The candy industry is continuing to use synthetic food dyes, despite ongoing initiatives by federal health officials to phase them out.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration said in April that they were trying to stop the use of petroleum-based synthetic dyes in order to “Make America Healthy Again.”
“These poisonous compounds offer no nutritional benefit and pose real, measurable dangers to our children’s health and development,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at the time.
“We’re restoring gold-standard science, applying common sense, and beginning to earn back the public’s trust. And we’re doing it by working with industry to get these toxic dyes out of the foods our families eat every day,” he said.
Mars, the makers of M&M’s, who recently phased out the whitener titanium dioxide for its Skittles candies, told the New York Times that its products are