Hi, I'm Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the show, how worried should we be about artificial food dies?

There's been kind of a growing recognition that there's some legitimate science about these concerns.

What do Flaming hot Cheetos, lime jello, and craft, creamy French salad dressing have in common? Well, for one thing, they have gotten a glow-up from artificial

food dyes. Think red 40, blue one, yellow six. You have seen them in the small print in the

ingredients list. These petroleum-based dyes have become a target of Robert F. Kennedy's FDA.

Food dye is just a no-brainer. Nobody wants to eat petroleum. Everybody knows there's enough

science out there that we know it's terrible for you.

Do we know that? What do we know? Let's find out. Joining me now is Dr. Asa Bradman, who has studied the toxicity of artificial dyes. He's a professor of public health at the University of California, Merced.

Asa, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. It's a honor to be here.

Let's start with the basics. What are these artificial food dyes made of?

So the artificial food dyes are derivative of petroleum products.

And they were developed in the early part of the last century and recognized as an ingredient for food as a way to, you know, make them more enticing, to make them fun and to, you know, attract people to food products.

And if any of you have children out there, you know often how fun it is to have, you know, a great range of colors,

especially with candies. It can make food very attractive. When did we start expecting that our food was going to be, you know, sometimes neon colored? Well, there's actually a long history of

the use of mostly natural food dyes. So, I mean, turmeric and other ingredients

were used to color foods. I mean, of course, a lot of foods have, you know, are naturally colorful,

meat, fruits, and vegetables. Of course, color is part of our natural environment and our food.

But early on, there was some kind of slow development of

artificial food colors. And in fact, some of the early colors used even things like arsenic.

There's some surprising history with some of these. And then when there was an explosion in

chemistry, science, and technical capacity, people recognized

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