I’ll trust that you’re reading food labels. Even better is to buy foods that don’t have labels. But can you trust the safety?
Of course you can. After all, the FDA regulates things that food manufacturers put into the stuff we eat. Many of the food additives that appear at the tail end of the ingredients label fall under the category of GRAS (generally recognized as safe). They are used to preserve, thicken, flavor and blend the foods we stuff in our mouths. Since the FDA determines was is recognized is safe, we’re all good and that would be the end of this blog post. But, of course, they don’t and this isn’t.
Nope. It’s the manufacturers who (A) determine whether something is recognized as safe and (B) let the FDA know about it. Here’s how it works:
The food and beverages manufacturers hire scientists and / or companies to determine whether an additive is GRAS. If it is, then the company is exempt from the pre-market approval process. In other words, these scientists can rubber stamp a new food additive and the FDA doesn’t get involved.
The Food Additives Amendment of 1958 listed 700 food substances that were grandfathered in and bypassed the FDA pre-market approval process. 1997, under the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Food Regulations the FDA announced a program that would allow streamlining of food additives merely by notifying the FDA that experts generally agreed that a product was safe. Incidentally, food colorings cannot be exempted. It is estimated that about 1,000 food additives are in our food supply that the FDA has no knowledge of.
Thus began the fox watching the henhouse.
In this particular study, researchers looked at 451 GRAS notifications that were voluntarily submitted to the FDA between 1997 and 2012, specifically looking for conflicts of interest that may have been present. Here’s what they found:
- 22.4% of the safety assessments were made by an employee of an additive manufacturer.
- 13.3% of the assessments were made by an employee of a consulting firm selected by the manufacturer (not an expert).
- 64.3% were done by an expert panel selected by either a consulting firm or the manufacturer.
- In none of the assessments was an expert panel selected by a third party (which would be the ideal situation–much like a UL listing).
- There were 290 panels with an average of 3.5 members. Ten members served on 27 or more panels; 1 served on 128 panels and at least 1 of these 10 with the most frequent service was a member of 225 panels (77.6%).
In other words, 100% of the members of these panels worked, either directly or indirectly, for the company that manufactured the food additive in question. I’m not saying that there is definitely a problem here, but if I were you, I’m pretty sure I’d still to what I call my “8 year old rule.”
If a typical 8-year old can’t read the ingredients label, you probably shouldn’t be eating it. Many of the food labels for processed foods today don’t pass the “35 year old biochemist” rule, let alone the 8 year old rule.