October 21, 2004 Our Food Supply And Terrorism We want fresh strawberries in winter and tomatoes all year round yet we have replaced many of our farms with housing and roadways and our edibles are increasingly being grown in other countries. Only a tiny fraction of the food that enters our ports is checked by our guardian agencies. Not only do we have to worry about foreign foods with undesirable additives and residues, we now have to be protected against terroristic tampering. In 2003, the FDA announced publication of a proposed regulations required by the Public Health Two regulations deal with establishing and maintaining records among food firms and the administrative detention of foods that may pose a risk to public health. Two regulations concern the registration of food facilities and prior notice of imported foods. These regulations further bolster the FDA's ability to protect the more than 400,000 domestic and foreign facilities that deal with food within our country, according to former FDA Commissioner Dr. Mark B. McClellan, MD, PhD. Under the rule, manufacturers, processors, packers, distributors, receivers, holders and importers of food must keep records identifying the immediate source from which they received the food, as well as, the immediate subsequent recipient, to whom they sent it. This requirement applies to almost all foreign and domestic food sources and almost all recipients of food destined for consumption in the United States. It would assist FDA in addressing credible threats of serious adverse health consequences or death to humans or animals. It is unbelievable that record keeping tracking foods---such as those including illegal additives and contaminants--- has not been required before! As a side benefit for all, an additional $20 million was given for Counter Terrorism - Food Safety. The increase is supposed to provide grants to states, increased laboratory preparedness and funds to develop the foods registration system. The grants to the states are meant to be used to build states' infrastructure to enable them to become part of the Laboratory Response Network and conduct direct federal food inspections. Increased laboratory preparedness should theoretically allow the agency's laboratory accreditation program to continue and to develop uniform scientific practices. There are loopholes, however. "To minimize the economic burden on food companies affected" by the rule, the FDA allows companies to keep the required information in any form that they prefer. The proposed rule also states that existing records can be used to satisfy the requirements of the regulations if those records contain all the required information. With respect to the immediate previous source, the specific source of each ingredient that was used to make every lot of finished food product would have to be identified if this information is reasonably available. What is reasonably available may vary from case to case, according to the FDA. If an article of food is reasonably believed to be adulterated and presents a threat of serious adverse health consequence or death to humans or animals, firms are required to provide these and other records to FDA within four hours during certain business hours, or eight hours at other times. Transporters (e.g., trucking companies, private delivery carriers, railroads and airlines) are also required to keep similar documentation-including information about all the means of transportation used. Farms, restaurants (including all operations that prepare food for, or serve food directly to consumers), fishing vessels not engaged in processing, and firms regulated exclusively by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are exempted from the new record keeping requirements. With some exceptions, foreign facilities are excluded if their food products undergo further manufacturing/processing, including packaging, by another facility outside the United States. Retail food operations are exempted from maintaining records on immediate subsequent recipients of foods sold directly to consumers. The FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition has set priorities not only emphasizing the prevention of terrorism on the food supply and handling transmissible diseases from food to humans. They have also added emphasis on food additives, dietary supplements and food biotechnology and increased their attention on food allergens. Twenty cents out of every dollar we spend goes toward a product under the jurisdiction of the FDA. There are 1,900 field operatives to the FDA workforce who also have responsibility for the multibillion-dollar drug and cosmetic industries. The FDA's Center for Food Safety has 904 full time employees, including office personnel, down from 924 in 2001. They are dedicated public servants but they must deal with the fact that contaminated, diseased food such as listeria-loaded cheeses can kill quickly and the FDA can react rapidly but cancer-causing or neurotoxic additives may damage and kill slowly over twenty years or more. DIRECT AND INDIRECT FOOD ADDITIVES Thousands of chemicals are added to our food. Many are beneficial but a number may be harmful or even lethal. Additives are substances, or a mixture of substances, other than basic foodstuffs, that are present in food as a result of any aspect of production, processing, storage, or packaging. BHT, for example, is a preservative, stabilizer, and antioxidant added in many foods. It is used as a chewing gum base, added to potato and sweet potato flakes and dry breakfast cereals, an emulsion stabilizer for shortenings used in enriched rice, animal fats, and shortenings containing animal fats. BHA is a preservative, stabilizer, and antioxidant in many products, including beverages, ice cream, ices, candy, baked goods, chewing gum, gelatin desserts, soup bases, potatoes, and in emulsions for stabilizers for shortenings. Some substances, vitamins E and C, for example, are considered both nutrients and additives. The two vitamins are sometimes added for their ability to retard rancidity. Red No. 3 and annatto are examples of colorings. The majority of food additives have nothing to do with nutritional value, as you will see from the contents of this dictionary--most are added to feed our illusions. All our lives we are subjected to beautiful pictures of foods in our magazines and on television. We have come to expect an advertiser's concept of perfection in color and texture, even though Mother Nature may not turn out all her products that way. As a result, the skins of the oranges we eat are dyed bright orange to match our mental image of an ideal orange. Our poultry is fed a chemical to color the meat yellow to look more appetizing, and our fruits and vegetables are kept unblemished by fungicides, pesticides, herbicides, and other antispoilants. We are very busy. We want our meals to be easy to prepare, but still tasty. One of the quotes used most often by food experts is that "the consuming public will not buy food products on the basis of their nutritional profile/clinical benefits---taste is the key!" No wonder then that the biggest category of all food additives is flavorings and flavor enhancers, a growing market which is expected to top $1.46 billion in 2006. Food sellers also know that if they put "new" on the package, we are almost always tempted to buy it. They spend, therefore, $1.4 billion annually to introduce 10,000 new food products some with novel additives and many with new combinations of additives. The danger in this is that food additives are rarely used individually in foods, so one meal may contain many different additives that can interact with one another. In addition, additives can change or react during cooking or processing. When this book was first published in 1978, there were thirty-five widely used additives that had been approved as safe for food use then but have since been removed as unsafe, most because they were found to be capable of causing cancer. For current information on possible food bioterrorism and food additives, check: A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives: Descriptions in Plain English of More than 12,000 Ingredients Both Harmful and Desirable Found in Food (the Sixth Edition just published by Three Rivers Press/Crown Publishers). A UNIQUE COMBINATION ? Combining an over-the-counter (OTC) medication with one of the most popular prescription drugs seemed a remote possibility but according to FDAnews Nutraceutical Weekly Bulletin, a Canadian company, Magistral Biotech, is aiming to do just that. Its flagship product, Libracol, is derived from shrimp shells processed with enzymes. The result is a medication that reportedly has very powerful cholesterol-lowering properties. Magistral Biotech has launched two multicenter clinical studies. The first is to demonstrate the effectiveness of Libracol when taken with Lipitor, a statin drug marketed by Pfizer. Adding Libracol to this statin, it is hoped, will improve the treatment's effectiveness. The purpose of the second study is to gather the information required to obtain marketing approvals from Canadian and US regulatory authorities. Three hundred and fifty patients are participating in the studies in Canada and the results of both trials are expected to be released in the first six months of 2005.
At the time of the first edition of A Consumer's Dictionary Of Food Additives in 1978, food additives were a $1.3 billion a year business in the United States. The number increased to more than $4.73 billion a year when the fifth edition was published in 1999. With the sixth edition, the total U.S. market for food additives is an estimated $5.8 billion. The European Parliament, in fact, issued the following statement in 2003:" The ever increasing number of food additives leads to accumulation of a large number of small risks for food safety, which are not easily evaluated, and which might create synergy effects between different substances. The total number of authorized food additives should therefore be limited, so that the industry, when applying for a new authorization, has to make a proposal for withdrawing an additive of little use."
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