END OF THE RAINBOW? CALIFORNIA BILL WOULD BAN SALES OF SKITTLES, OTHER ‘TOXIC’ SNACKS SCIENTISTS UNCOVER STARTLING CONCENTRATIONS OF PURE DDT ALONG SEAFLOOR OFF LA COAST

The snack and candy aisles at your local grocery store could soon carry fewer items if a bill proposed by California Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel is voted into law.

Last month, Gabriel, a Woodland Hills Democrat, introduced AB 418, which would ban the sale, manufacture and distribution of foods containing chemicals that have been linked to health concerns including decreased immune response, hyperactivity in children and increased risk of cancer.

The bill would make California the first state to ban the sale and manufacture of foods containing the chemicals, according to a release from Gabriel’s office.

The chemicals, currently banned in the European Union, are found in numerous snack staples including Skittles, Mountain Dew, Ding Dongs (with red heart sprinkles) and a host of other ubiquitous food items.

LOS ANGELES — First it was the eerie images of barrels leaking on the seafloor not far from Catalina Island. Then the shocking realization that the nation’s largest manufacturer of DDT had once used the ocean as a huge dumping ground — and that as many as half a million barrels of its acid waste had been poured straight into the water.

Now, scientists have discovered that much of the DDT — which had been dumped largely in the 1940s and ’50s — never broke down. The chemical remains in its most potent form in startlingly high concentrations, spread across a wide swath of seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco.

“We still see original DDT on the seafloor from 50, 60, 70 years ago, which tells us that it’s not breaking down the way that (we) once thought it should,” said UC Santa Barbara scientist David Valentine, who shared these preliminary findings Thursday during a research update with more than 90 people working on the issue. “And what we’re seeing now is that there is DDT that has ended up all over the place, not just within this tight little circle on a map that we referred to as Dumpsite Two.”

These revelations confirm some of the science community’s deepest concerns — and further complicate efforts to understand DDT’S toxic and insidious legacy in California.