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Republicans are coming for your blue M&Ms

Why your Halloween candy might be a little less colorful this year.

If you were anything like me as a kid, trick-or-treating meant one, maybe two, pillowcases full of candy every Halloween.

And as fun as collecting all that candy could be, the real fun began when I got home and dumped my winnings onto my bedroom floor. That’s when the sorting began.

I had some very specific rules: The usual suspects — think Smarties, Tootsie Rolls, and Dum Dums — went into one pile. Fun-size chocolates, like Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Baby Ruths, went into another. And then there was my prized pile: Skittles, Warheads, Starbursts, and Sour Patch Kids. Those were meant to be eaten slowly throughout November. The rest was fair game.

The ways we sort and eat our Halloween candy are decided by some very particular, personal rules. But Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would like to add another distinction: Which candies are made with artificial dyes?

Kennedy’s ire for synthetic food dyes is years old, and they’ve become a major target of his Make America Healthy Again movement. Last year, he announced a plan to remove “petroleum-based synthetic dyes” from foods, arguing that companies “shouldn’t be feeding it to the rest of us.”

That plan has become a multimillion-dollar problem for Mars, the maker of M&Ms, which promised customers last year that they would create an all-natural version of their tasty chocolatey treats. As the Wall Street Journal reported this summer, however, its latest offering is missing one of the most iconic colored M&Ms — the blue M&M.

M&Ms aren’t the only snack food in Kennedy’s crosshairs: He has called out Doritos, Cheez-Its, Cap’n Crunch, and gummy bears, saying their ingredients include “a lot of poisons.” On Fox News, he described what children eat as “food-like substances” and also said that “some of it was made in petroleum refineries.”

Is MAHA losing its battle to make Americans healthier?

In reality, the evidence is more complicated, because the Food and Drug Administration has long considered many of these approved synthetic dyes to be safe under its rules, while acknowledging that some children may be........

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