570
Newsom signs bill to make California first state in nation to ban "toxic" food additives
(www.latimes.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
570 points (98.3% liked)
News
23305 readers
5390 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The bromate ingredients are only dangerous if the factory fucked up during production as well. If they're doing their job correctly, there is no bromate in your food.
It's sort of like how you don't have to worry about food poisoning from chicken when it's cooked through, even though it's not recommended to risk eating the raw stuff.
No idea about the other two banned ingredients, but the risk seems pretty low for these at least. I wouldn't bother throwing food away over their presence, personally, but that's just me.
Edit: too tired
"The bromate ingredients are only dangerous if the factory fucked up during production as well. If they're doing their job correctly, there is no bromine in your food."
Idk if that's true or not so not commenting on that portion. However, "I wouldn't bother throwing food away over their presence, personally, but that's just me." We all have different risk tolerances so that's fine. What isn't fine is that the FDA makes a practice of taking corporate bribes, allowing flawed or outright manipulated studies, etc and then suddenly approving foods, additives, drugs, that are known or strongly suspected to be unsafe. For example, Donald Rumsfeld (sound familiar?) was a food company exec who really really wanted aspartame approved but they were having trouble getting through the approval process because it wasn't easily demonstrable that the product was safe. Rumsfeld gets added to Ronald Reagan's transition team and suddenly it's approved. Scary stuff. It's been approved in other countries so mayyyybe it's fine but the history of its approval is appalling and simply proves that the FDA isn't always looking out for the best interest of society at large. So if a state like CA steps in and says "holy shit don't eat this", I'm listening.
One source: "Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president January 21, 1981. Rumsfeld, while still CEO at Searle, was part of Reagan's transition team. This team hand-picked Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., to be the new FDA commissioner. Dr. Hayes, a pharmacologist, had no previous experience with food additives before being appointed director of the FDA. On January 21, 1981, the day after Ronald Reagan's inauguration, Reagan issued an executive order eliminating the FDA commissioners' authority to take action and Searle re-applied to the FDA for approval to use aspartame in food sweetener. Hayes, Reagan's new FDA commissioner, appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the board of inquiry's decision. It soon became clear that the panel would uphold the ban by a 3-2 decision. So Hayes installed a sixth member on the commission, and the vote became deadlocked. He then personally broke the tie in aspartame's favor."
Yeah, corruption isn't fine. I don't live on that continent though, so, I'm afraid I can't help you out much with Donald Rumsfeld. I just like accuracy in my science and proportionate anxiety about risks.
No worries, Donald Rumsfeld is dead now. He did a LOT of damage to the rest of the world before he kicked it though. He was the US Secretary of Defense for George W Bush.
Yes, I remember not being upset by the news of his passing.
And now we have a wealth of resources confirming that aspartame is indeed safe, so I'm not sure why this story is relevant.
https://www.wcrf.org/latest/news-and-updates/statement-on-aspartame/