A far-reaching Texas bill signed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Sunday will force manufacturers of processed foods and drinks to put warning labels on any products containing 44 different food additives or dyes believed to be toxic to human health.
While the law, which aligns with the “Make America Healthy Again” goals of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is limited to Texas, the state’s hefty population of more than 31 million gives it significant sway in the food industry.
“It’s official! Make Texas Healthy Again has been signed!” state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R) posted Sunday night on the social platform X, adding that the measure would ensure “consumers are informed and can make better choices for their families.”
The health law has other pillars: It mandates physical education and recess in schools and protects access to exercise even for kids in detention, and it requires that students in Texas premed programs and medical schools be taught about nutrition.
Curriculum for that program and K-12 health classes would be developed by a new Texas Nutrition Advisory Committee, from which anyone working in the processed food business — or their relatives — would be excluded.
But from a national perspective, the food labeling guidelines are the most significant, because any company that wants to sell in Texas will have to either remove those compounds or post a warning label.
The law contains one big exception: Food manufacturers will not have to disclose the presence of pesticides, which may cause as big a risk for cancer as smoking cigarettes.
But included among the chemicals are suspected cancer-causing chemicals such as potassium bromate, a common additive to bread products; titanium dioxide, a dye banned in the European Union that is used to whiten soups and baked goods; the preservative BHA, which disrupts the all-encompassing endocrine system; and several synthetic food dyes such as Red 40 and Yellow 5 and 6 that are found to cause hyperactivity in children.
In 1986, Californians passed Proposition 65, which required companies to label consumer products that contained chemicals that could cause cancer, reproductive or developmental harm — leading many companies to reformulate their supply chains to avoid those products, one study found.
But this didn’t necessarily make consumer products safer, researchers noted. Because material science advances far faster than the research into the harms caused by novel chemicals — let alone their regulation — in the aftermath of Proposition 65, many manufacturers reformulated products to remove harmful chemicals, “only to replace them with an unlisted chemical that might also be harmful but doesn’t require a warning.”
Many of these will be hard for manufacturers to swap out for reasons related to their potential health impacts. Petroleum-based synthetic dyes like Red 40 and Yellow 6, for example, are used in candies and children’s breakfast cereals because their stable chemical structure keeps colors bright in food that may sit on shelves for months.
And endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as BHA — despite the way they may play havoc on all the body’s systems — are nonetheless more effective at keeping foods from rotting, despite their health impacts to consumers.
Two main food manufacturers — Kraft and General Mills — have announced plans to phase out food dyes this decade.
