**2. Synthetic Food Colors**

Color is an important factor as far as food is concerned, as it plays a major role in the taste and perception of food, along with flavor and texture. It is a known fact that consumers will probably reject food that does not look attractive. To make food more appealing to customers, manufacturers add color to retain the food's natural look, as far as possible. Natural appearance is always preferable to anything that looks unusually colored. Even though many foods can contain added artificial colors, most consumers believe that the color of the food is its natural color.

The first synthetic organic dye, discovered by William Henry Perkin in 1856, was a purplish lilac color named "mauve". Similar organic aniline dyes were synthesized, representing every color and tint of the rainbow, and these were used for food coloring with little or few tests regarding their safety. Aniline and coaltar-based colors exhibited significant toxicity, which prompted regulators to examine the exact use of synthetic colors in the food industry [9].

In recent years, an astonishing amount of the food we eat is processed. To increase the shelf life and appearance of food, additives and colors are added, which make them unsafe for consumption. On average, processed food accounts for about 70% of the diet of U.S. residents. This includes soft drinks, confectionery, packaged bread, buns, biscuits, cakes, preserved meat products, instant soups, noodles, packaged pizzas, pies and packaged meals. The U.S. consumption of processed food is about forty times more than the diet of Indian residents [10].
