OPINION:
The Food and Drug Administration just announced it would ban the use of Red No. 3, a dye used in thousands of food and medicinal products to provide color but that has been linked to cancer in animals.
The dye has been approved for use in America’s consumables for more than 100 years. It was banned in 1990 from use in cosmetics after scientists discovered its cancer-causing links in animals — but it still wasn’t banned from food or medicines. So why now?
Why the sudden change of 100-plus-year-old FDA heart?
Two words. Donald. Trump.
President-elect Trump’s picks for Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and for FDA commissioner, Dr. Martin Makary, are both on-record, vocal, informed critics of dyes in foods.
Kennedy, in October, said this, as Barron’s reported: “I’m just gonna tell the cereal companies: Take all the dyes out of their food.”
Makary has said similarly.
In an interview on Fox Business in September, Makary responded to a report showing cancer deaths had fallen by 33 percent in the last 30 years by saying yes, that’s true — but at the same time, gastrointestinal cancers in those under the age of 50 had skyrocketed in the last two decades in large part because of chemicals from food and pesticides.
“The reason cancer deaths are down is that smoking is down but certain types of cancer are going way up, the gastrointestinal cancers, colon cancer — colon cancer in young people under age 50,” Makary said, on Fox Business. “We’ve got a poison food supply, we’ve got pesticides and ultra-processed foods and all sorts of things that have been in the blind spot.”
Yes, food matters. Yes, the air we breathe matters.
“We’ve known inflammation drives cancer and when you take all these chemicals, the engineered food additives, the body reacts with a low-grade inflammatory response. You feel sick, we medicate people, but … the lining of the GI tract [changes nonetheless],” Makary said. “Pancreatic cancer, my field of cancer, has been one where cancer rates have doubled in the last 20 years. These are the GI cancers.”
What goes in the GI system matters.
This is common sense. And the more we drift from food that’s produced by nature — that’s provided by God — and the more we consume products that have been altered by a lab, it’s only even greater common sense that the more our bodies will respond in ways that were never intended by nature, by God, by the Creator of the human body.
What’s shocking in the FDA’s announced intent to ban red dye from consumables is that it’s politics that have driven the action — not health. America’s federal health agencies are supposed to be in the business of safeguarding Americans’ health. But too often, for too many years, these same health gate guards are acting as revenue pots for their political partners and pharmaceutical buddies. Just look at the COVID madness and forced injections of experimental shots — so experimental, in fact, the health agencies had to change the definition of “vaccine” and “vaccination” so that they would no longer be seen as actions to take to prevent a disease, but rather only possibly, maybe, perhaps-but-probably-not prevent a disease — and then further launch a mass media campaign to deny any change in definition had occurred.
They think Americans are stupid.
They still think Americans are stupid and only the medical professionals — that is, the specifically chosen medical professionals; only those who advance the correct narratives of the Big Government and Big Pharma types — that only these medical professionals know best how to keep citizens healthy.
But because Donald Trump is entering the White House in a few days and because Donald Trump has already named picks to lead the federal health agencies who truly care about health and not so much about lining the pocket of Big Pharma players, and because these named picks are on record as setting dyes in food and consumable medicines as top priorities to ban — well, then. We get action at the FDA.
Suddenly, the FDA is swinging into gear to ban a dye that’s been in use for 100 years; that’s been banned from cosmetics because of its tie to cancer in animals; that’s been banned as a food additive in Europe, in Australia, in Japan, again because of concerns about its cancer-causing potential — suddenly, the FDA is seeing the light.
It’s amazing how effective Trump has been already.
He’s not even yet inaugurated and Mexico’s government, out of fear of the 25 percent tariffs Trump has threatened, has been busily self-policing the flow of migrants toward America’s borders. “Faced with the prospect of massive tariffs on goods under the new administration, Mexico has been dispersing migrants throughout the country to keep them far from the U.S. border,” Fox News just reported.
Hamas, out of fear of a Trump-ordered military action, has just agreed to a cease-fire and hostage deal with Israel — “Trump threatens Hamas to release hostages by inauguration,” ABC Channel 10 wrote a few days ago.
And now the FDA has banned the use of a dye in food that’s been known for decades as a cancer-causing risk.
Just think of what’s to come once Trump is officially in the White House.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
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