Is Food Really Better in Europe?

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There’s a type of video young women like to post after returning home from a trip to Europe. They want to know why, when they’re in the U.S., eating wheat and dairy makes them bloated and tired, but in Europe, they can gorge on pasta loaded with cheese and feel “amazing” and even lose weight. “What is wrong with the food we’re eating in the United States?,” they’ll ask. 

It’s not just study-abroad students who have become fixated on the superiority of European food. Joe Rogan has observed that while pizza, pasta, and breads “really wreck me” in the U.S., he can eat those same foods in Italy with “no problem at all.” Gwyneth Paltrow recently admitted that on a flight in Europe, she ate peanut M&Ms. “I would not do that in America,” she said. Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. loves to say Americans “have around 10,000 chemicals in our food, while Europe has only 400.” He recently invited Vani Hari — the activist known as Food Babe on Instagram — to the White House to present a comparison of the ingredients in Skittles and McDonald’s French fries in the U.S. and the U.K. “American companies are poisoning us with ingredients they don’t use in other countries,” she concluded.

With MAHA’s ascendance, claims about the unique horrors of the American diet are everywhere. Instagram is full of PSAs that your bread is probably causing inflammation and your yogurt could be ruining your gut health. You don’t have to consider yourself crunchy to be suspicious of American grocery stores, with their neon-colored breakfast cereals and allegedly pesticide-tainted produce. Is it so far-fetched to think that Europe, with its walkable cities and universal health care, might also have purer, healthier food?

Is Our Wheat Contaminated or Something?

The most ardent believers point to the ease with which they are able to digest wheat while they’re visiting Europe. According to Rogan, “When I’ve gone to Italy, you eat the pasta, it just seems normal.” He blames the fact that in the U.S., it’s common for grains to be fortified with folic acid. Rogan appears to have gotten this idea from Gary Brecka, a self-proclaimed “longevity expert” with not one but two undergraduate degrees in biology. Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience last year, Brecka suggested that fortifying grains with folic acid is a conspiracy on the part of pharmaceutical companies to make people sick, because he believes consumption of folic acid is correlated with everything from ADHD to bipolar disorder and postpartum depression. “It can literally be like cocaine for a 6-year-old,” Brecka said.

But there’s no evidence that folic acid — which is the synthetic form of vitamin B9 — can “make your body go haywire,” as Brecka claims. “I’ve looked, and I haven’t seen any good research to suggest that folic acid is negatively impacting people or making grains harder to digest,” says Jessica Knurick, a registered dietician who specializes in debunking health misinformation. The CDC agrees, noting that even people with an MTHFR gene variant — one of Brecka’s favorite talking points — “can process all types of folate, including folic acid.” Plus, there are foods that are fortified with folic acid in Europe. The U.K. recently mandated that refined wheat flour be enriched with folic acid by the end of 2026 for the same reason we enrich cereal-grain products in the U.S.: to prevent babies from being born with neural-tube defects.

Another popular claim is that wheat in Europe is easier to digest because they don’t use glyphosate, the herbicide found in Roundup’s original formula. Dave Asprey, the man responsible for Bulletproof coffee, says that while he “cannot touch a teaspoon of American gluten or American flour without it wrecking my microbiome,” a loaf of sourdough baked with white flour ordered from France “with no glyphosate in it” caused him no issues. However, contrary to popular belief, glyphosate is not banned in Europe. In fact, it was recently renewed for use through 2033. It’s also worth keeping in mind that when people talk about glyphosate residues detected on finished food products, these are incredibly small amounts. “You’re talking tiny, tiny quantities — parts per trillion,” says Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist who writes the newsletter ImmunoLogic, which is aimed at countering pseudoscience. “For context, that would be like a single grain of rice in a tractor-trailer full of rice.” There’s no evidence that exposure at these levels will have “any meaningful impact on human health,” Love says.

Doesn’t Europe Ban Artificial Food Dyes?

Actually, no. The most common synthetic food dyes in the U.S. — including Blue 1, Blue 2, Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6 — are all approved for use in Europe. They use different names for them there, which may account for some of the confusion. And there is a lot of confusion: MAHA influencers have been applauding RFK Jr. for “banning” artificial food dyes, but he hasn’t actually enacted any new regulation to this effect.

While there is a lot of fearmongering about food dyes, in reality, they’re strictly regulated in the U.S., says Love. The FDA requires “evidence that a color additive is safe at its intended level of use before it may be added to foods” and sets the maximum amount allowed to be used. For a 60-pound kid to reach the acceptable daily intake for Red 40, they would have to eat approximately eight bags of Skittles a day, according to Love. The amounts present in food are so small “that we have never seen negative impacts in humans,” says Knurick. “When people are out there saying ‘these dyes are toxic,’ there’s just no evidence.”

Some research has shown that in a small number of children with ADHD, consuming artificial food dyes may exacerbate their symptoms. A 2022 report from the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment in California reviewed 25 studies on the topic and found a small but significant association between food-dye exposure and “adverse behavioral outcomes in children” in about half of them, leading the state to ban several food dyes in schools starting in 2028. But analyzing the same report, the economist Emily Oster, who writes the newsletter ParentData, concluded that the research was inconsistent and that avoiding food dye “should not occupy significant brain space.” Knurick notes that much of the evidence on food dye and children’s behavior is correlational, which makes it “really difficult to parse out.” Because food dyes tend to be used in ultraprocessed foods that are often high in sugar, like candy or frosting, it can be hard to isolate a single culprit.

While the research suggesting dyes are harmful is limited, it’s become heavily politicized — including in Europe, where since 2010, food products containing certain synthetic dyes have required a warning label that they “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.” After reviewing the research in 2011, an expert advisory panel to the FDA concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to warrant a similar label in the U.S. In the final days of the Biden administration, the FDA did ban Red 3, citing decades-old evidence that it was linked to cancer in rats. Yet it’s worth noting that the amounts of dye present in foods are much lower than the amounts given to rats for the purposes of toxicology studies. Plus, the hormone mechanism that caused cancer in rats does not exist in humans.

It is true that Europe doesn’t use as many artificial dyes as we do in the U.S., but experts say that comes down to consumer preference, not safety. Food companies claim that Americans actually like their food unnaturally colorful. In 2015, General Mills announced it would voluntarily remove artificial food dyes from its cereals but changed its mind two years later when no one wanted to buy Trix dyed with carrots. (Apparently they’re about to try it again.) Mars — the company that makes M&Ms — also backtracked on a plan to swap out artificial dyes in its products, noting that “we have found that consumer expectations regarding colors in food differ widely across markets and categories.” Natural food dyes aren’t always a foolproof substitution. They are often more expensive and can also impact food texture and shelf life. Some natural dyes are also less tested for safety, says Love, and they can have other risks. For example, many people are allergic to carmine, a natural red food dye derived from insects.

But American Food Has Way More Ingredients, Right?

Online, proclamations that American food is making us sick are often accompanied by Food Babe’s signature infographics, where she compares the ingredients in similar foods sold in the U.S. and other countries. She typically focuses on foods that no one would mistake for healthy — Doritos, Mountain Dew, and McDonald’s French fries — and points out that the American products tend to have longer ingredient lists, highlighting the chemicals she deems problematic in red. But according to food scientists, neither the number of ingredients nor whether a chemical name is difficult to say is any indication of the safety of a food product. In a recent video, RFK Jr. struggled to pronounce “riboflavin” — otherwise known as vitamin B2.

Many of Food Babe’s claims don’t hold up to scrutiny. Take her comparison of Heinz tomato ketchup between the U.S. and the U.K., the American version of which she claims is “full of GMOs.” Putting aside the fact that there’s no evidence that genetically engineered crops are harmful to human health, there’s only one in Heinz ketchup, which is the corn used in corn syrup.

It’s true that Europe allows fewer GMO crops (though it does grow GMO corn). But the fear of GMOs is rooted in the assumption that just because something is “natural,” it’s automatically better or healthier. In reality, “it makes no difference to your body if you eat a slightly changed DNA sequence versus an original sequence,” says Love. “We have decades of safety testing to show that the nutrition quality isn’t impacted.” While people often claim that GMOs are “doused in pesticides,” many genetically engineered crops actually enable farmers to use less pesticide than they would otherwise. And anyway, even if it grows fewer, the E.U. still imports plenty of genetically engineered crops.

The main difference between Heinz ketchup in the U.S. and in the U.K. is that the American version contains high-fructose corn syrup and corn syrup, while the U.K. version includes sugar. In the U.S., we subsidize corn, so it’s much cheaper for companies to use corn syrup. “They’re both sugar,” says Knurick, noting that the metabolic impact is similar. A more useful comparison would be to look at the amount of sugar versus corn syrup in the two ketchups, but Food Babe rarely discusses the amounts of the ingredients she takes issue with, which food scientists say is a red flag, since any chemical can be toxic in certain doses.

Then there’s RFK Jr.’s claim that Americans have “10,000 ingredients in our food,” whereas Europeans “only have 400,” which, like many things that come out of his mouth, is clearly wrong. The 2011 report he appears to have pulled the 10,000 from includes “indirect food additives” such as chemicals used in food packaging. And though the E.U. database of approved food additives has 412 items, it has a separate list of more than 2,500 approved food flavorings. While Europeans do tend to eat fewer ultraprocessed foods than Americans on average, the idea that those foods don’t exist there is also a fantasy.

So Is There Anything That Is Better About the Food in Europe?

The U.S. and the E.U. do take different approaches to regulating food. In the E.U., ingredients can’t be used in food unless they’ve been approved as safe. In theory, the U.S. established a similar system with the Food Additives Amendment in 1958, but we have a uniquely American loophole. Known as “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, the exemption was intended so that common food ingredients like vinegar and baking soda wouldn’t have to go through the process of getting FDA approval before hitting the market. The problem, says Emily Broad Leib, the director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, is that over time companies have exploited the loophole, which essentially allows them to decide for themselves that a new ingredient is “safe” and begin selling it in food.

Most food-safety advocates agree that this is not an ideal system. You don’t have to look far to find evidence that the lack of FDA pre-market approval can lead to harmful ingredients in our food. For example, in 2022, Daily Harvest began selling “lentil crumbles,” a vegan ground-beef substitute that sickened nearly 400 people, some of whom were hospitalized with liver dysfunction. Eventually, the company determined that the likely culprit was tara flour, an ingredient that it claimed its supplier assured them was “generally recognized as safe.” (While Daily Harvest recalled the lentil crumbles, it continues to advertise “clean food” delivered to your doorstep and recently partnered with Trump’s new surgeon-general nominee, Casey Means, on a line of “metabolically healthy” bowls and smoothies.)

Because tara flour made people acutely ill, it was easier for the FDA to investigate its safety. But many experts worry about the long-term health impacts of ingredients that bypass the FDA’s food-additive approval process. One of RFK Jr.’s early moves as secretary of Health and Human Services was to direct the FDA to explore closing the GRAS loophole, a move that many experts support.

However, it’s hard to understand how MAHA’s purported desire to increase food regulations fits in with the Trump administration’s priorities. “Generally speaking, when we talk about concerns with the safety of our food supply and the safety of food ingredients, it’s often a result of decreasing budget and funding for scientists,” says Love. Experts say the FDA was underfunded long before RFK Jr. laid off many of the people responsible for assessing the safety of food additives. It’s also curious that some of the same wellness influencers who express the loudest outrage about the GRAS loophole seem to have no issue with the fact that the supplements they sell are also largely unregulated by the FDA. In fact, Mark Hyman — a close friend of RFK Jr. with a very lucrative wellness empire — has been accused in the past of selling supplements that contain the same ingredients he demonizes in food.

When influencers gush about the food in Europe, their observations are full of nostalgia for a simpler time. Who needs synthetic chemicals or preservatives when you can hop on a bike to the local market? “When you have milk in your fridge in Europe, it goes bad after two days, that’s supposed to happen,” the influencer Mari Llewellyn has observed on her podcast, Pursuit of Wellness. For the record, cow’s milk has a longer shelf life due to pasteurization, which the European Food Safety Authority also recommends. But regardless, preservatives exist for a reason. They make it harder for pathogens and mold and harmful bacteria to grow in food, and they also reduce food waste. “How often are you able to eat an entire loaf of bread in two days?” says Elaina Efird, a registered dietitian. “Sometimes convenience is a good thing. Without it, I think a lot of people would be in for a rude awakening.”

MAHA has latched onto vilifying particular chemicals in food because these claims spread like wildfire on social media. “It’s fear-based and easy for people to understand,” says Knurick. But experts say RFK Jr.’s claims that food dyes and other chemical additives are primary drivers of chronic disease don’t tell the whole story. “I don’t know of any scientific evidence to suggest that banning those ingredients would lead to different health outcomes,” says Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at UNC Chapel Hill. “There’s this really big obsession right now with identifying ‘toxic ingredients,’ but it’s not clear to me that’s really the problem with ultraprocessed foods.” Artificial dyes don’t add any flavor or nutrition — they’re solely a marketing tool to make unhealthy foods more appealing, particularly to children. For that reason, many experts think banning them could be beneficial. “But the actual issues are far more nuanced and far more systemic than just like, ‘these food dyes are poisoning us,’” says Knurick.

It’s clear that the U.S. spends more on health care but has worse health outcomes than other high-income countries — and it would be so convenient if the solution were simply to ban a few ingredients from our food. But there are far more obvious reasons that Americans tend to be less healthy than Europeans. “It’s really easy to blame the food or the pesticides, and ignore the fact that we have no universal health care, that we have insane health and wealth inequities,” says Love. Ninety-five percent of Americans don’t eat enough fiber, and we spend more and more of our waking hours sitting down. The reason you feel better eating pasta in Europe is probably because you’re on vacation — that, and you’re walking a lot more.