Food Additives Exposed: What Lies Beneath America's Food Supply?
Posted by freedomforall 1 month, 1 week ago to Technology
Excerpt:
"here are thousands upon thousands of additives—texturizers, colorings, humectants, anti-fungals, anti-caking agents, preservatives—in Americans’ food that have never been independently tested by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or by scientists who aren’t employed by the companies that make those chemicals and add them to their food.
As we’re discovering, many of those additives—the ones we know about and have begun to test—turn out to be extremely harmful, with links to every single chronic health condition you could care to name, from cancer and obesity to neurological and behavioral conditions like Alzheimer’s and autism. Tartrazine, which is found in Twinkies, Mountain Dew, candy, and cereals, among other foods, has been linked to hyperactivity in children and cancer. In the European Union, foods containing tartrazine must carry a warning label: “May have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.”
It sounds absurd—insane, actually—but it’s not a glitch or an organized system of corporate deception. We’re not talking about companies lying to regulators or acting beyond the boundaries of the law. No, this is all above board. The system even has a name. The FDA calls it “generally recognized as safe” or “GRAS” for short.
The GRAS system was first introduced by the FDA in 1958 after the passage of the Food Additive Amendments, to “grandfather” through additives that were already used in food. The new additive regulations were intended to ensure ingredients capable of causing long-term harm never entered the food supply, but something very different happened. The GRAS designation mutated into a system that allowed companies to introduce and safety-test additives themselves without the FDA ever getting a look-in.
...
This happened in large part because the FDA simply couldn’t keep up with demands from companies to test their new additives for the burgeoning processed-food category. So companies started testing additives themselves and adding them to their food products without any consultation with the regulator.
Companies did this for decades, and instead of stepping in to assert its authority, the FDA did what any poorly staffed, hopelessly compromised organization would do: It simply chose to regularize the process, which was completed in 2016.
According to one study, since 2000, there have been only 10 applications to the FDA for full approval of a new food additive, out of a total of 766 that have been added to the American food supply. The safety of the other 756 was self-determined by the manufacturers themselves, in secret."
"here are thousands upon thousands of additives—texturizers, colorings, humectants, anti-fungals, anti-caking agents, preservatives—in Americans’ food that have never been independently tested by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or by scientists who aren’t employed by the companies that make those chemicals and add them to their food.
As we’re discovering, many of those additives—the ones we know about and have begun to test—turn out to be extremely harmful, with links to every single chronic health condition you could care to name, from cancer and obesity to neurological and behavioral conditions like Alzheimer’s and autism. Tartrazine, which is found in Twinkies, Mountain Dew, candy, and cereals, among other foods, has been linked to hyperactivity in children and cancer. In the European Union, foods containing tartrazine must carry a warning label: “May have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.”
It sounds absurd—insane, actually—but it’s not a glitch or an organized system of corporate deception. We’re not talking about companies lying to regulators or acting beyond the boundaries of the law. No, this is all above board. The system even has a name. The FDA calls it “generally recognized as safe” or “GRAS” for short.
The GRAS system was first introduced by the FDA in 1958 after the passage of the Food Additive Amendments, to “grandfather” through additives that were already used in food. The new additive regulations were intended to ensure ingredients capable of causing long-term harm never entered the food supply, but something very different happened. The GRAS designation mutated into a system that allowed companies to introduce and safety-test additives themselves without the FDA ever getting a look-in.
...
This happened in large part because the FDA simply couldn’t keep up with demands from companies to test their new additives for the burgeoning processed-food category. So companies started testing additives themselves and adding them to their food products without any consultation with the regulator.
Companies did this for decades, and instead of stepping in to assert its authority, the FDA did what any poorly staffed, hopelessly compromised organization would do: It simply chose to regularize the process, which was completed in 2016.
According to one study, since 2000, there have been only 10 applications to the FDA for full approval of a new food additive, out of a total of 766 that have been added to the American food supply. The safety of the other 756 was self-determined by the manufacturers themselves, in secret."
