Why Red Food Dye Is Banned, but Processed Meat Is Still Sold Without a Warning

Last month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) effectively banned the use of Red Dye No. 3 in foods, citing concerns the additive may be carcinogenic — based on testing in rats. The push to ban the food dye was long coming, and was supported by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ahead of the 2024 presidential election stated that one of the first things he’d do is “tell the cereal companies: Take all the dyes out of their food.” But of all the potential cancer risks humans face, why has the FDA banned red food dye, while other foods with a similar or even greater carcinogenic risk, like processed meats, continue to be sold without a warning label?

“A lot of it has to do with how a health issue or a specific topic is framed in the public’s mind,” Doug Evans, a professor at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, tells Sentient. Red dye, an additive that doesn’t add nutritional value, fits with what the American public is “primed” to understand as unhealthy these days.

The question of why food dyes instead of, say, steak or bacon, gives us insight into the way we humans tend to think about risk. While concerns about food dyes and ultraprocessed foods are currently in the cultural and political spotlight, other noted possible carcinogens are not. Processed meats — classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as carcinogenic — and red meats (categorized as probably carcinogenic), remain relatively ignored by the chorus of voices, like RFK Jr., pushing for legal restrictions.

How Red Dye Came to Be Banned

Though the FDA banned the use of Red No. 3 in cosmetics and certain drugs in 1990, after studies linked it to cancer in animals who consumed it, the dye continued to be authorized for use in foods. That is, until late last year, when a petition filed by health advocates prompted the agency to take action. FDA officials relied on a provision called the Delaney clause, which prohibits the agency from approving additives that cause cancer in people or animals.

The study prompting the decision found the additive caused some male rats to develop cancer. However, critics say that the small amount of dye found in foods is not likely to be harmful to humans, and that banning it will make some foods less affordable, as natural dyes are more expensive. In fact, according to FDA regulators, Red No. 3 does not cause cancer in humans the same way it does in rats, and relevant exposure levels to the dye for humans “are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats.”

So then, why bother focusing on red dye at all? As Timothy Rebbeck, professor of cancer prevention at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, tells Sentient, food dyes are a relatively easy thing to focus on and ban, because they are “man-made compounds that people are not culturally attached to.”

The same thing cannot be said about processed and red meats, which are heavily embedded in our culture, despite a decade of cancer warnings from researchers — or at least some of them. The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer announced in 2015 that processed meats — bacon, ham, salami etc. — would now be categorized alongside cigarettes as carcinogenic, based on a number of studies finding an elevated risk of colorectal cancer.

Much like with food dyes, there was and is a fierce debate challenging the health risk claims against red meat — only this debate has been even more loud and protracted.

Why Ban Anything? Smoking As Case Study for Strong Public Health Regulation

One of the most successful examples of a public health campaign in relatively recent history centered on the dangers of smoking. In the 1970s, as research was mounting around the dangers of smoking cigarettes, public health organizations ramped up public messaging, including the National Cancer Institute’s “Helping Smokers Quit Kit.”

By the 1980s and 1990s, campaigns led by the American Cancer Society and American Lung Association spread this message further. In the late ‘90s, the landmark “truth” campaign targeted young people with quantifiable success. The American Lung Association reports that youth smoking rates dropped from 36.4 percent in 1997, to 3.8 percent in 2021; cases of lung and bronchial cancers also dropped over that time.

Taxes on tobacco products also played a pivotal role. The CDC reports that a “10 percent increase in the average price of a pack of cigarettes is estimated to reduce cigarette sales per person by an average of 7 percent.”

“It did take a while, but we eventually got there,” says Evans. “[Smoking’s] no longer a normative behavior. It’s been reframed as being not really the thing to do.”

What Impact Have Health Warnings Had on Meat Consumption?

Eating bacon is not considered as high-risk as smoking cigarettes. Yet there is research to suggest eating high levels of processed meat and red meat elevates your cancer risk, among other health concerns. Still, public health messaging on the risks of consuming too much processed meat has remained limited.

There are no major “quit salami” campaigns, and no signs of a bacon ban or baloney tax on the horizon. Even the NIH’s Healthy People 2030 directive, which “focuses on helping people get the recommended amounts of healthy foods — like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains — to reduce their risk for chronic diseases and improve their health,” does not include any objectives to reduce or cease the consumption of processed or red meats.

Rebbeck says the challenge with public health messaging about food and nutrition is that “the information is very difficult to communicate because we’re talking about some fairly complex, sophisticated science that has a lot of caveats.” The question then becomes, “how do you make a very simple public health message that people can follow?” The answer, he says: keep it simple and focus more on what people should eat, rather than what they shouldn’t. “The simple messages that people in government agencies have started making are very much around, ‘just focus on [eating] plant forward.’”

While the U.S. government has not launched any policy changes or large-scale campaigns specifically targeting red and processed meat consumption, the National Cancer Institute does point out on its website that red and processed meat consumption is associated with increased cancer risk. And some non-governmental organizations, such as the American Institute for Cancer Research, more directly suggest limiting red meat and fully avoiding processed meat, including in social media posts.

Rebbeck believes this health messaging around the risks of red meat consumption has had some impact. “Whereas some things have come and gone,” he says, red meat “seems to be sticking around” in the public health messaging as having some degree of risk.

That’s had an impact. While overall meat consumption in the U.S. has been on the rise, beef consumption has been in decline in recent years, and is predicted to continue to fall. This is due to a number of factors, including rising prices, as well as growing public knowledge regarding red meat’s link to cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

Bacon consumption, on the other hand, has gone up since 2011, along with other processed meat consumption.

Reasons for a Lack of Messaging and Policy Change on Meat

Evans says a number of factors contribute to why meat hasn’t received the same attention as red dye or smoking in terms of public health messaging and policy change — starting with a lack of abundantly clear evidence, the kind that we had for smoking.

“If we’re going to tell people to change their behavior, we need to be pretty sure we’re telling them the right thing,” he says. With smoking, there was “mountains and mountains of incontrovertible evidence” linking it to cancer. For red and processed meats, however, “we have some evidence,” he says, “but it’s not the kind of evidence that we had for smoking.”

Andrea Love, a biomedical scientist and science communicator, drilled down even further, explaining that “much of the data related to dietary components like bacon are based on observational studies,” where groups of people are studied without the researchers directly intervening in their behavior. These types of studies, while valuable, “cannot directly analyze cause and effect,” according to Love. What’s more, she told Sentient via email, “there are often confounding variables: like what is the overall dietary composition? Is this person eating enough fiber (which we know is directly related to risk of multiple cancer types)? Are they exercising? Do they have other underlying risk factors?”

In other words, even if an observational study finds a certain result, there are usually a number of other possible explanations, and more research is almost always needed.

Still, Evans believes the WHO is “out front” on the issue of certain meats potentially causing cancer, and while “that doesn’t mean they’re wrong,” he adds, “it just means that the consensus hasn’t fully formed yet.”

But there are other forces at work here. According to Rebbeck, “as with other areas of regulatory policy, there are a lot of countervailing forces from industry and others. It is also difficult when the item under discussion is a food that is part of our usual diet.”

The cultural embeddedness of meat is an important factor, says Evans. “Could we live without meat? Yes, we could,” he says, but adds “it’s such an essential part of human society, human culture; it’s hard to envision it just disappearing.”

On top of this deeply embedded cultural connection, the meat industry is actively campaigning to keep its products on consumers’ tables, three meals a day. Amid a growing awareness of meat production’s many impacts, whether on animals, clean air and water or a safe food supply, the meat industry has put out its own counteroffensive — disinformation campaigns to tar plant-based alternatives, sponsoring academic researchers to downplay the climate impact of milk and training online influencers to spread the good word about beef.

Even though the fundamentals of what makes for a healthy diet remain uncontroversial, these simpler messages can get lost in the barrage of misinformation. “A diet that’s healthy for keeping cancer risk low involves a variety of unprocessed foods,” says Rebbeck, and that remains the same as ever: “fruits and vegetables, less meat.”