Nutrition for Life

Food Safety and Labeling Rules

Different Standards Around the World

Nutrition for Life by Parul Kharod

In the United States, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) oversees the safety of food. This means that all manufacturers must use ingredients that have been tested and approved by the FDA.

One would think that this process ensures that we are eating healthy and safe food. Sadly, this is far from the truth. Moreover, the standards that are used in the United States are very different from Europe and other countries.

GRAS

The FDA uses the acronym GRAS which stands for “Generally Recognized as Safe.” According to the FDA, any substance that will be added to packaged food has to be approved by the FDA unless it is generally recognized, among qualified experts, to be safe. However, if the manufacturer tells the FDA that all their ingredients are GRAS, then the FDA does not need to do any preapproval. According to the final ruling issued in 2016, any person may notify the FDA of a conclusion that a substance is GRAS under the conditions of its intended use, and thus be exempt from premarket approval.

This means that most of the chemicals added to food and beverages are never reviewed by the FDA before those products are sold in grocery stores. Sometimes the FDA may not even know such chemical ingredients exist unless a company chooses to voluntarily disclose that information. In fact, the FDA may never have even heard of some of the chemicals added to foods and beverages and so certainly never reviewed them for safety.

Overall, there are estimated to be more than a thousand GRAS substances for which safety decisions were made by the food industry without any notice at all to the FDA, and thousands more chemicals for which there is minimal oversight.

Difference in Labeling Laws in the USA versus Europe

Here is an example of what proper regulation can do. Food manufacturers selling the exact same product with different set of standards here in the US versus Europe must make the product differently. For example, Kraft’s

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