Froot Loops cereal have landed at the center of a political battle over artificial ingredients linked to cancer.
There have been growing calls for the colorful hoops to be stripped of synthetic dyes like red 40, yellow 5 and yellow 6, as they have already been banned in Canada and Europe.
Hundreds of thousands have signed a petition calling for Kellogg’s to ban unnecessary additives, Trump’s incoming health chief Robert F Kennedy Junior has criticized the company and advocates in Texas are pushing for ban on all Kellogg’s cereals in public schools.
But despite mounting pressure, the cereal giant is unlikely to make changes, according to Marion Nestle, a top nutritionist who was a professor at New York University for almost 30 years.
She told CNN that studies that have shown how people believe brightly colored foods taste better and they ‘much prefer them’ over naturally colored options.
When cereal companies have replaced synthetic dyes with natural alternatives, Ms Nestle says that ‘people don’t buy them [and] they don’t want them as much.’
‘So from the cereals company’s standpoint, this is a marketing imperative,’ she adds.
Ms Nestle also points to cultural differences between the US and the rest of the world. ‘Americans seem to prefer the brightly colored neon colored dyes more than the Europeans do.
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‘The Europeans buy the cereals with natural dyes. But we don’t. So it’s a problem for the cereal companies.’
Pointing to one example of a fall in sales after the removal of food additives, Ms Nestle looks at General Mills’ brightly colored Trix.
She says: ‘In 2017, General Mills said they would take the color dyes out of Trix.
‘Guess what? Sales fell. General Mills put the dyes back in. You know, and I thought that I actually liked the colors that they were using in between.
‘But people didn’t buy them and the sales dropped by 5 percent or something like that. That’s all it takes.’
She added: ‘They’re not public health agencies. They’re businesses with stockholders to please. That’s the bottom line.’
Ms Nestle notes that the the food colorings are only used for ‘cosmetic reasons’ and they ‘have no actual function in the cereal other than to make it attractive.’
Kellogg’s promised to remove artificial colors and ingredients from all of its cereals nearly a decade ago by 2018 but has yet to deliver on that promise.
Ms Nestle bluntly says this is because is ‘if they take them out, people won’t buy them’.
Ex-USDA food chief Dr Darin Detwiler previously told DailyMail.com that Kellogg’s Froot Loops is the worst breakfast cereal in the US due to the number of chemicals the colorful rings contain.
Red 40, a dye that gives the hoops their neon red color, has been branded the most concerning additive used in the food industry.
Along with Froot Loops, other recognizable foods that currently have Red 40 in them include Fruity Pebbles, Trix, Nacho Cheese Doritos, Skittles, M&Ms and Gatorade.
It’s banned in several European countries for its link to hyperactivity and cancer, and are not present in most products internationally such as those in Australia and Canada.
Dr Detwiler joined with campaigners, including actress Eva Mendes, this fall, in a bid to encourage Kellogg’s to ‘consider reformulating their products to reduce the use of artificial additives, dyes, and high sugar levels.’
Marion Nestle – a prominent nutritionist who was a professor at New York University for almost 30 years – says it will be very hard to force change among the cereal makers
Along with red 40, the American variety of Fruit Loops contains yellow 5, blue 1, yellow 6, and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), which have been linked to health problems in children.
Canadian Froot Loops replaced these dyes with concentrated blueberry, carrot, and watermelon juices.
While studies show that colorants can cause health problems, Ms Nestle argues that there are holes in the research.
She reveals: ‘The problem for scientists is that the research is extremely difficult to do.
‘You can’t take two populations of kids and lock them up and feed them one set food dyes and one set not food dyes and keep them there for some number of years and see whether it affects their behavior.
‘You’re not allowed to do studies like that. So they do studies on animals. And the animal studies are done with much higher doses than are currently available in the food supply. And those studies show harm. So how do you interpret that?’
In Europe, Ms Nestle says food companies ‘use what’s called a precautionary principle, which makes sure these things are safe before they use them.’
In the US, ‘because the Food and Drug Administration is so badly underfunded and doesn’t have the personnel or the resources to do this kind of thing, they are forced to take the generally recognized as safe approach, which, you know, people have been complaining about that for decades, that it doesn’t work.’