Yves here. This post usefully goes a bit deeper into the regulatory system for food additives. It should come as no surprise that in the US, it remarkably permissive.
The article alludes to but does not address the idea that some foods, particularly snack foods, are engineered to seem very rewarding, such as the mouth feel of a Cheeto. So there’s an additional layer of issues: not only can additives be directly harmful to health, but they can be indirectly damaging by being incorporated to encourage excessive consumption, which then produces overweight and obesity.
By Charles Schmidt, a senior contributor to Undark and has also written for Science, Nature Biotechnology, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, and The Washington Post, among other publications. Originally published at YouTube in September, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took aim at U.S. health agencies that he said have allowed for the mass poisoning of American children. Standing behind packages of Cheez-Its, Doritos, and Cap’n Crunch cereal displayed on a kitchen counter, the future head of the Department of Health and Human Services warned that chronic disease rates in the United States have soared. “How in the world did this happen?” Kennedy asked. Many of our chronic ailments, he asserted, can be blamed on chemical additives in processed foods. “If we took all these chemicals out,” he said, “our nation would get healthier immediately.”
During his Senate confirmation hearings in January, Kennedy singled out a Food and Drug Administration standard by which companies can introduce new additives to foods without notifying regulators or the public. The standard, called “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, was adopted in 1958 and geared initially towards benign substances such as vinegar and baking powder. However, most of the chemical additives introduced in recent decades passed through the so-called GRAS loophole: The FDA requires manufacturers to affirm GRAS additives are safe, but the companies don’t have to release the data, and they are in effect self-regulating. In 2013, the Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that more than 10,000 additives were in processed foods and that 3,000 of them had never been reviewed by the FDA. Out of that group, Pew estimated that 1,000 were self-affirmed as GRAS by additive manufacturers.
The GRAS system came into effect “well before the majority of calories consumed by adults and children were in the form of ultra-processed food products,” Jennifer Pomeranz, a public health attorney and associate professor at New York University’s School of Global Public Health, wrote in an email to Undark. By self-affirming that a given additive is GRAS, companies can avoid time-consuming regulatory submissions. The process is easier and cheaper for companies, Pomeranz wrote, but it undermines “public trust of the food supply.”
On March 10, Kennedy directed the FDA to explore rule-making strategies for eliminating the self-affirmed GRAS pathway for food ingredients, claiming the move would provide transparency for consumers. At a March meeting with food industry executives, he also cited the elimination of artificial dyes — which go through a different FDA approval process — from foods as a top priority.