FDA BANS Red Dye No. 3 — but not Red Dye No. 40?

The FDA has announced plans to ban Red Dye No. 3 in the American food supply, citing long-standing health concerns, including cancer.

“The list is long of the effects. They’ve been difficult to prove,” Hilary Kennedy of “Four-Minute Buzz” tells Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson of “Blaze News Tonight.” “But on the whole, they’ve been linked to cancer, hyperactivity in children, rage, brain buzzing, sluggishness.”

The dye isn’t just used in food but also in cough syrups.

“As if we need dye in cough syrups,” Peterson says. “It is interesting to me, like why now? Why are we doing this now? And aren’t there a lot more substances out there like this that we use all the time in our food?”

“I think people have started to realize, ‘Hey, this isn’t healthy, why is this in here?’ And one of the reasons that we are just now hearing about it is there hasn’t been a lot of testing around this,” Kennedy answers.

However, while some people are just starting to wake up, others like Senator Tommy Tuberville have been championing this cause for quite some time and questioning FDA officials over the harmful effects of Red Dye No. 3.

“Red Dye No. 3 has been known to cause cancer in cosmetics, but we still allow it to be put in our food? I don’t understand that,” Tuberville said in a January 15 hearing.

“They’ve banned it in cosmetics. So you can’t put this on your skin, yet they let us go on ingesting this for however many more decades after this,” Savage says, noting that while we’re all cheering the ban, other dyes remain.

“We can say this is a victory for red dye No. 3, but then there’s Red Dye No. 40 and Yellow No. 5 and everything,” she adds.

“That’s where this is difficult,” Kennedy says. “We can ban Red Dye No. 3, but like you said, there’s Red Dye No. 40. So they can replace it with all of these other chemicals that are not being banned.”

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