Obama selects former Monsanto lobbyist to be his TPP chief agriculture negotiator

[proverbialwisdom]

35. Sidestepping "about 10,000 chemicals allowed in food products ~ 43% of which have been deemed GRAS."

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_28286.cfm

NRDC to Launch Attack on Food Ingredient Approvals

By Helena Bottemiller Evich
Politico, September 10, 2013

The Natural Resources Defense Council is best known for climate activism and celebrity fundraisers, but now the environmental powerhouse is escalating its work in another area: food policy.

By hiring two top food additive researchers - Tom Neltner and Maricel Maffini - NRDC is positioning itself to launch an aggressive campaign for much stronger regulation around the way the Food and Drug Administration approves the use of those food ingredients you can't pronounce.

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Both Neltner and Maffini are coming from the Pew Charitable Trusts, where they delivered a series of groundbreaking reports following a three-year study of the food additive approval process that wraps up this month. The Pew reports suggest the food industry has too much control over the way such ingredients as xanthan gum, maltodextrin and polyglutamic acid have been granted FDA's generally recognized as safe, or GRAS, status, which allows them to be used in the food supply without agency approval.

Overall, there are about 10,000 chemicals allowed in food products, about 43 percent of which have been deemed generally recognized as safe, according to Pew.

The group's most recent report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found "ubiquitous" conflicts of interest in GRAS determinations. Researchers looked at the 451 GRAS notifications that companies voluntarily submitted to FDA between 1997 and 2012 and found that nearly two-thirds of those safety assessments were made by an expert panel selected by the manufacturer or a consulting firm. About a fifth of those assessments were made by an employee of an additive manufacturer.

One of the issues highlighted by Pew is that companies are not required to notify FDA about their decision, and oftentimes they don't. FDA does not have a list or database of all the chemicals that can be used in food.

Pew has published two other peer-reviewed studies in recent months: one that found gaps in toxicology data for food additives and another that found FDA has not acted on a significant portion of the recommendations made by its own expert panel in 1983.

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