MacCleery and others hope to provoke FDA to more aggressively evaluate the safety of chemical additives. Flavor chemicals have long enjoyed a special regulatory arrangement, brokered by FEMA, the flavor industry trade group, in the wake of the 1958 Food Additives Amendment. This has largely allowed these materials to avoid direct FDA oversight.
Under this system, FEMA convenes a group of well-qualified experts to conduct a scientific review of different flavor chemicals and determine whether they are "generally recognized as safe"--GRAS--and thus exempt from the FDA food additive approval process. Every two years, a new list of GRAS flavor chemicals is published. These experts also periodically re-evaluate previously approved substances, revoking GRAS status if appropriate. Methyl eugenol, for example, was recently removed from the GRAS list pending additional review of its safety, pre-dating this federal action.
For the flavor industry, the GRAS expert review system represents a necessary compromise between the needs of industry and the limited resources of the federal government, an efficient way of assuring safety for a class of chemicals that are typically used at low enough levels that risk can be assumed to be negligible. For certain public health activists, however, GRAS is a "loophole" that allows companies to introduce new chemicals to the food supply without adequate review, based on the say-so of industry-linked scientists.
Among other qualities, chemical additives give potato chips their extended shelf-life. Will we taste food differently without them? This flavor additive decision from FDA does not have any direct repercussions on the GRAS system. But it's clear that FEMA's GRAS program is in activists' sights. "By my count, NTP studies have identified six more flavoring materials [currently on the GRAS list] as carcinogenic," Neltner says. "But when you're trying to fix a mess that's been created by 50 years of neglect, you have to set your priorities."Just as the disappearance of these synthetic chemicals (and many others to boot) will likely have negligible health consequences, few of us will be able to detect their absence in the flavorings used in our food. All sides agree on one thing, at least: Eaters are confused and scared.
All sides can agree on one thing, at least. Eaters are confused and scared, increasingly freaked out about the chemicals in foods, and neither federal regulators nor private industry are doing an adequate job of assuaging those concerns.
"There's a crisis in consumer confidence," says MacCleery, of CSPI. She attributes this to FDA's failure to fulfill its obligations to regulate additives and contaminants in the food supply. "When consumers fail to have faith in an objective regulator," she says, "one that is protecting their health and translating the science in a compelling way, everything becomes chaotic."
This is the kind of environment that breeds lawsuits like the one against LaCroix, with its misleading assertions. It's also an expensive problem for companies, which undertake costly "clean label" reformulations that often have minimal benefits for consumers. "They are taking stabs in the dark, removing ingredients that sound 'chemical' but might be safe, without the structure that would be provided by an objective public regulator," MacCleery observes.
For MacCleery and her colleagues, the goal is not to defeat chemical additives or the companies that make or use them, but to build a more rational and orderly system to protect health and enforce accountability. She points to the example of artificial Trans fats, which FDA ruled unsafe in 2015 and officially banned earlier this year, as an example of a success story.
"When the FDA said, you can't use these, these are not safe, industry organized itself," and found solutions. The goal is to get the industry in agreement with the FDA and the non-profit health sector, "around a shared set of public health goals that actually, rationally advances health. That's what we have an urgent need for right now."
Nadia Berenstein holds a PhD in History & Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on a book based on her dissertation, recounting the history of flavor science and the flavor industry in the United States beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Her writing has appeared in Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, among other places.
See also: click here
[How activists forced FDA to blacklist "carcinogenic" flavor chemicals the agency says are safe]
And click here for the trade publication regarding this FDA decision.
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This legal breakthrough COULD lead to the demise of Aspartame's FDA approval. It depends entirely on the FDA's defenses when this ends up in court, but further, why should they want to defend an approval of aspartame?
This artificial sweetener is the most egregious neurotoxin and carcinogen routinely added to American food products, the approval for which was rammed down the FDA's throat by Donald Rumsfeld in 1981 when he was CEO of Searle, and Ronald Reagan owed him a favor or two, from which Rummy profited to the tune of $12-15 million bonus from Searle for finally getting this chemical approved for human consumption.
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