Bravo Wall Street Journal, your article highlights how our foods in the United States have been poisoned, and we at WISEcode are committed to helping consumers know what’s exactly in our food. 

But your analyses are off.

It appears you are using the USDA’s Branded Food database (from the FoodDataCentral website) which is limited in scope, out of date, and relies on 'honest' updates from Big Food. WISEdata™ has over 650,000 foods analyzed through 32K+ ingredient terms, which is far more extensive compared to the 450,000 from USDA Branded Food database. 

But if we just stick to the dataset you analyzed, the actual data story is much worse than originally presented:

• Artificial colors are used in 17.8% (not your 13%) in the foods you evaluated (450,000 package goods) because you didn’t include pigments in your analysis.

  • So, you have left out some important ingredients including:

    • Carmine (a dye derived from insect shells)

    • Titanium Dioxide (a pigment also used in cosmetics and paints)

    • Lake pigments (often containing aluminum)

Some additional statistics about what to consider in your food:

• 31.4 % of our food uses at least one of the four artificial lab-created fake ingredients:

  • Artificial color

  • Artificial flavor

  • Artificial sweetener

  • Artificial preservative

• 29.0 % of our food uses emulsifiers (think glue for food)

• 29.4 % of our food are ultra-processed

How do we know? After a decade, WISEcode™, a leading foodtech company, has built the world’s best comprehensive nutrition data base with 15,000 attributes on each of the 650,000+ foods in our WISEdata™. But while we are working with the world’s best nutrition research institutes to advance the world’s knowledge about what is truly in our foods, we’re also focused on empowering the everyday consumer trying to make a healthy choice. 

We recently launched the WISEcode App, which identifies 14 categories of toxic and bad ingredients in our foods and puts power in consumer hands.

Founder, WISEcode

***Response to: How Prevalent Are Dyes in Foods? Wall Street Journal (3-23-25)