Orange #1."  They put the additives on an "interim" status and spent the next 40 years slowly deciding to list half of them permanently. 

Look again at the dates.  The kids got sick (how?) in 1950.  The FDA took ten (10) years to decide to think about it.  And then they took the next forty (40) years to decide what to do about each coloring.  They are not finished, either, since the type of color chemicals called "lakes" are still only provisionally listed and their decision is still pending.  But they are in your food ... you can see them listed. What have they been doing for 40 years?  Wandering in the Sinai?

And one more thing.  They are not testing them for behavioral effect; they have spent 40 years trying to decide whether they cause cancer ... knowing, of course, that some of their ingredients are clearly known as carcinogens.

See 74 studies on the food dyes (including a few on flavorings) at http://www.feingold.org/Research/dye.html

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[OneHealthyGirl.com]

Call for Ban on Eight Dangerous Food Dyes in U.S. Foods

http://www.naturalnews.com/024283.html