You come back home and want a snack. As soon as you enter your pantry, you see a variety of snacks. You reach out in front of you and grab a bag of Takis or pour yourself a nice bowl of cereal. Does this sound familiar to you? It might sound harmless. After all, it’s just a snack, how much could it do to you? The answer is, not much, unless it’s a repeating pattern. Unfortunately… a majority of the “small snacks” you consume are not harmless. In fact, a lot of them include red dye. Red dye is a synthetic color additive or food dye made for petroleum. Nothing unusual yet, right?
Well, according to “npr.org” and ”clevelandandclinic.org”, red dye ”has actually had a positive correlation to cause cancer in rats”. Reading that sentence, you probably squinted or raised an eyebrow. Cancer? From red dye? You heard it right, at high doses red dye can cause cancer, especially thyroid. But that’s not the only thing. Red dye can also be linked with ADHD. According to “cspinet.org”, “Because the FDA failed to uphold its legal obligation to fully ban cancer-causing additives, Red 3 remained permitted in foods, supplements, and oral drugs more than 34 years later.” This shows that red dye is so serious… that the FDA tried banning it.
After reading this informative piece… what do you think about red dye? Or a better question: What do you think about foods that contain red dye? Of course eating a bag of Takis won’t give you cancer, but a high and continuous dose could. Whether you eat foods with red dye or not I will leave up to you. But I hope this article helped inform you of the dangers of red dye!