Did California Ban Skittles?

What Everyone Should Know

I have some good news! A new California law bans four food ingredients commonly used in cookies, soda, candy, fruit juices, breads, and countless other products. New York is likely soon to follow.

The four banned food chemicals are really toxic and this is what they are:

1. Brominated vegetable oil
2. Potassium bromate
3. Propylparaben
4. Red dye #3

These ingredients have long since been banned in countries such as Japan, the UK, Canada, the European Union, New Zealand and Australia.

Unfortunately, food manufacturers have FOUR YEARS to implement the new law, which means that you have to know these ingredients, to avoid them, until 2027.

There’s no ban on Skittles, but the law was nicknamed the Skittles law because the candy had some of those ingredients, but also titanium dioxide.

That 5^th food toxin, titanium dioxide, was actually dropped from the law, and is still legal to put in processed food.

Many food manufacturers had already reformulated their products, to get those four ingredients that are illegal in other first-world countries, out of their products.

Probably not so much due to their concern for your health, so much as seeing the ban coming and not wanting to have to make two different products for different markets.

Titanium dioxide, however, will still likely be in Skittles, perfectly legally. And it took decades for the research on these ingredients to finally translate into outright bans—so, I don’t know that I’d trust the replacement ingredients much, either, where in most cases little or no research has been done.

The FDA spends most of its budget obsessing about food-borne illness (like E-coli and salmonella outbreaks) and persecuting companies like water purifiers, ozone generators, CBD oil companies—

–and of course they spent most of their energy from 2020 to 2022 telling you there was NO legitimate way to treat a virus.

Whereas very little attention goes to the chemicals in our food making so many people sick with thousands of different chronic disease diagnoses.

Processed food manufacturers abuse a loophole in the system called GRAS, or Generally Regarded As Safe. If they tell the FDA that an ingredient is GRAS, due to the manufacturer stating that it’s safe–they’ve fast-tracked the use of a new food chemical.

A 2011 study found that of over 4,200 chemicals in foods, only 582 of them had ever even been disclosed to the FDA as GRAS. So only 14% of the chemicals found in food have even been disclosed to the FDA.

Food manufacturers have figured out that the FDA is understaffed and overwhelmed and putting its emphasis elsewhere. They know that FDA just isn’t paying attention, and they’re taking full advantage of that.

So, the FDA is focused on acute, rare salmonella or  E-coli or listeria outbreaks. Which is not likely a good use of public resources, since 99.999% of the time, those fruits and vegetables we’re sold are safe.

While the 80,000 chemicals being used in our air, food, water and of course, food, may not be safe, especially in unlimited concentrations and combinations.

The best approach is to skip the Skittles and get your colorful foods from fruits and vegetables, full of fiber and nutrients, and skip the candy, cookies, juices and sodas full of chemicals.

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