Angst Over Additives in Our Food

As the push to ban certain food dyes gains momentum, what should we know about them, and about other additives in our food supply? What are the potential consequences of ingredients that are not naturally occurring? How do we know what to believe and what conclusions to draw?

Dr. Rebecca Andrews, UConn Health primary care physician whose roles include director of primary care, associate program director of UConn’s Internal Medicine Residency, and nationally, chair of the American College of Physicians Board of Regents, helps us try to navigate it all.

(Dr. Rebecca Andrews, Carolyn Pennington, Chris DeFrancesco, June 2025, studio and production support by Ethan Giorgetti and Ryan Bernat)

Listen now on Podbean.

Transcript

Chris: Phasing out Red Dye No. 3? Today on the Pulse we talk about the potential effects of dyes and chemicals in our food supply.

This is the UConn Health Pulse, a podcast to help you get to know UConn Health and its people a little better, and ideally leave you with some health information you’ll find useful.

With Carolyn Pennington, I’m Chris DeFrancesco. There’s been a lot of talk lately about additives in our food, and a directive from Washington to move away from many of them.

Carolyn: Have those additives been making us sick? Joining us today is Dr. Rebecca Andrews, UConn Health primary care physician who holds several roles, including director of primary care, associate program director of UConn’s Internal Medicine Residency, and nationally, chair of the American College of Physicians Board of Regents. Thank you for your time today. You’re a busy woman.

The push to get dyes and chemicals out of our food supply is finally coming to a head. But why now, Dr. Andrews?

Dr. Andrews: I think there are a few reasons it’s coming to a head now. One would be, we had the COVID pandemic and all of a sudden people start to realize how rapidly research can evolve, change, teach us things about our health, and people are starting to focus on their health in a new way.

There are medications out there to help us with overweight and obesity, and I actually love the movement that we have right now where our patients are trying to get healthier. So I think the ask for information and transparency is timed because of those two things.

Chris: How overdue is this effort?

Dr. Andrews: That’s a great question, and I get asked about dyes all the time.

I don’t know that it’s overdue. Some of the data, how we interpret it is complex. A lot of the data is either in animal studies with really high levels of the dyes, things that we wouldn’t see in our food. But I think it is overdue by, I don’t know, maybe 15, 20 years to say, “Let’s get back to healthy eating. Let’s change our lifestyle.” We are very busy in the US so people eat a lot of processed foods to fill their family and their schedule the way they need to, so I think just looking at the health of America, it is long overdue.

Carolyn: But for dyes specifically in some of the chemicals and additives that people have been complaining about, is there really research showing that they were dangerous to our health, or is it much ado about nothing?

Dr. Andrews: So there is data that some dyes caused cancer in male rats, specifically the red dye, at a super therapeutic level, nothing that we would see in our food. We do not have the same data in humans. But to be cautious and remove it from the foods I think is reasonable. There has been a real concern about, do any of these dyes cause hyperactivity in children? And there’s conflicting data, but the summary is probably not. We have to be very, very careful about not taking personal experience and making that a broad statement. If cookies or something with a dye in it makes your child hyper, don’t feed it to ‘em. But we have to be really careful about then expanding that to say, “This is a cause of the dye for everybody and nobody should take it.”

Again, I’m all in for healthy eating. The less processed, more raw foods you eat are healthier for you, but I don’t want people to panic. There’s been no secret stash of medical information that has been hidden from the public.

Chris: Is there a consensus, or at least a belief maybe in the scientific community and the medical community, about these types of additives in food — I mean, aside from the fact that they’re, it’s a removal from whole natural whole foods, which we’ll talk more about, but — do they give the food almost properties that make us just want to eat more of them and lots of them, and then cause a whole new set of problems?

Dr. Andrews: If I could have picked a question, that would’ve been it. So yes, what these dyes do, and even flavorings, they make food prettier, more attractive, more tasty than what we would find in nature itself. And I don’t want to say food is a drug, but when we have a good meal, just like a hug, we release dopamine, we feel good. And so if you make foods more attractive, more tasty, and they make us feel good, we can develop almost food addictions or unhealthy eating. So instead of eating because we need nutrients or we need calories, we’re eating for the food because we like it.

Carolyn: I know, I love that picture they had of the Froot Loops before and after the dyes.

Dr. Andrews: Really?

Carolyn: They were very monochromatic, you know, it was like they just weren’t as colorful, but who cares, right? I mean, they’re still, they’re still tasty. I still love my Froot Loops. No, I’m kidding. So for families out there though, I mean obviously a lot of these healthier ways of eating are also more expensive. So what kind of tips, what kind of recommendations do you have for eating healthier, especially for families?

Dr. Andrews: Particularly right now, it really is expensive to eat healthy. I had watched a documentary that showed a woman in the Midwest who said, “I can feed my family if I go to Kentucky Fried Chicken and I buy a bucket of food, a couple of these” — you know how they always supersize the sodas — “And they’re not hungry.” Which, as a parent, nobody wants a child to feel hungry. I think there are a few things that we really should do. We should, as a community, advocate against extra taxes that add to the cost of healthy foods. Make it easier to eat healthy. So let’s not add to the cost of them. There are places that you can shop that, I haven’t been in an Aldi’s, but I have heard that — and I am not supporting one brand over another, but I’ve heard that — some of their produce might be cheaper than someone somewhere else. If you have the time, shop around. Figure out what your family likes, so there’s no food waste. Figure out what you can use both tonight to cook dinner, but also turn it into lunch. Our country has a lot of food waste that I think we don’t even realize. But no doubt, bottom line, if you don’t have money to buy healthy food, you can’t eat healthy food. So we have to work both as a health community, but also the laws in our states and our federal government to support this, but also looking at food waste, I think is really important.

Chris: I wonder often if there’s like a version of, like, could we subsidize fresh produce and just make it like super affordable? Could that be like a huge federal effort to boost preventive care?

Dr. Andrews: I think it’s a great idea. I don’t know that anyone has submitted such a bill, but it is an absolutely great idea. When you look at how we got people to quit smoking, yes. If your doctor told you to quit smoking, it took like an average of seven times, and it takes people multiple quit attempts, but you know what made the real difference? When we increased the cost of cigarettes. So if we increase the cost of things that are harmful and decrease the cost of things that are healthy, that would definitely, just by patient and personal behavior, make a difference. I think we just need people on board that we wouldn’t be doing it to be big government and control you; it would be big government finding ways to keep you healthy.

Carolyn: Do you get patients asking you questions about this a lot. Just curious.

Dr. Andrews: All the time.

Carolyn: Really?

Dr. Andrews: All the time. There’s a few, there are a few websites I use. Patients for whatever reason are often interested in supplements but afraid of medications, and supplements also have risks to them. And so we look at this stuff, what is worth your dollar? Where can I help you find the healthy foods? What do you want to avoid? And so, like for the dyes, walking them through transparently and clearly, this is how the data was done. If that makes you nervous, absolutely don’t eat it. Eating healthy, raw, natural foods that you cook is the best thing to do, but also don’t go home and stay up at night thinking that you have been exposed for years to dyes that we knew created cancer in humans, because that’s not true.

Chris: Because the quantities in our food supply are not enough to move the needle.

Dr. Andrews: Yeah. The studies that were done weren’t in humans, thankfully. But they also were at these really, really high levels that are not in the level that we get in our foods.

Chris: What about things like — I mean, obviously there’s the balance with healthy eating and weight and weight management and all the things that can come with that, but again, with things that are in your food that aren’t naturally occurring, what about things like the proliferation of allergies or immunity problems or even early onset cancers or,

Carolyn: I mean, it does seem like allergies are increasing. Could that be?

Dr. Andrews: They are. Yeah, they are. There is some good evidence, and I wish my mom was still alive to hear me say this: We’re too clean. Very clean, industrialized nations, you’re not exposed to allergens early enough to sort of develop a tolerance and not to make anyone queasy, but there are, I don’t want to say benign, but symbiotic parasites that in less clean environments might live in your body that you don’t even know are there. And part of what they do to survive is reduce your immune system and keep it at a normal level. So now we have these really clean environments. No exposure to allergens and super-active immune systems, and that’s what creates some allergies and autoimmune conditions.

When you’re thinking about like food additives, maybe like sugar substitutes that aren’t in the environment, I do think we should be concerned about those. Anything that is not naturally in your food. We should question and we should study. The problem is the studies are really hard to do. Think about all the confounders. So I want to study if a sugar substitute is causing cancer. I have to worry about all the other activities the patients in the study do, all the other foods, what they put into their body as far as alcohol, smoking, exercise, genetics — very complex to study that. It requires really long-term population-wide studies.

Chris: And even if you come up with definitive conclusions on that, then you’ve got to fight the lobbies.

Dr. Andrews: Correct. So even if you know, until there’s a law that says you can’t do that, companies can put it in their foods, and at the end of the day, they want to make their food attract–they want their fruit loops to be colorful, so you eat that over maybe granola in the morning.

Chris: So things like a soda tax have always been such a struggle. It seems like an obvious one, but there are very powerful opponents to those concepts.

Dr. Andrews: Yes. At the end of the day, businesses, whatever they produce, whether it’s food or something else, their job to their stakeholders in their company is to stay viable and make a dime. And so they will oppose those changes. So I really do think, well, one of the reasons this podcast is such a great idea, we have to get everybody on board with, we want to be healthy as a nation. Look at the U.S. and look at other countries. We are not a healthy nation, and so we really have to get behind changes that we can make to get there.

Carolyn: Yeah, it seems like the European countries are so far ahead of us as far as outlawing some of these chemicals and dyes in our food.

Dr. Andrews: They have outlawed some that we haven’t, and they haven’t outlawed some that we have it.

Carolyn: Oh, really?

Dr. Andrews: So it is very interesting. But European culture, smaller portions, more time to walk versus drive, weekends — Germany, I don’t remember the term, but Sunday is like, “do nothing day.” What a great idea.

Carolyn: Nice.

Dr. Andrews: Long maternity and paternity leaves, true vacations, true signing off — If you look at those cultures, you would never reach out to a boss or an employee after 5 p.m. There are a lot of behaviors that we have here that aren’t necessarily good for our health, and a lot of them, because we’re then so busy, we pick these foods that are highly processed and really easy to feed to our families.

Chris: And from like a mental health standpoint, the concept of comfort food, it seems like whenever I hear that term, it’s like, “Yeah, you probably shouldn’t eat that.” You probably shouldn’t eat a lot of it, but it just makes me feel better. Is there a mental health element to this too?

Dr. Andrews: There is. So self-soothing behaviors that we learn early on — I had a Portuguese grandmother who never let me leave the house without eating something. So we are trained that eating is social and soothing, and I think almost everybody has a comfort food. I ask my patients all the time, are you salty or sweet? Mine is chocolate. And I think what I would say if there was a food group to avoid, the candies, sugars, yes carbohydrates, but the concentrated sweets, they might make you feel good in the moment, but they are bad for your health and there are better choices: pineapple, grapes, there’s lots of things that we can do to find new comfort foods that are healthier.

Chris: I know whose house I’m not going to on Halloween though, I’ll tell you that. Dr. Rebecca Andrews, thank you so much for being here today.

Dr. Andrews: Thank you for having me.

Chris: That is our time for today. Thank you to Ethan Georgetti and Ryan Burnett for the studio support, and, for Dr. Andrews and Carolyn Pennington, I’m Chris DeFrancesco. Thank you for listening to the UConn Health Pulse. Be sure to subscribe so you can catch us next time, and please share with a friend.