"cancer causing foods" news and stories

Bright-red soda, rainbow-hued kid's cereal, electric-yellow popsicles...most of us have eaten them. But unlike the public health uproar over salt and trans fats, there hasn't been much said about the dangers of food dyes. Fed up with consumer apathy, The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is calling for a complete government ban of food dyes. The advocacy group says the three most widely used dyes -- Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6 -- contain cancer-causing substances. Another dye, Red 3, has actually been identified as a carcinogen by the FDA, but you can still find it on supermarket shelves.

"These synthetic chemicals do absolutely nothing to improve the nutritional quality or safety of foods," says Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the nonprofit group. "[They] trigger behavior problems in children and, possibly, cancer in anybody."

Think you're immune to the problem because you don't gobble Fruit Loops in the morning? Think again. The dyes are in a staggering array of foods, from salad dressing to matzo balls. In fact, manufacturers put about 15 million pounds of eight synthetic dyes into the food supply each year, according to CSPI. Even scarier? Per capita consumption of dyes has risen five-fold since 1955. A lot of it has to do with the kinds of foods now marketed to children. The wilder the color, the more cash a product often brings in.

If we actually paid attention to every single "news" item that warned us about cancer-causing foods, we'd probably only be able to drink water. Heck, someone somewhere at some point will probably determine that water causes cancer, too. I wouldn't be surprised.

Still, it's good to know that a common chemical used to flavor processed foods is linked to stomach, liver, and kidney cancers. The chemical is called methyleugenol and is found in common foods like candy, cookies, bubblegum, pumpkin pie, puddings, ice cream, apple butter, chutney, anise biscotti, French toast, ketchup, nutmeg and gingerbread. Although the chemical hasn't been officially found to cause cancer is humans (tests were done on laboratory rats), tests that were done from 1994 to 1998 on humans showed that 98 percent of participating adults had traces of methyleugenol in their blood.