FDA Should Do More to Regulate Food Additives, Health Experts Warn

Federal food regulators have failed to protect Americans from potentially dangerous food ingredients, according to new warnings issued by a group of public health experts warn, who are calling for the agency to exercise more power over the inclusion of additives in foods sold to U.S. consumers.

According to a recent report published in the American Journal of Public Health by researchers at the NYU School of Global Public Health and led by Jennifer Pomeranz, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has failed to protect the public from unsafe food additives and ultra-processed food. They are calling on the agency and lawmakers to address what they see as a serious public health threat.

Food Additive Health Concerns

Food additives are becoming much more common in the U.S. food supply, despite growing evidence that they may increase the risk of diet-related disease, toxicity, cancer, and other health problems.

Manufacturers use numerous different types of food additives. Some are used to preserve foods and increase their shelf life, others improve texture, and some make food more palatable. They can include controversial ingredients like brominated vegetable oil and red dye no. 3, both of which have been linked to potential adverse health effects.

Research has also linked emulsifiers, a common ingredient in processed foods, to an increased risk of breast and prostate cancer. Emulsifiers are widely used in pizzas, fast food products, and other highly processed products to improve the texture of food and extend shelf life.

The FDA does not regulate food additives. Instead, ingredients are added using a loophole rule known as “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, which allows the food industry to self-regulate and label ingredients as GRAS, without having the FDA evaluate their safety or review any data on the ingredient.

The federal rule was meant to be used for common ingredients like salt and vinegar, but increasingly became used for new ingredients, like preservatives, emulsifiers, and dyes. A study published in 2015 concluded most food additives in the American food supply have not been properly reviewed by the FDA.

Food Additive Regulatory Concerns

From 1990 to 2010, there were more than 1,000 ingredients labeled as GRAS by manufacturers without notifying the FDA of the addition of the ingredient, according to this latest report.

Since 2010, there have likely been thousands more added to America’s food supply without proper safety review by regulators. Researchers determined that, because of the lack of oversight, there is no good estimate of how many additives have been placed in the nation’s food supply through the GRAS designation.

Much of the FDA’s budget comes from fees paid by pharmaceutical companies to have drugs reviewed. Because resources are largely allocated to the drug program, food oversight is often overlooked.

“The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) evaluates the premarket safety of ingredients regulated as food additives but allows the food industry to self-regulate and determine which substances to classify as generally recognized as safe (GRAS) based on undisclosed data and conclusions that the FDA never sees,” Pomeranz’s team concluded. “Furthermore, the FDA lacks a formal approach for reviewing food additives and GRAS substances already found in the food supply. Substances in the food supply thus include innocuous ingredients (e.g., black pepper), those that are harmful at high levels (e.g., salt), those that are of questionable safety (e.g., potassium bromate), and those that are unknown to the FDA and the public.”

The researchers called on the agency to develop a more defined policy to regulate food additives to better protect public health.

Recent Food Additive Regulations

The agency and congress have made some moves to more stringently regulate food additives in recent years.

For example, after years of advocacy and public pushback the FDA recently banned brominated vegetable oil. Prior research shows brominated vegetable oil is linked to neurological problems and may damage the liver. The ingredient was banned by the United Kingdom, European Union, and Japan decades ago.

In March, congressional legislators called on the FDA to reassess seven chemicals often used in meat, dairy, and egg products. The chemicals include preservatives, colorants, emulsifiers, and disinfecting agents known to have serious health side effects and are banned in the European Union and other countries.