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West Virginia’s Artificial Food Dye Ban Still Blocked by Judge; Bill to Address It Died in Senate
A GOP-backed bill meant to make changes to West Virginia’s ban on certain colorful artificial dyes failed to make it to the governor’s desk this year. For now, the food dye ban — one of the first of its kind in the country — remains temporarily blocked by a federal judge. While the bill aimed at tweaking the artificial food dye ban passed the House of Delegates, it faced tougher scrutiny in the Senate, where members wanted to exempt West Virginia-made popsicles, pepperoni rolls and more from the synthetic food dye regulations.
Ultimately, the Senate parked the measure, which faced seven amendments aimed at exempting West Virginia food makers and products, in the final days of session.
Sen. Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, thought it wasn’t right for lawmakers to overstep federal food regulations. And, he felt it could hurt West Virginia-based food makers.
“It is a terrible look for attracting industry to West Virginia, and especially when we already have a lot of that industry here in West Virginia,” said Tarr, who sponsored amendments to the bill. “That sends a terrible message across the country and in the world about coming to West Virginia.”
In California, the War on Ultraprocessed Foods Moves to the Supermarket
A California Democrat is pushing a bill to create the nation’s first seal of approval for non-ultraprocessed foods — and require grocery stores to prominently display those products at the ends of aisles and other visible locations. The legislation, shared first with POLITICO, is the latest in a broader war on unhealthy food gaining traction at both the federal and state level, and across parties, with bipartisan support nationally for ridding American diets of ultraprocessed foods. It would create a “California Certified” seal on foods that aren’t ultraprocessed.
The bill comes just months after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation phasing ultraprocessed foods out of school lunches. California has also enacted laws banning food containing certain dyes like red 40 from being sold in schools by 2027, and banning food containing chemicals like brominated vegetable oil from being sold in the state by the same year.
The bill comes just months after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation phasing ultraprocessed foods out of school lunches. California has also enacted laws banning food containing certain dyes from being sold in schools by 2027, and banning food containing chemicals like red 40 from being sold in the state by the same year.
Fiber Optic Cables Reveal a Serious Problem at the Heart of Modern Farming
Thousands of years ago, beasts of burden helped make humanity what it is today. When farmers first started putting down roots, they’d plant and tend their crops by hand. With the power of oxen, they could drag plows across their fields before sowing, which boosted soil fertility and eliminated weeds. Today, that job has been made even easier by giant machines that rake the landscape.
Millennia of tilling, though, has come at a cost. While plowing releases nutrients in the short term, it degrades soil fertility in the long term, requiring farmers to load their fields with synthetic fertilizers. (The burst of microbial activity after roiling the ground also chews through accumulated carbon, returning it to the atmosphere as planet-warming greenhouse gas.) In addition, all this cultivation destroys the natural subterranean structures that hold onto water, meaning less is delivered to crops.
Fiber optic cables, of all things, have now exposed just how badly tilling messes with a farm’s ability to retain moisture. Using a technology known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, scientists analyzed how seismic waves disturbed the cable as they rippled through harrowed fields compared to adjacent undisturbed plots. This created subtly distinct signals, showing that plowing obliterates the “capillaries” that carry water like tiny interconnected reservoirs.
Ultraprocessed Foods Increase Risk of Heart Problems, Especially in Black Americans
A new study showed people who eat more than nine servings of ultraprocessed food every day are much more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes or die from heart disease than those who eat less — a risk that was particularly pronounced among Black Americans.
Previous studies have linked processed foods and cardiac risk, but most were conducted in Europe rather than in more diverse American populations. Amier Haidar, MD, a cardiology fellow at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, sought to fill this knowledge gap by examining data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA).
Haidar and colleagues administered food questionnaires to more than 6800 adult participants without known heart disease and assessed their daily intake of ultraprocessed foods with the NOVA classification system. The system categorizes foods into four groups ranging from unprocessed or minimally processed, such as whole foods like vegetables, to ultraprocessed, which includes many convenience foods like potato chips, frozen dinners, breakfast cereals, and processed meats.
It Begins as a Tick Bite and Can Be Devastating. And It’s Spreading.
A decade ago, Scott Curatolo-Wagemann knew of only one person stricken with a tick-borne ailment called alpha-gal syndrome — the husband of his wife’s cousin.
The list has since grown in his corner of Long Island: His sister, who was bitten this past summer, has it. So does his sister’s best friend. Then there’s the mother of a boy on his son’s baseball team. The phlebotomist at the Labcorp office where he gets blood drawn has it.
And, yes, Mr. Curatolo-Wagemann has alpha-gal, too. Once regarded as a rarity, the disease, which involves an allergy to red meat that develops after a tick bite, has emerged as a significant health menace, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimating that as many as 450,000 people nationwide may have had it in the past 15 years. And that is probably an undercount, said Dr. Scott Commins, who helped solve the mystery of alpha-gal syndrome about two decades ago.
More recently, Dr. Commins was involved in testing, largely at random, 3,000 samples from blood donors in 10 states for alpha-gal antibodies. A forthcoming study shows that in Arkansas, Kentucky and Missouri, nearly 30 percent of samples tested positive, although that doesn’t mean that all — or even most — had allergic symptoms, he said.
