Finally, CA is acting on these unhealthy lab products masquerading as food. Only last year, CA signed into law an upcoming (2027) ban on brominated vegetable oil (BVO), potassium bromate, propylparaben, and Red 3.
Now, the FDA just last month revoked regulations allowing the use of BVO in food. It's been banned in most EU countries since 1970!
Regulatory capture at work. The FDA doesn't work for the tax payer anymore.
Our regs would look a lot like Euro regs if they did. Glyphosate, BVO, titanium dioxide (taste the rainbow!), all artificial transfats, hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oils, ractopamine (pig feed), pink slime, yellow 5, yellow 6, red 4,5,6, and 40, rBGH / rBST (growth hormone for cows), chlorine baths for chicken, atrazine (have some birth defects with your corn)... and the list goes on.
All of those things are used in U.S. foodstuffs, which is why so many U.S. food exports are banned in Europe and elsewhere. They're not good enough, or actively harmful. We have food science on these items going back many decades, but Monstanto (now Bayer?) and Dow Chemical throw millions of dollars around to ensure their chemicals still get used on U.S. crops.
CA law can be overly picky about a lot of things, but health and safety is one area where they're the good kind of picky.
I quit artificial food colouring and it’s greatly improved my diet. It turns out many unhealthy foods try to use colour to hijack good decision making.
I've extensively looked into the research on the dyes themselves and it's all incredibly suspect. There are a lot of low quality studies as well as a lot of correlation between food dyes and things like income and electronic use and etc. I don't personally believe any of the supposed health risks of modern colorings are worth the worry.
But ironically, the whole point of food coloring is to create strong emotional responses with a minimum amount of ingredients. So psychosomatic feelings from kids and parents... is kind of the point! The health effect of the ingredient could mostly be irrelevant.
So I think the case to ban artificial colors on the grounds of manipulation is stronger than it is purely health.
That kind of blanket statement is not only factually wrong, it does no one any good.
Almost all food consumed in the world is mass produced, and most staple foods (rice, grain) have been mass produced for centuries now. While we've increased automation in some things, using a robotic metal arm to harvest grain doesn't change anything about how healthy the grain is.
Now what sorts of pesticides are used can change things, but being "organic" doesn't change this, as some of the initial (early 2000s) organic pesticides were found to be horrifically toxic. Each substance applied to food needs to be judged on its own.
The real problem with food designed for mass consumption (different than mass produced!) is that it is engineered to be hyper palatable, so people want to eat more of it. Think potato chips (very few people ever open a bag of chips and have a reasonable number!) or any other "snack" food. Individually the ingredients may be safe (in moderation, and note that plenty of "healthy" foods are bad for you in excess), but when packaged together in a way that encourages over-consumption (and then backed by an ad campaign that does the same), negative health effects start to appear.
And FWIW plenty of "highly processed" foods are healthy, the issue once again comes down to most foods in the highly processed category also being engineered to encourage over-consumption. However things like whey protein are highly processed and healthy.
All that said, eating nothing from a bag or a box or a restaurant will generally improve a person's health, but that is largely due to the reduction in calories.
Now, the FDA just last month revoked regulations allowing the use of BVO in food. It's been banned in most EU countries since 1970!