Why the FDA is in the dark about so many food ingredients

If you have a serious food allergy — one that could turn fatal in a hurry — you may want to put down that fork until you finish this message.

Because that next bite of breakfast could kill you.

That’s what nearly happened to Rebecca Fattell, a young woman who went into anaphylactic shock after eating a roll with a peanut-like ingredient called lupin.

Rebecca had no idea lupin was in her food. She’d never even heard of the additive. And the hotel that served her food, which promised her it was peanut-free, probably hadn’t either.

Because right now there are thousands of additives being mixed into our foods every day that we know nothing about. Additives that have never been reviewed by our government… that may contain harmful ingredients… and that nobody can say for sure are safe.

And it’s all thanks to a 57-year-old loophole that gave the billion-dollar food industry the right to regulate itself — and put millions of Americans in harm’s way.

Mum’s the word

Eisenhower was president and a gallon of gas went for a quarter in 1958. But that was also the year when the mother of all loopholes was born.

It’s a loophole that’s keeping us — and our government — in the dark about the safety and risks of thousands of food chemicals and additives we’re eating every day.

You see, Congress had initially passed a law in 1958 requiring new food additives and ingredients to be submitted to the FDA for a full review. But in a major concession to the food industry, it allowed for an “expert panel” to fill in for the FDA and handle approvals instead.

Notice I said “expert panel” — and not “objective panel.” Because, believe it or not, Congress handed the job of approving new additives to an industry trade group, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association (FEMA).

For 57 years FEMA has had the authority to approve new additives while labeling them as safe, or GRAS (generally recognized as safe). Companies don’t have to bother telling the FDA anything about new chemical food additives — they can simply get their products labeled safe by FEMA.

So who’s really making these life-or-death decisions about the safety of additives that have been linked to everything from severe allergic reactions to cancer? According to Michael Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for food, it’s basically “three employees in a room looking at information that is only available to them.”

And FEMA seems awfully intent on making sure that no information — especially information about the risks of food additives — ever leaves that room.

FEMA will tell you that it has been sending all its safety data to the FDA for decades. But Susan Schiffman, a professor at North Carolina State University, calls the idea that FEMA releases any of this information “garbage.”

The Center for Public Integrity learned that the hard way last year when it requested information about additives recently approved by FEMA.

It got back documents that were heavily redacted and only contained research on “structurally related” substances — not the actual approved additives.

When an organization that approves food additives starts acting like the CIA, we all have to wonder what they’re hiding.

“It’s really clear that we have no basis to make almost any conclusions about the safety of the current food supply,” said Laura MacCleery, an attorney with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group. “We don’t know what people are eating.”

In fact, we often don’t know about the dangers of certain food additives until FEMA has rubber-stamped them into the market. Additives like mycoprotein, a fungus-based ingredient that killed an 11-year-old boy allergic to mold. Or the lupin that nearly killed Rebecca Fattell.

The next FEMA horror show may be a “sweetness enhancer” called Sweetmyx that will start arriving this summer in drinks from Pepsi. It was actually developed using cloned human taste receptors — and no one from our government has ever studied whether it’s safe.

So if you ever wanted to start booting products containing artificial flavors and fake sweeteners out of your diet, now may be the time to do it.

Because by the time we do find out how all these secretly approved ingredients are actually affecting our health, it may be too late to undo whatever damage they’ve caused.

Sources:

“Food flavor safety system a ‘black box'” Chris Young, June 9, 2015, The Center for Public Integrity, publicintegrity.org
“Why the FDA doesn’t really know what’s in your food” Erin Quinn and Chris Young, April 14, 2015, The Huffington Post, huffingtonpost.com