FDA Bans More Food Additives — With an Apology
Headlines about LaCroix sparkling waters containing alleged pesticides and carcinogens are raising eyebrows among the company’s otherwise enthusiastic consumers. The company claims its product is composed of nothing but “natural” ingredients, while a plaintiff in a lawsuit alleges it contains synthetic or artificial chemicals.
Public and scientific scrutiny will follow, but no matter what that reveals, it will be difficult for consumers to separate good from bad science. Just look at the FDA’s new food-additive ban and the difficulties in measuring and regulating cancer risk in foods over the years.
Bruce Ames, the inventor of one of the most famous tests for carcinogens, would be amused right now. Back in 1990, Ames and his colleagues found that synthetic and natural chemicals have about the same possibility of being carcinogenic and that 99.99 percent (by weight) of all of the pesticides we are exposed to occur in plants naturally.
But the real story begins in 1958. A lot has happened since the world’s first commercial jet was introduced, just three years after the microwave oven. But today we use the same science that we did then to regulate what we call “carcinogenic.” That’s also the year that brought legislation known as the “Delaney Clause,” which has about the same scientific backing as Santa Claus.
When we feed rodents so much of a foodstuff that they develop cancer, we infer that humans ingesting a tiny fraction of that amount will, too. It’s not that simple. Nevertheless, the Delaney Clause banned any food or color additive or pesticides that fails that test.
In 1977, when the FDA banned saccharin, consumers were indignant and argued that feeding rats the equivalent of 800 cans of soda had nothing to do with them consuming two or three cans a day. Congress finally recognized the problem, at least for pesticides, in 1996 and replaced the Delaney Clause with the Food Quality Protection Act, which was signed by President Clinton. But the spirit of the clause survives for regular old, non-pesticide, food additives.
Then on October 5 of this year, the FDA apologetically banned seven food additives because they were forced to by surviving provisions of the clause. In banning the additives, the agency apologized for bad science and said that they had “a reasonable certainty that the substances would cause no harm under the intended conditions of use.”
One reason we got rid of the Delaney Clause (for pesticides) was because our microscopic science got so much better. One former FDA scientist describes the race to detect smaller and smaller amounts of “carcinogens” as “an Olympic sport to see who can get down to one attogram (one-trillionth of a gram).”
In fact, three Nobel Prize winners won the award in 2015 for telling us that our bodies are continually assaulted by “carcinogens” at low doses but “a host of molecular systems continuously monitor and repair DNA.” The repair of DNA is what prevents a chemical assault from becoming cancerous.
As Professor Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts said in recent congressional testimony on a new EPA proposal, we need to move toward a more science-based approach to managing “poisons.” The entire science of poisons, called “toxicology,” is based on the 400-year-old discovery that everything is poisonous. Whether something is good, bad, or neutral for you depends on how much you are exposed to.
Food additives have been enormously valuable in feeding the planet. They increase shelf life, keep food fresh, and prevent spoilage and the diseases that come with it. They can replace vitamins and minerals that are lost when we process foods. They can make food both look and taste better. And unless they are already known by scientific experts to be safe, they must be pre-approved by the FDA after undergoing a battery of safety tests.
You can, of course, avoid food additives altogether. You just have to bake your own bread, eat no processed snacks, drink nothing but water, and even avoid many organic products. Consumer groups describe the FDA ban on the additives as a “win for consumers,” and no doubt it will be heralded by people who reject food ingredients whose names they don’t understand.
It’s not a win for consumers; it’s a loss for science. Consumers were never at risk from these boogeymen, and this kind of fear tactic actually undermines science. Americans may want food labels to include “DNA,” but we need to stop short at bans and heavy-handed legal remedies.
Richard Williams is a senior affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and former director for social sciences at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in the Food and Drug Administration.
