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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: banning artificial food dyes.

Nestle, General Mills, and Heinz say they are phasing them out of all of their products. And Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pushing for a nationwide ban on synthetic food dyes.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: The FDA has wrestled with this issue since its earliest days. So why are companies removing them now, and is it really the health victory Kennedy says it is?

WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

BILL SABO: You can just tell when kids have artificial colors.

MARY MUNCY: Bill Sabo founded Newport Flavors, which specializes in natural flavors and colors. He took artificial dyes out of his company’s offerings because he says he saw the effects of artificial ingredients personally in the kids he used to coach.

SABO: They all had a Gatorade to drink during break. But this boy, especially when he would drink that blue Gatorade, we lost him.

The boy wouldn’t be able to focus on the game and would start annoying the other players.

SABO: So I went back into the lab and I created a drink, which we still sell to this day.

When he started offering that instead of Gatorade, he says all of the boys’ behaviors changed for the better.

So he and his wife started taking as much artificial dye out of their family’s diet as possible, and Sabo started making the switch to natural colors and flavors in his company too.

SABO: We started embracing things like cherries for red color and hibiscus flowers for red color, and beets and turmeric for orange and an annatto for yellow.

Natural dyes are a little harder to work with. They’re more affected by the acidity of the food you’re trying to dye, usually have a shorter shelf life, and many don’t tolerate heat as well.

It’s not a simple science either. If you crush a bunch of blueberries, you’ll find their guts are actually reddish-purple, but if you put them in something alkaline like muffin mix:

SABO: It instantly turns blue. And when you bake that blueberry, the entire blueberry turns blue.

Sabo thinks that companies are open to switching now because more Americans are starting to think like him, avoiding foods with synthetic dyes.

THE NATIONAL DESK: Kraft-Heinz announcing today it will remove artificial dyes from US products by the end of 2027.

WE ARE IOWA LOCAL 5 NEWS: Nestle says it will soon eliminate artificial colors from its US foods an beverages by the middle of next year.

CHANNEL 3000: Welches is the latest of several major companies to announce it’s eliminating artificial food dyes.

He thinks that if consumers continue to be activists with their money, companies will keep changing.

And this isn’t the first time synthetic dyes have been under scrutiny.

JERRY MANDE: They've been controversial almost from 1906 when the FDA got its start.

Jerry Mande is CEO of Nourish Science and adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard. He’s also worked with the Food and Drug Administration. When the FDA first started, companies were using hundreds of food dyes, some with lead and arsenic in them. Within a few years, the FDA had cut the number of allowed dyes down to around ten. Ones that were less harmful and determined to be safe for human consumption. But Mande says they only knew so much about the chemicals and their long-term effects.

MANDE: If something is an additive, a chemical, a color, and you eat it, you're going to get sick right away, and it could maybe even kill you. That's something you can know within days. Then the question becomes, what about an additive that you're going to feed somebody over their lifetime? You know? What about that? How do you determine the safety?

Right now, there are nine FDA-approved artificial dyes in the American diet… and the agency recently approved three natural dyes. But that’s too many synthetics for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: We are going to, we're going to get rid of the dyes and one by one, we're going to get rid of every ingredient and additive in, in food that we can legally address.

California, Virginia, and West Virginia have passed laws limiting almost every synthetic dye, and 23 other states have proposed some regulations on the additive.

Mande thinks these laws will have a big effect because companies won’t want to reformulate a food just for a few states, and they can’t just stop using dyes altogether.

MANDE: We choose food, and find it delicious or not, based on the colors and flavors. And so colors have always been kind of a key interest in a way to make food seem more attractive and delicious.

Mande says that’s why artificial colors are so prominent in ultra-processed food—that’s basically any food that you can’t make in your kitchen.

MANDE: In my work, in the years in government, visiting countless food factories and watching food made, you know, I noticed a shift. At one point. I see the raw ingredients that went into the food that they were processing. Now, when you go into a factory, I don't recognize anything as food.

He thinks these “consumables” are a bigger threat than artificial dyes because people tend to overeat them—leading to obesity.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. agrees.

KENNEDY: There's no one ingredient that accounts for the child chronic disease epidemic. And let's be honest. Taking petroleum based food dyes out of the food supply is not a silver bullet that will instantly make America's children healthy. But it is one important step.

So while Mande doesn’t see artificial dyes as the biggest threat to Americans’ health, he does think removing them may make these foods less attractive to consumers.

But not everyone agrees with Mande. Marion Nestle is a retired professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health.

NESTLE: I'm happy to be getting rid of them, but I think if they really want to make America's children healthy again, they have to get restrictions on marketing to children.

TRIX COMMERCIAL, RABBIT: A circus, and they have Trix! Yikes! Going down.

KIDS: Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!

She says a single mom working two jobs can only resist a begging child for so long. Not to mention, these foods are typically cheap and quick to prepare.

So far the FDA has maintained that while some people may have problems with dyes, they’re generally safe to consume. But it's undeniable that they cause clear harm to at least some people and a growing body of research suggests it’s a much bigger issue than many in the FDA and food industry have been willing to admit.

For now, Nestle says if you’re that overworked parent trying to keep artificial dyes out of your child’s diet, start by trying to get them to eat what you eat.

NESTLE: Try to feed kids as relatively unprocessed foods as they're willing to eat, and you have the patience for getting them to eat, kids will develop tastes for healthy food. If given the opportunity. But that takes work, and it takes a great deal of patience. If you, as an individual, are trying to feed your child healthfully, you are fighting an entire food system on your own. That's a lot to ask.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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