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MOD: In light of reports related to homeopathy:
There is a studied and demonstrated harm associated with homeopathy. However, claims made in ignorance of this will not be removed as misinformation at this time.
Read more: Adverse effects of homeopathy: a systematic review of published case reports and case series | 2012
Anyone want to take bets on how long until right wing influencers start talking about how Red No 3 cures COVID/cancer/brainworms and how the government is trying to take it away because of how good it is, while posting a video of themselves chugging gallons of it on TikTok to own the libs?
Anyone want to take bets on how long…
Longer than it took for someone to jump in here and make an off topic politically based comment.
Well, you have to make the bets before the thing happens, so….
They have until 2027?
Lmao, we know this is bad but what’s another 2yrs going to hurt…
If the ban was effective immediately a bunch of things would have to be pulled from shelves and that would impact everything from Acetaminophen to Maraschino cherries to some vegetarian faux-meats. There’s over 9,000 (lol) products across a wide number of industries that use Red 3.
Your comment prompted me to lookup when red 3 started to be used in food, but I couldn’t find anything. Can’t find who discovered it or when it was discovered either, weird. (There are claims but none with a credible source)
Sure. Ban Red Dye No. 3, but let’s allow all the homeopathic bullshit we want because hey why regulate that stuff? They just give it to kids.
I agree with you, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is barely “the good.”
A 1990 study concluded that “chronic erythrosine ingestion may promote thyroid tumor formation in rats via chronic stimulation of the thyroid by TSH.” with 4% of total daily dietary intake consisting of erythrosine B.[10] A series of toxicology tests combined with a review of other reported studies concluded that erythrosine is non-genotoxic and any increase in tumors is caused by a non-genotoxic mechanism.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythrosine#Safety
Humans are not rats and no one is eating that much Red Dye No. 3 a day.
From reading about it, it’s really a risk/reward call. Red 3 has no nutritional or flavor-enhancing purpose. It’s just a decoration, so why take any risk, however small?
Because this took a hell of a lot of time and effort and taxpayer money that the FDA could have spent on so many other more important things.
They do more than one thing at a time. It isn’t like all other evaluations stopped to look at red dye #3.
They have a limited amount of time and resources. What was spent on this could have been spent on something more dangerous.
Why are you complaining about the FDA doing their job, rather than the large corps that likely lobbied to avoid this and make it much harder for them?
They banned it in cosmetics in 1990, it seems pretty obvious that if it’s unsafe for the outside of our body it shouldn’t be inside either.
They’re a troll. Don’t waste your time.
If they were doing their job, they would remove dangerous “herbal” remedies people are giving to their kids and hurting or even killing them, not something that has a small chance of causing cancer if you feed a shit ton of it to a rat.
As I showed to someone else, it took ten years for the FDA to get a company to voluntarily recall a product that was causing seizures in hundreds of babies. https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/13/homeopathy-tablets-recall/
That’s a deflection, not an answer
I’d be curious about what the cost actually is?
Right so I mean—the cost of research and analysis and the entire process of determining the possible risks is money that simply must be spent either way, even on products that are ultimately deemed suitable for market. That’s the entire purpose of the FDA, to find these things out.
So we’re really just looking at the costs associated with the ban itself. Such as the labor hours of FDA employees setting it up? Communicating it to people? I agree with your concerns I’m just trying to get a sense of what we actually spent to arrive here
I can’t give you numbers, but it’s a federal regulation. A lot of reports have to get written and a lot of research has to be done, especially in the field of federal regulation as a whole, which is so insane that we literally have no idea how many federal laws there are. And then all of that documentation has to be read by other people and approved all the way up the chain. So we are talking a lot of people’s time and effort (which translates into taxpayer money) that could have better been spent on things which are causing active harm.
I’ve genuinely never seen someone play Devil’s advocate for a food dye of all things.
I’m not playing Devil’s Advocate, I’m saying this is a really minor good in the greater scheme of things and I imagine the cost and time breakdown in terms of what it took to accomplish took a lot away from other, more important things.
Doesn’t really matter since food dye is completely unimportant. Candy, cakes, and other foods will taste exactly the same without Red #3.
Better to eliminate any potential risks to ourselves and our pets/livestock than keep it around so Big Company can get better sales with their bright red whatever.
You willing to apply that logic to every unnecessary decoration in your life?
I mean, yeah. Potentially harmful but otherwise useless materials? I try to reduce those whatever possible.
That painting on the wall could potentially fall and break in a hazardous way. The point is: regulation for its own sake is theater and it’s impossible to account for every conceivable risk. If a product is plausibly harmful under normal usage, sure. If it causes cancer when force-fed to rats in impossible proportions? Leave it be, study further perhaps.
Well, to be fair, the painting ostensively offers a somewhat unique artistic value. There is a reward to go with the risk.
Red 3 is simply a way to make things red, which we have tons of other ways of doing that don’t have any known risks
There’s a reason that paint doesn’t have lead in it anymore.
Studies have also indicated this dye (and others) could cause hyperactivity and similar problems in children.
Any easy way to figure out 4% as grams in a human diet?
Assuming a person eats ~1.8kg of food per day, that would be ~72 grams. Basing that math off of a number I had heard previously stating that adults eat anywhere from 3-5lbs of food daily.
I bet we could tell who is eating 70+grams of Erythrosine by their color.
Thanks, I was wondering what was wrong with it.
Don’t worry, the republicans will complain about a war on red and it will be available again.
At least homeopathic anything is not directly harmful in the context of ingesting it, because it contains no active ingredient.
It’s only harmful in that people don’t understand that it’s bullshit and therefore believe that it works, and might skip actual effective treatment for whatever their ailment is in favor of cheaper (and totally ineffective) homeopathic whatever-the-hell. For that reason it should at least be regulated to the extent of having a big neon warning sticker on it that says, “This product is completely ineffective and accomplishes nothing other than setting your money on fire.”
I’m all for outlawing it from a consumer advocacy standpoint because it’s a scam, but otherwise it’s just expensive water.
Except that it’s ridiculously unregulated and it’s not even actually “homeopathic” half the time, it contains actual pharmaceuticals or even just straight up poison.
Here’s an example. It took ten years for the FDA to get this company to do a voluntary recall despite their product giving babies seizures.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/13/homeopathy-tablets-recall/
I’m amazed people aren’t aware of this stuff.
Yeah, that’s ridiculous.
Just slapping a “homeopathy” label on something with no oversight can’t be an automatic dodge-all to regulation. If Hershey needs to prove what they put in a candy bar, anyone hawking homeopathic products should need to prove what they put in there as well.
That’s the neat thing… They don’t. Hershey can claim anything new is “generally recognized as safe” and skip all that. It was meant to grandfather in actual foodstuff, but it left a loophole that’s frequently used to put in all sorts of substances not proven to be harmful
Homeopathic bullshit has no negative effect, it’s literally just water and sugar. As long as they are not prescription pills, the FDA does not regulate them because they are merely false advertising and not actually dangerous.
When done properly, it is just water. Hyland made some homeopathic teething tablets about a decade ago that used too much belladonna which killed several kids and paralyzed a few more because they did not dilute it to nothing.
That’s just murder and pretty sure the FDA pulled those.
Why was it allowed to get to market in the first place? Why were they allowed to use belladonna at all ( a known poison) without oversight?
Because Orrin Hatch pushed the “supplements” act back in the 1990s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_Education_Act_of_1994
Ah, so typical american ignorance
In a way. We’re not all stupid, I promise. Though the billionaires keep trying to make us all ignorant. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hatch or his relatives were heavily invested in the industry at the time. Keep in mind the US isn’t the only country that sells homeopathic bullshit.
Belladonna has actual medical use tho. It’s applied to dilate the pupils, so maybe they declared it wrong?
Yup, and I still think that any use of belladonna should have oversight from regulatory and medical professionals due to the fact that if you fuck up bad enough you (or others) die.
That’s like saying fire extinguishers filled with nothing but air are just false advertising. People have died taking these “treatments” when actual professional medical care would have saved them.
It would be more akin to fire extinguishers filled with air. It doesn’t accelerate illnesses any more than doing absolutely fucking nothing would.
A fire extinguisher filled with air can make a fire much larger.
That wasn’t a rebuttal, it was an admission of ignorance.
Only if the air is compressed. If you fill a fire extinguisher with literally just air, nothing happens if you pressed the nozzle. Everyone but you understood that. But it’s pointless to even type this as you already made up your mind, champ. Feel free to think you are a big mind.
Point in case: the dude I “rebutted” against (lol) agreed that their initial comparison (a fire extinguisher filled with gasoline) was not appropriate.
If we’re talking regular atmospheric air that has oxygen in it, blowing air can absolutely amplify a flame by providing oxygen to replace air that has already been burned. It’s very common to blow on camp fires to add heat, for example.
Needs to be pressurized. Else nothing happens (as in homeopathy where nothing happens; not sure what is hard to understand here honestly). I know how a fire works. But whatever, I’m done with this comment chain.
I wished I wouldn’t live on this planet anymore. Fuck all y’all.
Not being able to put out a fire isn’t the absence of a negative effect. It allows the fire to grow larger. Which is a negative effect.
Yeah I made an edit literally exactly same time as your comment as I thought about it.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t force people to seek legitimate medical help if they don’t want to.
Yeah, but you can regulate misinformation at best, or at worst intentional disinformation, which is what’s made these people think its a legitimate path in the first llace.
That’s the way homeopathic nonsense is supposed to work. Unfortunately bullshit like this isn’t regulated properly so it often ends up being dangerous.
They are actually dangerous in the sense that people believe they are buying medicine when they are not, and therefore do not receive proper, actual life saving treatment.
It doesn’t help when this crap is legitimized by being sold in actual drug stores like Walgreens.
Often right next to real medicine.
Homeopathy convinces people to take a mixture that has no active ingredient instead of one that can affect what they’re sick with. If it’s a cold, eh whatever. If it’s cancer, that’s incredibly dangerous.
Who numbers all these dyes anyway?
Interesting question… After a small amount of research.
The FDA in the US and the INS globally. The number is just a sequential identifier, i.e., red #3 was approved before red #5.
EU too. It’s E127 there.
No. 2
Who does No. 2 work for?
That’s right, buddy. You show that turd who’s boss.
No. 1
🤯🤯🤯
To be reversed by Tuesday.
We need more concrete changes.
I thought Red No. 5 was the bad one. I feel like I remember that from somewhere.
Yellow 5.
Rumors of it killing sperm back in the days of Surge.
Surge. Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.
Oh no! What about Big Red?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNMq3-mN0JU
EDIT: It’s OK, we still have Red 40
Don’t worry. It’ll be back on the menu in six days.
