Illinois To Become Next State To Join The "Skittles Ban"

Lawmakers in Illinois have proposed legislation that would ban 5 different chemicals in food – all of which have been linked to serious health problems in human beings, and most of the chemicals were banned overseas decades ago. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Lawmakers in Illinois have proposed legislation that would ban five different chemicals in food, all of which have been linked to serious health problems in human beings. And most of the chemicals, well, they were banned overseas for decades. I've got Farron Cousins with me to talk about this story and many more stories. Farron, this Skittles, we did this story how long ago?

God, I think it's been a couple years, really.

Oh, two or three years ago. And what we started seeing is we started seeing that this is Japan, Asia, was banning Skittles. Europe was banning Skittles. And so we took a deep look into it and said, why? And it's because they figured out that the additives that were going in this would cause cancer, all kinds of chronic disease, ADHD, and FDA ignored it as they usually do. They totally ignored it because industry was pumping so much money into the FDA.

Yeah. Europe was big on just immediately getting rid of these chemicals. And like you said, we've got cancers, we've got cognitive disorders, we've got nervous system disorders, reproductive issues. I mean, across the board, any horrible thing you could imagine as a side effect of a chemical is listed for these five chemicals. And the common places you find 'em, Skittles, PEZ, Peeps, Sun Drop sodas, any kind of colorful candy or or sweet type thing, whether it's a beverage or a food, most likely has at least some of these chemicals. And what really got me about this story is that the US banned it from cosmetics in the nineties.

Right.

But not from consuming it.

Not from kids candy.

Right.

In other words, the FDA says, oh, well, we're gonna make some movement here, but we're not gonna interfere with the food industry. Well, if you do anybody watching this, if you take a look at brominated vegetable oil or potassium bromate, or take a look at red dye number three, and you're gonna see that this is really bad stuff. And not only that, we've known it was bad stuff for a long, long time. This isn't guesswork. The scientists, the clinicals on this stuff have been around forever. So how did it make it this far for so long?

Well, again, I think you kind of nailed it there, is we have a regulatory system that is completely captured by the industry. So let's compare, you know, over in Europe what it takes for something to be taken off the market in Europe is suspicion. If we suspect that this could be causing negative health effects, we remove it, then we run our tests, so that nobody in the interim gets hurt. We'll run our tests. If it's safe, hey, welcome back. If not, ha, we told you so. We gotta do something else. In the US, we wait, we wait and wait and wait and then we test while the product is still out there potentially harming millions of people. We let the industry come in, we have our 90 day comment periods, the industry can submit their own testing, they can object to our final testing results. A process that literally takes decades. And if the final determination is, yes, it hurts people and we take it off the market.

It's still not done.

It's been 20 to 30 years already at that point.

Okay. First of all, it's worse than that. Okay. Because even after you make it all through those hoops, when things start really getting tight, what the industry does is goes out and hires all these science whores. A science whore is somebody that works at a university or works with some type of foundation. And they say, we did the studies and we can't be sure. Okay. That's all they have to say. We can't be sure. In Europe, if you say we can't be sure it's gonna be pulled anyway. In the United States, there's just not enough. We need more studies.