Will a food dye ban make your favorite treats taste different? We put Froot Loops to the test.
According to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll of 1,597 U.S. adults conducted in April, 65% of Americans support such a ban. According to 26% of the respondents, losing artificial food dyes would 'affect the taste or quality' of certain food items that traditionally contain them — things like Mountain Dew, Doritos, M&Ms and Froot Loops — for the better, while 10% think it would 'make them worse.' (Another 34% thought there would be no change, and 31% were unsure.)
So ... which is it? We wanted to see if people could actually tell whether a food item contained artificial food dyes or not. Enter a blind taste test comparing traditional Kellogg's Froot Loops sold in the United States (which contain Red 40, Yellows 5 and 6 and Blue 1), Canadian Froot Loops (which come in a box boasting 'no artificial colors, same fruity taste' and get their color from turmeric, fruit and vegetable juice concentrate and other natural sources ) and a dye-free alternative from Aldi, the chain known for its use of plant-based colorings. Did our testers taste a difference? Here's how it played out.
We recruited four testers from our New York City offices: Yahoo News Reporter Katie Mather, Yahoo Finance Video Producer Jo Santangelo, Yahoo News Director of Social Media Marianna Brady and Yahoo Finance Senior Health Care and Business Reporter Anjalee Khemlani.
Each tester was blindfolded and given three bowls of cereal to sample — American Froot Loops, Canadian Froot Loops and Aldi's Millville Fruit Rounds. They tried them in different order and gave their honest reviews and best guesses about which was which. (You can watch the video here.)
The Aldi Fruit Rounds, which are free of artificial flavors and colors, preservatives and corn syrup, tasted a little different from our testers' childhood memories of Froot Loops. But they scored highly for tasting somehow 'more wholesome,' says Brady.
Mather and Khemlani were convinced that Canadian Froot Loops were the real American deal. To be fair, they're effectively identical to the U.S. version of the cereal, minus the dyes. 'This is really good,' Mather says. '[it] reminds me of being a kid and being so excited to have like seven bowls of this before going to school.' Khemlani picked up on the sweetness and said the Canadian cereal 'has to be the American one.'
The U.S version actually had Santangelo convinced that it was the 'alternative' (Aldi-sourced) brand, because it seemed less sugary. Mather and Khemlani also detected the fruity nostalgia of the flavors they knew from their youth.
In the end, only one person correctly guessed which cereal was the American one. And nobody could agree which version tasted best. Mather summed it up after her blindfold was removed and she saw the cereals she'd tried: 'The colors don't make any difference. [Each] tastes exactly like my spoonful of whatever colors I ate the last time.'
On their own, artificial food dyes are designed to have no negative flavors. Dyes may not be entirely flavorless, but they're usually added to foods in small enough quantities that there's no detectable change to the taste, Marion Nestle, a New York University professor emerita and a leading food activist, tells Yahoo Life.
But that doesn't mean those colors don't affect how we perceive the taste of food. 'We eat with our eyes,' says Nestle, who is also working on a book called Sugar Coated, which explores nutrition policy through an examination of her exhaustive collection of cereal boxes. It's not just smell and taste that 'make food attractive, but bright colors [too] — and people, particularly kids, really like them,' she adds. In fact, after General Mills tried producing a version of its cereals (including Trix) without artificial dyes in 2016, sales plummeted. The company reversed course the next year.
Is that reason enough to leave the bright colors alone? No, says Nestle. As noted by RFK Jr. and the FDA, studies — including a small but influential 1980 paper — have suggested a link between behavioral disruptions and problems, including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in kids and artificial dyes. It's difficult to establish that dyes alone are a major cause of ADHD or behavioral problems, but there's enough evidence to result in bans in Canada, California public schools and, now, the United States generally. Plus, according to Nestle, 'There's no reason to keep them; they're just cosmetic and have no safety or taste function.'
Ditching them won't solve the bigger issue with cereals like Froot Loops, however, says Nestle. 'Kids shouldn't be eating them anyway, and [banning] the color additives isn't going to change that — they're still ultra-processed cereals,' she says. 'I'm all for getting the color additives out of the food supply, but it is not going to make America's kids healthier again.'
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