The Free Press
Last week, the Food and Drug Administration banned Red Dye No. 3—a coloring found lurking in everything from pastries to pills. Regulators banned it on the grounds that several studies have shown a worrying tendency for the dye to cause thyroid cancer in animals. Since 1990, it has been prohibited for use in cosmetics, but it has somehow persisted in food and medicine.
Relieved by the ban? Don’t be. Red Dye No. 3 is set to be replaced by. . . Red Dye No. 40, which in Europe comes with the unencouraging warning label: “May have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.”
It’s hard to shake the feeling that synthetic dyes are just the tip of a very large and very troubling iceberg.
Nearly four years ago, I became a father and encountered a seemingly perfect living thing. But I quickly began to wonder what I unknowingly was feeding my daughter. Untold numbers of other Americans have felt the same wariness toward a food system that seems uniquely fortified with a witches’ brew of colorings, pesticides, preservatives, and sweeteners, often encased in packaging that leaches into the things we eat.
Many Americans are now backing parts of the MAHA agenda led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This is not because his ideas are particularly political—the MAHA movement crosses all party and demographic lines—but because Americans are desperate to remedy the problem.
And it’s not just our food that needs to be fixed.
Synthetic fibers in our clothing shed microplastics during their increasingly short tours of duty. Everything from our water to our organs teem with detectable levels of multisyllabic compounds that don’t belong in our bodies. The air in our hospitals, offices, cars, schools, and homes envelop us in undesirable compounds emanating from cleaning products and air fresheners. All this stuff could harm our health. The supreme insult is that most of it performs no better than the same products from decades ago, despite our newfound chemical “enhancements.”
Part of the challenge with our current generation of stuff is that their damaging ingredients are now enmeshed in almost everything we touch, consume, or encounter. Never have so many ingredients been as invisible as they are pervasive. But their disturbing omnipresence does not have to continue.
We need a Great Reformulation.
If the cause doesn’t seem urgent yet, it’s because we’re only beginning to grasp the scale of the problem. Consider this: In 2023, researchers at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center tested the placentas from 62 women, and detailed their findings in a paper published last year. The result? Every single sample contained microplastics. Another study published in May 2024 (though still not peer reviewed) analyzed the prevalence of microplastics in cadaver brains. Relative to samples collected in 2016, researchers found that the accumulation of microplastics has skyrocketed in less than a decade, leaving the average American brain sample with concentrations of 0.5 percent plastic by weight. That’s about the weight of a pencil in your brain. Think about that.
We don’t actually understand what these substances mean for human health. Studies have shown how chemicals like BPA and phthalates (found in things like food containers and printed receipts) disrupt hormone functioning, and flame retardants (mandated in certain furniture) may degrade IQ in children. It’s possible their ubiquity is overblown. But given the choice, would you want to have any percentage of your vital organs contain any foreign matter?
The more you look, the more disconcerting the picture becomes. To take one example: Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (usually shortened to PFAS, but often referred to by the unsettling label “forever chemicals”) represent a class of nearly 15,000 individual chemicals that turn up in everything from dust to dental floss. This class of chemicals is almost certainly detectable in the water coming out of your tap; it is likely woven into the carpet under your feet. It’s becoming obvious that we can’t CTRL + F to search for all the toxic products and just delete our way out of all this. Only a fundamental reformulation will address the problem.
If we wait for years of painstaking research to show that a particular compound is harmful—only to replace it with other compounds—we will simply swap the shunned for the suspect. Instead of reverting from Red Dye No. 3 to Red Dye No. 40, why not try beet root extract? True innovation means rebuilding products balancing three core principles: performance, safety, and cost. We’ve been told that this is a kind of trilemma—that we can have only two of the three. In practice, this has often meant that cost and performance take priority, leading to toxic products on the market. Instead, companies must develop ingredients whose effects they understand at a cost customers can afford.
To be clear, companies aren’t intentionally trying to harm consumers—they’re trying to address challenges like function or cost. But if compelled to reformulate, history has shown that companies can do so efficiently and swiftly, creating products that are simply better.
To give just one example: Until 1978, lead was used in house paint to increase its durability and sheen. When we realized babies were eating lead chips from peeled paint, which caused brain damage, federal regulators promptly outlawed lead-based paint for residential use and removed it from paint supply chains. Ditto with asbestos (an excellent insulation material, but an instigator of lung disease, and banned in 1989). Good luck trying to find a homeowner who pines for the lead-covered walls of old. The ingredients that replaced lead performed much better without the heavy metal’s hazards.
Reformulation won’t happen overnight—and given the sheer pervasiveness of certain compounds like PFAS and plastic, it will require meaningful investment. But if the result is improved products and reduced toxicity, then companies should make the Great Reformulation a priority.
In small ways, the latest cycle of reformulation has already begun. In 2022, 3M announced that it would stop manufacturing PFAS by the end of this year. Foreshadowing the FDA’s action on Red No. 3, California banned six food dyes, including Red No. 40, from school food last September.
Reformulation is not just about reverting to more natural ingredients. Novel design and manufacturing tools—increasingly supercharged with AI—mean a new generation of optimal products that are high in functionality and low in toxicity. Think packaging wrapped in seaweed instead of plastic, apparel that stretches and wicks sweat powered by biomanufactured spider-silk yarn instead of petroleum-derived polyester, and skin creams mimicking human collagen rather than containing unpronounceable synthetic additives. We no longer use whale oil for lighting. Why use PFAS to make things nonstick?
The EU has stepped up to protect its citizens through heavy regulation, banning dozens of additives and chemicals in everything from pesticides to cereals—ingredients Americans are still allowed to consume. The same should happen in the U.S.
But I imagine that, given the cultural shifts before us, with the most sensible aspects of the MAHA movement going mainstream, companies will eventually embrace reformulation. That’s because their customers—more informed and discerning than ever—will demand better products by asking one simple question: What’s in it?
It’s been almost 120 years since Upton Sinclair published what remains one of the great works of guerrilla journalism, The Jungle. A fictionalized account of Chicago’s sprawling meatpacking plants, Sinclair’s descriptions of rat melangé and chemically tainted cuts of meat led to public uproar over an increasingly urbanized lifestyle and all that it wrought. The backlash led to changes that ensured greater oversight and control of the ingredients we consume.
RFK Jr. has the potential to do what Sinclair did in the early twentieth century: to shift the vibe, and spark the public into demanding companies remake their products for the twenty-first century. America cannot claim to be exceptional while making inferior, toxic products. The process will take decades to fully mature, but Americans have never been afraid to insist on better.
It’s time that we do that now, and demand a Great Reformulation.
Joshua Lachter is the co-founder and chief business officer of Synonym, a financing and development platform for biomanufacturing.