Is Red 40 banned in Europe?

The claim circulates in a strong form, that Europe banned Red 40, and a weak one, that Europe treats it more seriously. The strong form is wrong. The weak form is right and worth understanding properly.

What Europe actually did

Red 40 is authorised in the EU. It has an E number, E129, which is what authorisation looks like there.

What the EU added is a labelling obligation. Following the research that came out of Southampton in 2007, the European Union called for eliminating six colours or listing on the label the warning that the colour “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children”.

So the product is legal and the packet has to say something. That is a middle position, and it is a real regulatory instrument rather than a compromise: it moves the decision to the shopper instead of removing the option.

In practice many manufacturers chose reformulation over the statement, which is why European versions of familiar products are often coloured differently. The colour left the shelves through commercial choice, not prohibition.

What the US did with the same evidence

FDA put the question to its Food Advisory Committee, which met on 30 and 31 March 2011. The committee “concluded that the evidence was too inconclusive to link food colors to hyperactivity and too insufficient to recommend warning labels for products containing artificial food colors”.

One body of research, two regulators, two answers. That is the actual story and it is more useful than either version of the myth.

It is worth adding what the source for this account also says. It is a commentary by a researcher who testified before that committee for the opposite conclusion, and who argues that FDA framed the question as whether colours cause hyperactivity in children generally, when the evidence speaks to a subgroup. Framing decides outcomes, and he is not a neutral party, and both of those things are true at once.

The thing Americans get that Europeans do not

Red 40 is a certified colour in the US. Every batch has to be submitted to FDA and tested against a published specification before it can be sold.

Very little in food is controlled batch by batch. Colours exempt from certification, which includes most of the ones sold as natural, are not. If your mental model is that American food rules are uniformly looser, this is a place where the opposite holds.

What to do about it

If you want to avoid it, avoid it. It is a colour, nothing depends on it nutritionally, and removing it costs you nothing.

If you are asking because of a child, the honest position is that the evidence points at a subgroup rather than at children in general, and that the only way to find out about one child is to try removing it and watch. That is a reasonable experiment and it is more informative than either regulator’s conclusion, which are about populations.

The fuller account is on Red 40, and the general problem with reading regulatory differences as a safety ranking is on the banned-elsewhere page.