How The FDA Can Let Potentially Dangerous Chemicals Into Your Food

If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you might have noticed the FDA being more than a bit beleaguered this year, for example:

After The Recent Wave Of Food Recalls…

So, it’s not the all-powerful regulatory titan it was once popularly considered, and its resources are getting thinner.

This is part of why we are seeing such stories as: Is Your Medication Made in a Contaminated Factory? The FDA Won’t Tell You.

So, what’s going on with food ingredients?

Hear no, see no, speak no…

The crux of this comes in two parts:

1. Companies rely on the “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) labelling system, created in the 1950s, which allows ingredients considered obviously safe (such as salt or vinegar) to be used without formal FDA review.
2. Manufacturers can declare their own ingredients safe without notifying the FDA, meaning regulators may never examine the scientific evidence behind some additives.

So in other words, there are a lot of cases where FDA didn’t find a problem with the ingredients because they simply didn’t look!

You may be wondering whether this is more of an issue for obscure brands, but as it turns out substances lacking FDA review appear in foods from brands sold at retailers such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.

So, how much of an issue is this?

It can vary wildly. For example, food products containing tara flour, previously treated as GRAS, were linked to more than 300 illnesses and 113 hospitalizations over the course of a year.

And there are a lot of mysteries, for example, a review of US regulatory records by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found 111 food substances used in common products that were never reviewed for safety by the FDA.

Of those, cross-referencing with the USDA FoodData Central database (that’s what we use for our “This or That” comparisons, by the way, we pull the numbers from that database), found that 49 of those 111 substances had not even been reported to regulators. That is to say, they went a level lower than liberally self-certifying as safe, and just went with a “what they don’t know can’t hurt them” approach, and just proceeded as if they weren’t putting them in their foods.

Sometimes, the ingredient itself is not the problem, ontologically. Rather, it’s what’s happened to it along the way!

For example the EWG report identified 22 plant extracts—themselves perfectly innocuous and even healthful things such as green tea, mushroom, cinnamon, cocoa, and aloe vera—whose extraction processes can alter their chemistry and can introduce solvents or toxins.

So it matters not just what the thing is, but also how it got to be there.

You can read about this from the EWG itself, here: Secret GRAS: How 100+ food chemicals bypassed government safety review

And for background context: Almost all new food chemicals greenlighted by industry, not the FDA ← this is from last year

Want to keep yourself safe?

Or for a much deeper dive into the broader topic of avoiding the toxins the industrial world is keen to throw our way, you might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:

Healthy Living in a Contaminated World – by Dr. Donald Hoernschemeyer

You might also consider this simpler, practical guide: Unprocess Your Life – by Rob Hobson

Take care!