California became the first state in the nation to prohibit four food additives found in popular cereal, soda, candy and drinks after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a ban on them Saturday.
The California Food Safety Act will ban the manufacture, sale or distribution of brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben and red dye No. 3 — potentially affecting 12,000 products that use those substances, according to the Environmental Working Group.
The legislation was popularly known as the “Skittles ban” because an earlier version also targeted titanium dioxide, used as a coloring agent in candies including Skittles, Starburst and Sour Patch Kids, according to the Environmental Working Group. But the measure, Assembly Bill 418, was amended in September to remove mention of the substance.
There is the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and normally that’s their purview, but they’re probably a bit more lax and industry-friendly, so more likely to let that stuff slide. California is a bit more progressive and health-conscious, and they’re a big enough market that when they say they’re gonna ban something, it essentially becomes banned for everybody else. Businesses won’t develop CA and non-CA products, they’ll just rework whatever it is to conform with CA’s demands.
The FDA did step in I believe when states starting talking about introducing different labeling standards and having different requirements for what needed to be called out, because it would’ve turned into a nightmare if you had to manage 50 different sets of labeling requirements.
If the FDA let’s industry produce toxic food that gives people cancer then I’d argue that the FDA is useless.
It’s just a other agency that is paid off by corporations to look the other way so they can continue exploiting Americans for massive gains.
There’s a long road between “you’ve put lead in your pasta as a sweetener!” and “you’ve but XYS-32 in your candy and it may cause cancer eventually.”
The FDA is much more concerned with immediate and serious threats and is still very much necessary.
Nothing is that black and white.
The FDA was created to enforce standards of sanitation and prevent false advertising in medicine (e.g. snake oil). The whole, “banning toxic additives” came later after science started understanding physiological dependence and addictive substances (e.g. actual coke in Coca-Cola).
Really, the FDA is an evolution of a lot of preceding government bodies and there’s a lot of history involved that they don’t cover in school 🤷