Do You Want Cancer with your Candy?

Today at school pickup I found both of my kids lined up at the infernal ice cream truck that shows up and parks in front of the school when the weather warms.  They had just purchased a product from Popsicle called "Shots."

I bluntly told the kids that they will get cancer if they continue to eat things with artificial colours.  Yeah, okay, I admit that I was guilty of a bit of frothing at the mouth over the top mommyism, but there was some truth there.  When I got home, I did some research on this.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest says that food dyes pose the risk of cancer, hyperactivity in children, and allergies.

The three most widely used dyes, Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6, are contaminated with known carcinogens, says CSPI. Another dye, Red 3, has been acknowledged for years by the Food and Drug Administration to be a carcinogen, yet is still in the food supply.

Despite those concerns, each year manufacturers pour about 15 million pounds of eight synthetic dyes into our foods. Per capita consumption of dyes has increased five-fold since 1955, thanks in part to the proliferation of brightly colored breakfast cereals, fruit drinks, and candies pitched to children.

“These synthetic chemicals do absolutely nothing to improve the nutritional quality or safety of foods, but trigger behavior problems in children and, possibly, cancer in anybody,” said CSPI executive director Michael F. Jacobson, co-author of the 58-page report, “Food Dyes: A Rainbow of Risks.” “The Food and Drug Administration should ban dyes, which would force industry to color foods with real food ingredients, not toxic petrochemicals.”

Blue 1, Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6 have long been known to cause allergic reactions in some people. CSPI says that while those reactions are not common, they can be serious and provide reason enough to ban those dyes. Furthermore, numerous studies have demonstrated that dyes cause hyperactivity in children.

But the biggest concern is cancer. Back in 1985, the acting commissioner of the FDA said that Red 3, one of the lesser-used dyes, “has clearly been shown to induce cancer” and was “of greatest public health concern.” However, Secretary of Agriculture John R. Block pressed the Department of Health and Human Services not to ban the dye, and he apparently prevailed—notwithstanding the Delaney Amendment that forbids the use of in foods of cancer-causing color additives. Each year about 200,000 pounds of Red 3 are poured into such foods as Betty Crocker’s Fruit Roll-Ups and ConAgra’s Kid Cuisine frozen meals. Since 1985 more than five million pounds of the dye have been used.

Tests on lab animals of Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6 showed signs of causing cancer or suffered from serious flaws, said the consumer group. Yellow 5 also caused mutations, an indication of possible carcinogenicity, in six of 11 tests.

In addition, according to the report, FDA tests show that the three most-widely used dyes, Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6, are tainted with low levels of cancer-causing compounds, including benzidine and 4-aminobiphenyl in Yellow 5. However, the levels actually could be far higher, because in the 1990s the FDA and Health Canada found a hundred times as much benzidine in a bound form that is released in the colon, but not detected in the routine tests of purity conducted by the FDA.

I decided to look up Red 40 at a helpful website of the same name and find out if it was in any of the foods that my family eats.  Unfortunately, it was, including the Popsicle brand, although "shots" were not mentioned.  It did list other frozen treats by Popsicle that are brightly coloured.

Here are some of the foods we sometimes eat in our family that contain Red 40:

Froot Loops (We eat it only on vacations)
McCormick Food Colours (not sure whether this is the brand we buy)
Sprinkles (on Tim Horton's doughnuts and Purdy's ice cream)
Twizzlers (at the theatre)
Starburst
M&Ms
Skittles
Candy Canes
Bubbalicious
Trident
Smarties
Minute Maid Orange Soda
Schweppes Raspberry Gingerale
Gatorade Fruit Punch
Lipton Brisk Iced Tea
Ocean Spray Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice
Kraft Barbecue Sauce
Kraft Catalina Dressing
Frito Lay Doritos
Betty Crocker Fruit by the Foot (A&W kids' packs)
Hershey's Strawberry Syrup
Kellogg's Nutrigrain Cereal Bars
Jell-O Instant Pudding Chocolate
Mott's Fruitsation Apple Sauce Strawberry
Children's Tylenol Cold Liquid Grape
Bayer Children's Flintstones Multivitamin
Centrum Performance Multivitamin

That was only one of the potential cancer causing food dyes.  What about the rest of them?

Moral of the story:

Avoid buying processed foods, drinks, and drugs.