Food Dye Bans Should Be Left to the States

By Raymond J. March. He is a Research Fellow and Director of FDAReview.org at the Independent Institute. He is a Professor of Economics at North Dakota State University.

"This January, the Food and Drug Administration announced Red Dye #3 (a synthetic food dye) must be removed from all food products by January 2027. It was a strange decision. 

Red Dye #3 has been used to make food redder since 1907. To date, Red Dye #3 has only been clinically linked to lead to cancer in lab rats—never in humans. Notwithstanding, the use of Red Dye #3 has been in decline since the late 1980s due to health-related concerns. 

This was just the beginning. 

In April, the FDA announced a more ambitious plan to phase out eight additional food dyes, with some bans coming “within the coming months.” The press release also indicates that the FDA will fast-track the authorization of four new natural color additives and work with the National Institutes of Health to study the impact of food dyes on childhood behavior. 

Banning a variety of food dyes has long been one of the top priorities for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is quoted in the same press release as saying:

These poisonous compounds offer no nutritional benefit and pose real, measurable dangers to our children’s health and development. That era is coming to an end. We’re restoring gold-standard science, applying common sense, and beginning to earn back the public’s trust. And we’re doing it by working with industry to get these toxic dyes out of the foods our families eat

RFK Jr.’s intentions are understandable. His approach of having the central government decide what products to ban and what to replace them with is anything but the “gold standard.” Instead, it’s an easy-to-replicate and repeatedly failed experiment. 

Numerous state-initiated guidelines to recommend healthy diets and provide better nutrition labels have had little success. FDA and HHS financial support and revised approval guidelines to develop nicotine replacement therapies to help patients beat nicotine addiction have gone up in smoke. 

Instead, food dye bans and regulations would be much better addressed at the state level, where many complex health decisions have been regulated without FDA involvement.

Several states and many cities began banning artificial trans-fats in 2010. The FDA did not issue a ban until 2015. Before it became federal law, 41 states enacted right-to-try laws, which grant terminally ill patients access to potentially life-saving experimental medication. Many states differ from the federally recommended vaccine schedules and provide their own. Well before RFK Jr.’s appointment, eleven states enacted legislation to remove food dyes from public school lunches and other products. California specifically banned Red Dye #3 two years ago. 

State-led efforts to address and regulate complicated health policies are far from perfect. But they can vastly outperform federal efforts with the same goals. 

Before 2016, states were tasked with regulating e-cigarette sales, including preventing retailers from selling to minors. After 2016, the FDA initiated a federal effort to prevent younger demographic vaping use from becoming an epidemic. Teenage and middle school-aged vaping rates increased afterward. 

Whether and how food dyes impact our health is a complicated question and we could easily be decades away from reaching a scientific consensus. However, any complex question in health or public policy is better addressed with experimentation and varied approaches. A federal ban provides the opposite."