By Josh Bloom —
Pickleball is life. Purple Gatorade makes pickleball possible. Now RFK is coming for the purple—so what’s left? Give up and drink water like a savage?
As if I don’t have enough problems getting through two hours stumbling around on a pickleball court in the blazing sun without doing a faceplant, tearing a ligament, keeling over from heat stroke, or—worst of all—using my backhand, something that the (other) old fools I play with exploit mercilessly.
So the last thing I needed to hear was that PepsiCo, the maker of Gatorade—my sole sustenance on the court—has caved to yet another heroically trivial crusade by our sub-orbital HHS Secretary RFK Jr.
In a public health development roughly on par with the invention of the Salk polio vaccine, Kennedy has persuaded the food giant to remove synthetic, petroleum-based colors from an otherwise pristine sports drink. Kill me.
Why is this personally cataclysmic?
Although I still lead a full and rich life (pickleball with a bunch of corpses and Monday night Diaper Bingo), I fear that without PURPLE Gatorade – one of the few flavors(?) I can keep down, I'll be forced into lesser, "natural" alternatives. This is deeply disturbing, given that other flavors range in palatability from "OK if stranded in the Gobi Desert" (the red) to "A bottle of unfiltered Gowanus Canal water" (the orange). [1]
Running away from the science
As was the case with Skittles, another "health nut bioweapon" (See MAHA Targets Red Skittles but Ignores Red Wine), Kennedy set his sights on a meaningless target, and he does so using bona fide ridiculous reasoning: the mistaken belief that “synthetic” is inherently different from “natural,” and that anything derived from petroleum is automatically harmful—claims that sound ominous but collapse under even minimal scientific scrutiny.
Yes, by all means, let’s focus on the color of a bunch of sugar water [2] while measles cases in the U.S. soar to a 30-year high—and the entire ACIP [3] has been unceremoniously dumped.
Kennedy claims dismantled
The terms "synthetic" and "petroleum-based" are both red herrings. Let's fish around for why. First, let's tackle synthetic.
Actually, I lied. A bit. There is one real—though usually irrelevant—difference between, say, naturally derived and factory-made alcohol (or any other chemical from a living course). Natural sources contain trace amounts of radioactive carbon (¹⁴C), while petroleum-derived chemicals, being millions of years old, do not. That’s how carbon dating works. (See Natural Flavors Are More Radioactive Than Artificial Ones.)
With the obscure exception of isotopes, there is no difference between the naturally occurring and synthetic versions of the same chemical. None. No machine can tell them apart. Your body can’t tell them apart. Only the supplements industry says otherwise, and they’re full of synthetic crap.
Petroleum-based is likewise a meaningless term. It is supposed to imply "unhealthy," but all of the chemicals below are either in petroleum feedstocks or derived from them:
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Aspirin
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Ibuprofen
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Beta-carotene
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Vitamin A
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Vanillin (the flavor of vanilla)
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Vaseline
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Baby oil
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Chewing gum
It’s a long list—but good luck finding anything obviously hazardous among these everyday chemicals and substances.
The same can be said for Gatorade colors. But yes, by all means, let’s keep fighting the real enemy: brightly colored liquids. Civilization clearly hangs in the balance.
As does my backhand.
NOTES:
[1] The Gowanus Canal, in Downtown Brooklyn, is one of the most polluted waterways in the US, yet it still harbors gonorrhea. Talk about adaptation.
[2] Fine, it has salt too. But it does not make you Michael Jordan. Even the purple.
[3] ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) is a CDC panel of independent medical and public health experts that develops recommendations on the use of vaccines in the United States. Getting rid of them might be the single worst thing Kennedy has done.
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Josh Bloom
Dr. Jonathan (Josh) Bloom, ACSH's Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. During his 20-plus years in drug discovery at Wyeth, his research group discovered the antibiotic Tygacil®, approved in 2005. He holds 25 issued patents and has authored 35 academic papers. Since joining ACSH in 2010, he has written more than 2,000 articles and dozens of op-eds for major newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune.
