Food additives exposed: The artificial dyes and chemicals to avoid | Marion Nestle

28:29Oh, yeah. I think that's on the list of things that people want to get rid of. The state of Texas has passed a law that forbids 44 separate additives in the food supply from being allowed in Texas foods. And that will have a big effect because companies can't formulate different products for different states. And so Texas has sort of taken the lead on that. And I believe that's one of the things that was in there. I'm not sure that's true. I vaguely remember. It was a long list. And yet what's interesting, I think you said, is there's a long list of like, did you say 46? But you're also saying there's sort of 10 ,000 of these ingredients that are out there.

29:12I can't imagine where the figure 10 ,000 comes from because you certainly don't see 10 ,000 additives listed on food labels. So that would be a significant reduction in the number of additives that are... The Texas 44? Oh, that would knock everything. Practically most of the ultra-processed foods would be knocked out of the food supply. So that would be quite a profound shift to what you're allowed to eat. Oh, it would be huge. How do you feel about that? I think it's fun to watch. I find all of this extremely entertaining. because food advocates like the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest has been trying to get color additives out of foods for decades and have made no headway whatsoever.

29:58They're considered kind of a left-wing organization. Now it's Republican right-wing states that are taking the lead on doing this. And so that's kind of head-turning. And, you know, I don't know what to make of it. It's just astonishing to me. And so part of what astonishes you is the shift in terms of who's pushing to remove these advocates. Yeah, it's astonishing. I hardly know what to make of it. But let's get rid of them. We've been trying to get rid of them for decades. It's time. Why has it been hard to do this sooner? Oh, because the food companies say they can't exist without them. Even so, the candy companies are just stunned.

30:40They have tried. It's not for lack of trying. Mars at one point said it was going to get rid of all of its petroleum color additives, and it didn't. It couldn't do it. It couldn't find replacements that had the bright, shiny colors that people expect in M &Ms. And General Mills, a cereal company in the United States, tried to take the color additives out of Trix cereal, which is a cereal designed specifically for children. And the colors were kind of brown and tan and fall colors. I thought rather attractive fall colors, but I'm not four years old. And nobody bought the cereal. They stopped buying it.

31:28They said it didn't taste as good. This is color psychology in food. And that this really makes a difference to children buying these candies. Everybody thinks the brightly colored foods taste better. What you want is you want a level playing field, as there is in Europe. There's a level playing field on color additives. Everybody's got to do the same thing. So then the companies can continue to compete. But in the United States, so far, all of this is voluntary. It's voluntary for the end of 2027. So it's not exactly going to happen tomorrow. But a lot of companies have said they will voluntarily remove them.

32:11And do you feel that the sort of this new political pressure coming from like this new American administration is really going to shift the fields on all of these additives? Or is this very much around the colorant additives specifically? Well, they started with color additives. I think there are others. I think it's too soon to tell. We've talked a lot about additives that are sort of put in for the end consumer experience. So the colors we've talked a lot about. You've also talked about sort of the shelf life and the softness. but one of the things that the team also shared with me is that there's a lot of additives that are used in the farming processes in the states that might not be allowed elsewhere so i'm thinking about what is it that you are allowed to feed your animals for example that then sort of goes upstream into what we might end up eating should we worry about the stuff that wouldn't appear on my food label, right?

33:13Because it'll just say beef or pork, but are effectively all the things that have been fed to these animals to affect their growth? Well, the big question in animal feed is antibiotics, which have an enormous impact on the health not only of animals, but also of people. And there have been pressures for, again, decades to try to stop industrial animal producers from using antibiotics as growth promoters because they work as growth promoters. I mean, everybody is fine about giving antibiotics to animals if they're sick and need them. But the idea that you would just routinely, across the board, put antibiotics in the feed of animals in order to get them to grow better and not get sick because they're so closely raised together, you know, hundreds and thousands of animals are raised together.

34:12That's been a huge issue and it's been impossible to deal with because the meat industry says we need this. Marion, could you tell us a little bit more about why they're using antibiotics for something other than just stopping them getting sick? If you want to be efficient about meat production, you have large numbers of animals raised together in very closely confined animal feeding operations. They're called CAFOs. The animals are messy. They don't use toilets. And so you have a lot of mess. And if one animal is sick and has some bacterial disease, it can easily be transmitted to all the others that are mucking through whatever they're mucking through.

34:59And so if you put antibiotics into the feed, it does two things. It not only prevents the animals from transmitting bacterial diseases from one to another, But it also, for reasons that are quite poorly understood, nobody really knows why, it encourages the animals to grow more rapidly. And if you can raise animals to grow more rapidly, you don't have to feed them as much. And that saves cost. And the object is to produce meat at as low cost as possible so that you don't have to charge too much for it so everybody will buy it. So you pump them full of antibiotics, which I think we know from many other podcasts we've had here, obviously deeply disrupts your gut microbiome.

35:49And then these animals end up just putting on a lot more weight faster than they would without these antibiotics. And so is that a standard part of farming practice now? Yes. And so you brought this up. Why as a consumer might I care about this? Well, if these antibiotics are antibiotics that are used for human diseases, they're not going to work because they will have selected for bacteria in either the animal's microbiome or yours that will resist these antibiotics and the antibiotics won't work. And, you know, lots of antibiotics are confronted with resistant bacteria now. And this has made the antibiotics much less useful for treating human disease.

36:41And can these antibiotics make their way into the food that we eat? That's hard to know. I mean, yes, they would be incorporated, but they would probably be destroyed. or you would think that it wouldn't make any difference, but apparently it does. And partly because the animals and humans share the same bacteria in some ways, and so the workers on the industrial farms, on the industrial CAFOs, carry the bacteria from the animals home. Those bacteria infect humans, and they get transmitted that way. So it's not that it's in the meat. It's in the bacteria. Got it. One of the things that people living outside the USF1 talk about is sort of the higher level of industrialization of these sorts of things.

37:37So antibiotics in the feed is one. Chlorinated chicken is something that comes up all the time in the United Kingdom. I'm not sure if anyone in the US even hears about the concept of a chlorinated chicken. I think we chlorinate all of our chickens. I think you chlorinate all of your chickens, exactly. And these chlorinated chickens are banned in the UK and the EU. Well, we have to talk about salmonella. I mean, here's another one. An enormous percentage of supermarket chickens in the United States are found to be contaminated with salmonella, often toxic salmonella, which if ingested by humans would make people sick.

38:15The Department of Agriculture has argued forever that salmonella is normal in chickens and therefore doesn't need to be labeled and you don't need warning labels. We have warning labels now. But it's been extraordinarily difficult to get those warning labels onto the chickens to make people understand that if you've got a chicken in your house, you've got to deal with it as if you were running a contamination laboratory. Wow. You know, you really need to wear gloves and you shouldn't handle these and you certainly don't want to wash them in your sink because the bacteria from the chicken are going to get on your dishes and everything else.

39:02And for decades, I mean, always, these are old issues. Food safety advocates have argued that salmonella should be considered an adulterant on chickens. And if it's an adulterant, you can't sell it. But the poultry industry has successfully managed to keep that one off. It's amazing, right? This tension you keep coming back to between what might be optimal for the manufacturers making this is not always what's optimal for us as consumers. Oh, it's an enormous problem. Apparently, the team said that on chlorinated chicken, what the European Commission has said that the reason why they're concerned about it is that chlorine rinses are a way to sidestep animal welfare standards earlier in the process.

39:49So they say it's a way to clean this away. And therefore, you sort of hide, I guess, not looking after this as much earlier. Right. And is this, again, a sign that I think we know that lobbying by sort of big food companies is an issue around the world, that it's somehow even stronger and more perfected in the states than in a number of other places? Lobbyists are really good at what they do. They're paid to make sure that no federal agency passes regulations that are going to raise their costs or make their lives more difficult. that they're paid to do that. And they're very good at what they do.

40:29Consumer advocates have a much greater difficulty because there are very few consumer organizations that pay lobbyists to try to counter some of this. And right now, well, right now it's hard to talk about, but there's always been this tension between the health of consumers and the economic health of the corporations that are producing the food. And there are real tensions about this. From the corporation's standpoint, keeping the cost of food low is something that's very important. It means everybody can afford it. It means they can hire people. They've got jobs. They've got places where they're supporting entire communities because everybody in the community works for one of these places.

41:19These are very important considerations in the States. And I think anyone listening who is outside the States is not going to say this is totally different where they live. It's just like a matter of degree, it seems to me. I think the thing that I think of as you describe, like the cheap food and the availability, which I think has always been a very powerful argument, is listening to this now in 2025, it's now clear how huge the unexpected health costs have been for all of us. of eating these very highly processed foods with all of these different things in them so far away from the sorts of foods we used to eat.

41:57And so when you think about those lost years, right, of healthy life, the diabetes and the heart disease and the raised cancerous, all the rest of it, like when you put that in alongside the fact that your bread is, you know, 20 cents or 20 PE or 20 euro cents cheaper, it's not cheaper at all, is it? It's actually more expensive than it is. Well, those are the externalized costs. Help me to understand. It's an economics term, but I love it. It's the externalized cost of producing food in the health consequences and in the cost to the environment, which is a whole separate issue. That the companies don't pay for the health care that people have to have later on, and they don't pay for the environmental cleanup.

42:45I mean, the obvious example there is that the big agricultural production in the United States is in the Midwest, and the chemicals that are used to grow corn and soybeans are used in great excess. they get into the water supply, they flow down the Mississippi River, and they end up in the Gulf of Mexico killing all the fish in the Gulf of Mexico or stimulating the growth of plants and algae so that the fish don't have enough oxygen. That's an externalized cost of agricultural production and probably the most obvious example. How should this affect what I think about what I eat? Well, I think diets are simple.

43:31What a healthy diet is, is so simple that the journalist Michael Pollan can do it in seven words, eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And that takes care of it. And within that structure, once you define food as something that's minimally processed, that's all you have to do. But what that does is to exclude the most profitable processed foods that are on the market. And those are cheaper because if you make a bread that lasts on the shelf for a long time, you can sell it at a lower cost. You're not constantly having to replace. You're not wasting a lot. And these foods are designed to be really tasty.

44:20People love them. Everybody has their favorite breakfast cereal, candy, cookie, biscuit, whatever, or bread for that matter. And these are deliberately formulated to be irresistibly delicious. Some people are talking about addiction to specific food products, that they stimulate the same kind of dopamine responses that addictive drugs do. Whether that's true or not remains to be determined. But a lot of people feel that they're addicted to certain kinds of foods. And a lot of addictive scientists say that they meet the criteria for addiction. I'm not sure, but there's a lot of talk about that these days.

45:06saying, like, avoid all processed food or only minimally processed food is really hard. Oh, I would never say that. I would say minimize. I think it's hard for yourself. It's even harder when you have a family and you think about, you know, your children and the sets of choices. Well, remember that those food manufacturers are deliberately marketing their products to your children. Tell me a little bit more about that. Well, the objective is to get children to like certain foods because they're going to eat them through their entire life. Marketing is aimed at children. And even though children don't have money of their own usually, they certainly have the ability to – actually, it's called the pester factor.

45:52They have the ability to nag their parents to buy certain foods for them. And companies deliberately advertise to this. And they do this on social media that the parents never see. So it's invisible to most parental authority. I mean, I don't have young children anymore, but I have friends who do. And they say, we've never taken our child to McDonald's. We don't have McDonald's food in the house. When we drive down the street and my child sees a McDonald's outlet, my child says, I want to go there, take me there. And when I say why, the child doesn't really know, but the child wants to go. That's brilliant marketing.

46:36That's interesting. It's fabulous. And you feel that they are intentionally focused? I don't feel. There's research that shows that they're intentionally doing it. There's real research that says they're intentionally... Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Because they're trying to sell products. Food companies are not social service agencies. They're not public health agencies. They're businesses. They have stockholders to please. That's their job. They could be selling widgets. Their job is to sell more to as many people as possible. The consequences are irrelevant. I think we need regulation. That's what government is supposed to do.

47:17The executives in food companies have told me we would like to do the right thing. But if we do the right thing, our competitors are going to get ahead of us. We need a level playing field. The only way they're going to get a level playing field is if the government issues regulations. That's why I'm in favor of government regulations. I think it's better for consumers, but it's also better for the companies. Because they're not going to be competing with each other in ways where they shouldn't be competing with each other. And, you know, unfortunately, there are many examples of companies that have not behaved with much integrity when it comes to food safety.

47:59There are plenty of places that do, but there are plenty of places that don't. And for that, we need government regulation. I mean, maybe this is the case in the states more than in other countries, but certainly in the states. It's a huge issue. And not to have government regulation means that companies are given permission to behave badly. I actually think the rest of the world might be getting a slightly light ride out of this conversation. I do think that things are worse in the States than in many other places, but we have the same explosion of obesity and diabetes, all these other impact on mood, all these other sort of things that are going on and the same explosion of very highly processed, high risk foods.

48:45So although I think there are more controls in a number of other developed countries, the same underlying pressure, the same pushback I think that we see from big food companies about any restrictions on the advertising they do or the way in which they process their food. There's a global tension here, it seems to me, and visiting lots of different countries and seeing this. Well, we have corporate capture of government these days pretty worldwide. You know, and I don't think that that's necessarily for the public good. Someone you know might be unknowingly consuming additives that are posing long-term health risks.

49:26Why not share this episode with them right now? It could give them the information that they need to have to make more informed food choices. And I'm sure they'll thank you for it. So if I could give you a magic wand now and you could suddenly reset the regulations around the world, what would be the top things that you would want to change? Well, it depends on what country we're talking about. You can make it apply everywhere. Everywhere, everywhere. Get money out of politics would be my first one. But I would say put regulations on marketing to children. I think it's morally wrong because children really are not in a position to exercise judgment over this.

50:10There's plenty of research that shows that kids can't tell the difference between advertising and content and require media literacy in schools so that children learn how to distinguish advertising from content. So I would start there. I would, you know, in the States, I would deal with school meals in a much more direct way. They need much more money for the meals. They need much better food. But, you know, maybe the States have particular issues. And Marion, on school food, what would be the top thing you'd want to change? Oh, I would rather have kids eat real food than packaged food, real food, the way the French did or do or still do.

50:55You know, real meals were cooked with the expectation that children will eat the food, taste the food and get involved with the food. I think school food is enormously important because, again, in the States, there's evidence that shows that kids eat most of their calories in schools and their healthiest calories in schools. So it's important that schools do it right. And when you think about any regulations that might affect the food that we eat as adults? Well, I'd like to see restrictions on ultra-processed foods, portion size considerations, and people have to find ways to eat healthfully and pleasurably without taking in too many calories for their activity and metabolic levels.

51:49Very difficult to do for most people, obviously, which is why so many people are overweight. and kids are overweight now in a way that they never used to be. And part of this is dealing with the social media problem, which is an enormous one. I'm so glad I don't have small children now. I think it would be so hard. You know, I raised my children before social media. You know, life is really tough for parents now. I have enormous sympathy. I think that's really nice. I do think there's a whole set of, I have a 17-year-old and a 6-year-old, and there are a whole set of pressures that you worry about, I think, as a parent, as things that, like the access to these digital devices and what's really going on in their lives that, you know, my parents never had to worry about because it didn't exist.

52:38Yeah, and you don't want to argue with your kids about food. Well, you have so many other things to argue with your kids about. Correct. I'm guessing. I think, well, in my household, they're stuck with it. We talk about food a lot. and the thing that's been transformational in my house is this shift of thinking about eating this food not just generically because it's healthy but thinking about you've got all of these trillions of good bugs in your gut and if you're eating the right things for that you're feeding them and I have found that that is a real unlock in terms because it's about adding things it's not about making some particular food being demonized but still as you described, like as soon as you go out into the world and you can just walk into a store and there can be like literally nothing in there that you really feel you want.

53:27To feed your bacteria. Exactly. And so that is definitely a problem. Well, the wonderful thing about it is they eat food, not too much, mostly plants. It applies not only to feeding your microbiome, but it also applies to obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancers, you know, all of the, I mean, it's so simple and it's one diet. And there are also an infinite ways of putting food to get foods together to eat that way. So it's not as if it's boring or restrictive. It's, I think of it as opening lots of ways of thinking about this that are extremely pleasurable. I worry a lot about losing the pleasure of food.

54:14We have GLP-1 drugs, for example. People report that they just, well, they're not interested in food anymore. That breaks my heart. I love that. And maybe actually we could wrap up. So let's say I take your magic wand away. I'm sorry, Marion, but you had it for five minutes, but now I've taken the magic wand away. Shucks. And all you can do now is actually just give individuals advice. And you've given this sort of very high level, like try and eat minimally processed food, you know, not too much. But people say like, OK, help me to understand a bit more about how I might think about applying that to my life in quite a practical way without losing the joy.

54:58What would a great, you know, lunch and breakfast be for you? First of all, I'm not a breakfast eater. So I don't get hungry until later in the day. But I'm perfectly happy to have something made with vegetables or fruits or grains. I'm perfectly happy. I'm not a vegetarian. I'm not a vegan. I eat everything. I try to follow my own advice. And I don't have to work very hard doing that. It comes quite easily. You know, for people who are raised on processed foods, getting them to eat other kinds of things is very, very difficult. And I would never tell anybody, do this, do this. I would try to find out what they're willing to try and what baby steps they're willing to take and then work with them.

55:55But that's an enormously difficult job. People who are used to eating one way don't want to change, usually, unless they have to, or a doctor tells them to. Well, Marina, I hope I'm not about to get an enormous amount of trouble from you, but I'm going to say that you are into your 80s, and you are... Well into my 80s. Well into your 80s. and for anyone who's not on video like you're in incredible shape but you're also like razor sharp and you've kept me on my toes a lot through this uh this conversation a lot more than normal a lot of listeners are thinking about what they eat bluntly to be in the shape that you're in right now when you know they're 89 what do you put that down to good nutrition i don't know good I can't say good genes because my father died of a heart attack at the age of 47.

56:55So, you know, maybe it's genes, maybe it's luck, maybe it's eating healthfully, which, as I said, that's how I like to eat. And this isn't just a recent discovery. No, it's how I've always liked to eat. Since I was a child at summer camp and discovered a camp that I went to had a vegetable garden for dinner, and we were sent out to pick the vegetables that were cooked for dinner. And I realized how absolutely delicious fresh vegetables are. It's what I've liked ever since. And I don't like a lot of junk food. And I do read food labels on packages. and if it's got all that stuff in it, I leave it on the shelf.

57:43I'd like to stop there because I don't think there's anything better that I could ask. I'd like to do a quick summary if that's all right and correct me if I've got anything wrong. So the first thing that honestly this jumps into my mind is that these U.S. food colorants come from oil and, you know, petrol or gas depending on how the country comes in. This is totally mad. It's really shocking that the big food companies in America have said for decades that they can't exist without these additives because if one company takes it away, then all the other companies keep it. And so they will lose out their market share.

58:20So there's this terrible pressure to keep putting these bad things in. we're finally starting to see some real pressure to remove those particular additives. But the general environment in the States continues where any company can just add a new additive, declare that it's safe and just put it into the food. And there are potentially thousands of these. We don't understand what they do because doing the studies on these individual additives is so hard. So this just feels sort of backward. Anyone can put this in And if they put it in, then all the other companies feel they should put it in. So this is a really profound problem.

58:56It is better in Europe in regard of like having to sort of prove a lot more that something is safe. But still, we have this incredibly highly processed food and all of these different additives that we don't understand. We talked a little bit about what's going on also in the animals that we end up eating, because you don't necessarily see this directly in your food labels. and for you the top thing was the antibiotics that amazingly they're giving these animals all of these antibiotics and it's making them really fat which i think begs the question of you know the fact that so many of us end up having 20 courses of antibiotics before we're grown up and how that might be affecting our health but that's probably a whole nother podcast i'd love to talk about and that this ends up you know then flowing through to what we eat and that for you there's two parts of this one is we need more regulations and that the lobbying of these big food companies around the world is incredibly powerful interestingly for you the first thing you went to is about marketing aimed at children they are intentionally understanding how to make their products as attractive as possible to kids and you gave this brilliant example of like a child knowing about mcdonald's even though their parents had never taken them to to mcdonald's think about school meals as something which is like could you get children to eat real food and how important that could be for their their health and really restricting this you know ultra processed food what we tend to call sort of high risk processed food because the nutritional scientists at Zoe tell me off for the vagueness of ultra processed food and then you talked about what could individuals do and you said like if you're going to boil it down to like a really simple sentence I got sort of eat minimally processed food, not too much, mostly plants.

1:00:41Read the food labels. So turn it over and like understand what's in there. And a lot of listeners are sorry members and they know that's one of the things that, you know, the app enables you to do is to sort of like short circuit that. If you end up like Marion on the back of eating all of this food in your late 80s, you know, I think you're doing something pretty amazing. So you're definitely like a walking advertisement for the power of what we eat in terms of giving us really high quality life. So thank you so much for coming in. I thought that was really powerful. Well, thank you very much.

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