Experts who decide on food additives conflicted

Elizabeth Weise | USA TODAY

How safe are the additives that make your food tastier, thicker, more vitamin-filled or less likely to spoil? It depends on how much you trust the companies that make those additives. A study out today Wednesday finds that the scientists who judge the safety work for the additive manufacturers or for consultants they've hired.

To understand the scope of the issue, it helps to know that 43% of the 10,000-plus food additives in use are considered so safe they're exempt from Food and Drug Administration supervision. They are called Generally Recognized as Safe. The GRAS list includes things like carnauba wax, modified food starch, caffeine, monosodium glutamate, gum arabic, mineral oil and rosemary.

In 1958, Congress gave additive manufacturers the right to decide on their own what food additives were GRAS without FDA being involved. Companies are not required to tell the agency when they've decided an additive is safe. If they chose to do so voluntarily, the company submits a letter to FDA outlining the scientific literature that supports its decision.

To determine whether the people writing those notifications were biased, researchers looked at the 451 GRAS notices submitted to the FDA from 1997 through 2012. They found that 22% were written by employees of the additive manufacturer and 13% by employees of a consulting firm hired by the manufacturer. The rest were written by a panel set up by the consulting firm or the manufacturer.

"Rules governing the chemicals that go into a tennis racket are more stringent than (rules for) the chemicals that go into our food," says Thomas Neltner, lead author of the study in the JAMA Internal Medicine.

"At least when you put a new chemical on the market, you have to notify the EPA. But there's no requirement that you notify the FDA when you make a new food additive," he says. Neltner is director of the food additives project at the Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, D.C..

Some companies do tell the FDA about new GRAS additives, to keep consumer confident about the safety of the foods they buy and because it helps companies market them internationally, Neltner says. When his team reviewed those notifications, it found that all the members of panels deciding whether a food additive was safe worked directly or indirectly for the companies that make the additives.

"The companies hire a consulting firm to get experts for them and then the experts review the information that's available and then they write a letter to FDA saying this additive should be considered GRAS," says Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University who wrote a commentary to accompany the journal report.

"There are whole companies that are in the business of recruiting scientists to sign off on these things," she says. "That was one of the amazing findings of this paper."

"We welcome scrutiny and ideas that can help us insure the objectivity and rigor of independent GRAS determinations made by the industry," says Michael Taylor, the FDA's deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine.

This all goes back to food safety laws that Congress enacted in 1958. The idea was that some ingredients that had been used in foods for years didn't require safety testing. "It was meant for common foods like vinegar, salt, oil," Neltner says. Over the years more and more additives were added to the list.

In 1997, the FDA created a voluntary notification system. Companies were told they could still determine what was GRAS, "but please, please, please tell us!'" Neltner says.

From the beginning of that notification system through 2012, the FDA received 451 such notices. That's nowhere near all the GRAS additives, Neltner says. He believes that for every notice sent to FDA, companies decide that another six food additives are safe but don't tell the agency. "That number could also be a lot higher. We really don't know."

Neltner says he doesn't believe that companies want to put anything on the market that's going to hurt people, but, "we're suggesting that the system creates its own momentum that's likely to skew in favor of the additive manufacturers."

As new food additives enter the marketplace and old ones are used in new ways, better oversight is necessary, Nestle says. She cites recent questions raised by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and Consumers Union about the use of caffeine in foods, after manufacturers began to put it in products ranging from energy drinks to potato chips to trail mix to chewing gum.

The food industry is aware of concern among consumers.

"Ensuring the safety of our products and maintaining the confidence of consumers is the single most important goal of our industry," says Leon Bruner, chief science officer with the Grocery Manufacturers Association in Washington, D.C.

"We also recognize that the GRAS process, like any other, can be improved," Bruner says. He says his organization is committed to working with the FDA and consumer groups.