I hesitate to say someone is trying to pass off sub-par food based on its coloring. The degree to which an item of food is pleasing in appearance is very unrelated to its nutritional or taste qualities, except the latter in a 'if you think it should taste good it will' kind of way. But appearance certainly factors in to how much of something people will buy and how much they'll pay.

I agree deception on food is wrong, but so is promoting hysteria when we tell people things that worry or disgust them, like in Jon's Cracked link below, where it rags on Worcestershire sauce or the dual use of titanium dioxide in ranch dressing and sunscreen. The former is simply reminding people that food is, often, very gross when contemplated in a certain light, and the latter is very akin to what you've brought up. Titanium dioxide was found to 'maybe possibly' increase the risk of respiratory cancer when inhaled in large quantities (e.g. when blowing massive quantities of it as an ultra-fine dust into rat lungs it might have caused cancer) it's totally safe to eat only scientists hate to say 'very definitely safe' in favor of 'possible' and that response results in a lot of panic. What I read as 'obviously not a risk worth considering' lots of other people will read as something to get seriously worried about.

On the citation thing, its really up to you if you want to provide them or not, an article lacking them though is one I will assume is very dubious simply by the lack of them, because it means the author doesn't think they're important or would prefer not to list them. Ditto one is gneerally expected to list one's credentials, because even a great list of citations doesn't help much if the person writing is doing anything but straight quotation. When these are both missing it is typically not a good sign, and while I give blog-format a bit more leeway about the author not listing their own credentials when I click on his the author is described as having his Doctorate, but in Chiropractics. That is not credential that fails to raise an eyebrow when we're talking about hard science based health and medicine.