Food Dyes, Fearful Doctors, and Food-Safety Fails
Plus, the links: WeightWatchers goes bankrupt, RFK's falsehoods about autism, the food-sensitivity test to MAHA Mom pipeline, and more
Welcome to another installment of the Rethinking Wellness link roundup! Twice a month I share a small selection of links from around the internet that are relevant to the conversations we have here, along with some quick takes and occasional deeper dives for paid subscribers.
This time the takes/dives are about the FDA’s recent announcement that it would phase out synthetic food dyes, and how I’ve been thinking about one of those much-maligned dyes (Red #40) as both a health journalist and a mom. Plus, some quick thoughts about just how f*cked everything is right now, from the FDA suspending food-safety inspections to doctors being afraid to speak out against measles misinformation—and some possible ways to respond.
Links
Here are some pieces that got me thinking in the past few weeks. I found value in all of these, but links are not endorsements of every single detail in the piece or everything the writer ever wrote.
The Food Sensitivity Test to MAHA Mom Pipeline (
)Inside an anti-vaccine autism summit in the age of RFK Jr. (NBC News / Brandy Zadrozny)
WeightWatchers Prepares for Bankruptcy (WSJ)
Don’t Believe Everything You See About A.D.H.D. on TikTok (NYT)
Related: My son has autism. He deserves better than RFK Jr.'s ignorance. (Joseph Ball / Indianapolis Star)
Related: RFK Jr.'s autism study to amass medical records of many Americans (CBS News)
Controversial doc gets measles while treating unvaccinated kids—keeps working (Ars Technica)
In Case You Missed It
Why is this popular public-health nutritionist so uncritical of RFK?
Alternative Medicine Has a Patriarchy Problem - ft. Arianne Shahvisi
Vitamin D and Health Outcomes, Part 3: Diabetes and Blood Sugar
“Adrenal Fatigue” + Anti-Inflammatory Diets + Eating-Disorder Recovery with
Also: We made the Substack bestseller charts! I truly didn’t expect that, given that I’ve intentionally worked to make Rethinking Wellness a lot more nuanced and less attention-grabbing than so much of what’s out there (including my own previous work). My nerdy, wordy deep dives into scientific evidence aren’t the kind of thing that typically hits it big in this algorithm-driven media environment, but it makes me so happy to know that people are finding this content worthwhile, especially given the state of health/wellness policy and communications right now. Thanks so much for being a subscriber and supporting this work!
Takes/Dives: Red #40 and the Food-Dye Phase-Out, Food-Safety Suspension, and How Fear Helps Misinformation Spread
Red #40 and the Food-Dye Phase-Out
On Tuesday, the FDA announced that it would “phase out all petroleum-based synthetic dyes from the nation’s food supply” and fast-track their replacement with new “natural color additives.” The dyes to be removed include all of the FD&C numbered colors (Green #3, Red #40, etc.), which could be gone by the end of next year, and two other dyes with very limited applications whose authorization the FDA plans to revoke in the next few months. The agency is also requesting that food companies remove Red #3—which was already banned in January for no good reason—sooner than the previously imposed 2027-2028 deadline. Plus, at the news conference about the ban, RFK Jr. threw in the incendiary claim “sugar is poison,” which it is not.
As with the ban on Red #3, this latest move is not backed by any good evidence that artificial colorings generally cause health problems in humans at the doses typically consumed (although there does need to be further study when it comes to hyperactivity in a small subset of kids who already have ADHD). I’m not and never have been affiliated with the food, beverage, or coloring/flavoring industry, and I couldn’t care less whether they lose money as a result of these bans (though I do worry about increased costs getting passed on to consumers). But when RFK claims that synthetic food dyes are “poisonous compounds” that “pose real, measurable dangers to our children’s health and development,” he’s simply wrong—and this kind of overblown rhetoric does real, measurable damage to scientific literacy and public trust.
A good illustration of this scientifically unsupported hype is the discourse and policymaking around Red #40, which has recently been singled out by various states for school-related bans. As it happens, I’ve also been thinking a lot about that particular dye because of what’s been going on with my daughter lately, so I wanted to share some thoughts about all of that—and what I learned from my deep dive into the science.