The FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, is the only organization that makes all decisions regarding the food we consume in the United States. The FDA was created in 1906 by Theodore Roosevelt and Harvey Washington Wiley to enforce the Pure Food and Drug Act, which was passed because of concerns about the safety and quality of food and drugs.
Today, Martin A. Makary is the face of the FDA. He makes many final decisions on the food you eat in your everyday life. In America, a lot of our food has ingredients that we can’t even pronounce. Some of these ingredients we don’t bat an eye at are currently banned or heavily regulated in other countries.
Take Skittles, for example, one of their many ingredients is Titanium Dioxide. According to usrtk.org, Titanium Dioxide is banned in the European Union (EU) and France for a good reason; it is banned because studies have shown that it has been linked to health risks related to the gut, including intestinal inflammation and alterations to the gut’s microbiota, and more.
This is not the only ingredient in our foods that we should be worried about. Some ingredients you should be looking for include Brominated Vegetable Oil (BVO), Potassium Bromate, and Azodicarbonamide. These things are in name-brand food items and foods you may consume on a daily basis.
The food in the European Union (EU) is more regulated than in America. For example, in the EU, all products that contain Red 40 must include a warning label that states that the dye may have “adverse effects on activity and attention in children.” In America, on the other hand, there is no regulation requiring any sort of warning on foods that contain it. While the EU didn’t outright ban Red 40, some countries did. Norway, Austria, and some other areas of the EU have already banned Red 40.
These ingredients can affect our health in many ways. According to cdc.org, in the United States, there were 1,777,566 new cases of cancer that were reported in 2022. However, when we compare those numbers to those of the EU, they only account for one-fifth of the global cases, according to acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com.
Although this doesn’t have a direct tie to the food we consume or the ingredients that are in that food, it still raises the question. How can we avoid this in our daily diet? If you want to avoid ingredients that could potentially be bad for you, you can look for alternatives to these known ingredients, including BVO and Red 40. For BVO, you should look for good alternatives like sucrose acetate isobutyrate and glycerol ester of wood rosin. As for Red 40, look for safe alternatives like beetroot juice, carmine, paprika, or pomegranate juice.
We should look into what we eat to keep our bodies safe and healthy. Keep this in mind the next time you buy food at the grocery store.
