For years it has been know that foods containing Tartrazine, yellow dyes, can causes food allergies and behavioral problems that are especially server in children and those that have bouts with asthma. While there have been some protest in the past to try and get these dyes banned they haven't had too much effect. Two food bloggers in North Carolina are hoping that focusing their efforts on one company just might be more fruitful in getting the dyes out of our food.
Lisa Leake, 100 days of real food, and Vani Hari, creator of Food Babe, have started a petition asking the Kraft corporation take the dyes out of their macaroni & cheese. The idea of going after one of the giants of the food world many of the others will follow suit. So far they have received more than 150,000 signatures to their petition.
"But Kraft is an iconic American brand," Vani Hari says. And in their effort to draw attention to the issue, "we wanted to make sure we targeted (a company) that could set an example of providing safer foods, eliminating ingredients that are bad for health reasons, and get away from this double standard." A spokesperson for Kraft, Lynne Galia, released a statement shooting back at the petition saying "The safety and quality of our products is our highest priority and we take consumer concerns very seriously. We carefully follow the laws and regulations in the countries where our products are sold. So in the U.S., we only use colors that are approved and deemed safe for food use by the Food and Drug Administration."
The statement refers to the fact that our FDA here in the United States have no problem with allowing these dyes even though they are band in both Norway and Austria. The FDA in this country do confiscate foods that are mislabeled or containing Tartrazine products that have not been tested by them. The closest the FDA came, so far, of actually banning any of these products was in 2011 when they considered putting warnings on the products that carried any of these dyes.
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