4 ms·

Ugh, as someone with celiac disease, I don't have many starch choices. Don't take rice from me! The recent lead contamination in apple sauce made me glad we ha

Ugh, as someone with celiac disease, I don't have many starch choices. Don't take rice from me! The recent lead contamination in apple sauce made me glad we have the FDA, but also wonder if the FDA is doing enough. I've ran across some political conspiracy theories about doing away with the FDA and similar organizations, and I think I should appreciate the FDA while I can. But also, why did it take a bunch of kids getting lead poisoning for the FDA to find that apple sauce had a lead problem? Systematically testing products from the stores seems like a low hanging fruit, one of the simplest and most effective means of regulating the food supply. Is this not happening? What is the FDA doing that is more important than performing regular checks of the food in stores for contaminants? Maybe I'm a pessimist, but if rice commonly does have unsafe levels of arsenic, I'm not confident that anyone will say or do anything until it becomes a tragedy.

b112 3y ago
Probably fighting for the budget to do so. Certain political stances think that companies are the best people to curtail their own behavior. That inspections should never be done by the government. That no sane company would ever chase short term profit and stock price, over going bankrupt in 5 years, because they killed 1/2 their customers. So the FDA hasn't the budget to do random pulls I suspect. Of course, if you think of how many products are on grocery store shelves, pulling and testing 100k? 200k? products a week would be a budget indeed.
no_wizard 3y ago
The bigger problem is we have a ton of regulatory overhead. The FDA and the USDA are both responsible for checking the safety of different parts of the food supply, and this causes issues. Instead of it being a clear priority for one agency it gets muddled in which agency should be looking at what. Then couple that with the fact that the FDA historically spends more time on drug safety than food safety and the USDA has conflicting priorities in many ways, combined together you end up with some real issues with catching things early and/or before they hit the market It could be solved by creating a single agency dedicated to food safety and removing the burden from two the agencies that have many other priorities on top of food safety. That in a tl;dr nutshell is the problem. There is a good overview of these dynamics done by Last Week Tonight that’s on YouTube I recommend for an overview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Za45bT41sXg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Za45bT41sXg
- mh- 3y ago
  This sounds a lot like the justification for creating the DHS to encompass the historically-disjoint agencies. I don't disagree with you, but I worry that the result would end up providing food safety theatre, à la TSA.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    I don’t think the theater resulted from the joining of the agencies but rather the change in mindset post 9/11 that led to the merger. Common root cause.
bombcar 3y ago
If you’re truly worried about rice consumption levels, you likely can order specialty rice from known locations that has less arsenic
somenameforme 3y ago
You're dramatically underestimating the amount of work that testing all foods would entail. It would be, at the minimum: every_single_type_of_food * every_production_point_of_said_food * every_manufacturing_point_of_said_food(e.g. restaurants) * every_test_to_run * frequency_to_test_at. That's a wildly exponential function. So the way the FDA (and most regulatory agencies in the US) works is by researching what they believe to be safe and then requiring companies agree to only use those methods/components. If a company does something else, they are required to provide evidence that they believe it is safe. The FDA then evaluates the provided evidence, rather than e.g. running labs/experiments/etc themselves. This drives numerous issues. For instance one is a 'generally recognized as safe' exception that allows companies to add entirely new components to their foods without even notifying the FDA. [1] Genetically engineered foods are another big one. A genetically engineered e.g. potato is, from the FDA's definitions, just a potato. And so it there's no further regulatory oversight or safety testing done whatsoever. The only thing they offer is a voluntary 'plant biotechnology consultation program.' [2] [1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/14/399591292/why-the-fda-is-clueless-about-some-of-the-additives-in-our-food https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/14/399591292/wh... [2] - https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/how-gmos-are-regulated-united-states https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/how-gmos...
- reaperman 3y ago
  I think removing "every_manufacturing_point_of_said_food(e.g. restaurants)" would suffice, and be would perfectly appropriate. We literally already do this for all exported and imported food. So it's not absurd at all. Also I think your variable naming is a bit off. Restaurants aren't generally considered manufacturers.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    No, they don't. What people think the FDA does and what it really does in general are extremely different. There's a very readable paper here [1] precisely on FDA handling of food imports - that is, if for some reason, you don't choose to believe random internet guy insisting everything most people think they know about a topic is wrong. I don't think it's very purposeful for me to just rephrase the paper when you can read it yourself and get all the details. But, if nothing else, I'll at least quote the lead sentence of the background section: --- "The FDA’s overall foods program is distinct in several respects from the agency’s other public health regulatory program areas. First—with the exception of food and color additive approvals and premarket notification for certain foods—foods under FDA jurisdiction, whether produced within or outside the United States, do not require premarket approval. Thus, the foods program overall is generally a postmarket program." --- The FDA does spot testing of high risk foods but otherwise relies primarily on corporations to simply promise that they're following the regulations that the FDA publishes. That's how you get things like lead in apple sauce - it's not something the FDA is going to be checking for. By contrast, they would likely test something like chicken, coming from a region that had a recent bird flu outbreak, for contamination. [1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220404/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220404/

b112 3y ago

Probably fighting for the budget to do so. Certain political stances think that companies are the best people to curtail their own behavior. That inspections should never be done by the government. That no sane company would ever chase short term profit and stock price, over going bankrupt in 5 years, because they killed 1/2 their customers. So the FDA hasn't the budget to do random pulls I suspect. Of course, if you think of how many products are on grocery store shelves, pulling and testing 100k? 200k? products a week would be a budget indeed.

no_wizard 3y ago

The bigger problem is we have a ton of regulatory overhead. The FDA and the USDA are both responsible for checking the safety of different parts of the food supply, and this causes issues. Instead of it being a clear priority for one agency it gets muddled in which agency should be looking at what. Then couple that with the fact that the FDA historically spends more time on drug safety than food safety and the USDA has conflicting priorities in many ways, combined together you end up with some real issues with catching things early and/or before they hit the market It could be solved by creating a single agency dedicated to food safety and removing the burden from two the agencies that have many other priorities on top of food safety. That in a tl;dr nutshell is the problem. There is a good overview of these dynamics done by Last Week Tonight that’s on YouTube I recommend for an overview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Za45bT41sXg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Za45bT41sXg

mh- 3y ago
This sounds a lot like the justification for creating the DHS to encompass the historically-disjoint agencies. I don't disagree with you, but I worry that the result would end up providing food safety theatre, à la TSA.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  I don’t think the theater resulted from the joining of the agencies but rather the change in mindset post 9/11 that led to the merger. Common root cause.

bombcar 3y ago

If you’re truly worried about rice consumption levels, you likely can order specialty rice from known locations that has less arsenic

somenameforme 3y ago

You're dramatically underestimating the amount of work that testing all foods would entail. It would be, at the minimum: every_single_type_of_food * every_production_point_of_said_food * every_manufacturing_point_of_said_food(e.g. restaurants) * every_test_to_run * frequency_to_test_at. That's a wildly exponential function. So the way the FDA (and most regulatory agencies in the US) works is by researching what they believe to be safe and then requiring companies agree to only use those methods/components. If a company does something else, they are required to provide evidence that they believe it is safe. The FDA then evaluates the provided evidence, rather than e.g. running labs/experiments/etc themselves. This drives numerous issues. For instance one is a 'generally recognized as safe' exception that allows companies to add entirely new components to their foods without even notifying the FDA. [1] Genetically engineered foods are another big one. A genetically engineered e.g. potato is, from the FDA's definitions, just a potato. And so it there's no further regulatory oversight or safety testing done whatsoever. The only thing they offer is a voluntary 'plant biotechnology consultation program.' [2] [1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/14/399591292/why-the-fda-is-clueless-about-some-of-the-additives-in-our-food https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/14/399591292/wh... [2] - https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/how-gmos-are-regulated-united-states https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/how-gmos...

reaperman 3y ago
I think removing "every_manufacturing_point_of_said_food(e.g. restaurants)" would suffice, and be would perfectly appropriate. We literally already do this for all exported and imported food. So it's not absurd at all. Also I think your variable naming is a bit off. Restaurants aren't generally considered manufacturers.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  No, they don't. What people think the FDA does and what it really does in general are extremely different. There's a very readable paper here [1] precisely on FDA handling of food imports - that is, if for some reason, you don't choose to believe random internet guy insisting everything most people think they know about a topic is wrong. I don't think it's very purposeful for me to just rephrase the paper when you can read it yourself and get all the details. But, if nothing else, I'll at least quote the lead sentence of the background section: --- "The FDA’s overall foods program is distinct in several respects from the agency’s other public health regulatory program areas. First—with the exception of food and color additive approvals and premarket notification for certain foods—foods under FDA jurisdiction, whether produced within or outside the United States, do not require premarket approval. Thus, the foods program overall is generally a postmarket program." --- The FDA does spot testing of high risk foods but otherwise relies primarily on corporations to simply promise that they're following the regulations that the FDA publishes. That's how you get things like lead in apple sauce - it's not something the FDA is going to be checking for. By contrast, they would likely test something like chicken, coming from a region that had a recent bird flu outbreak, for contamination. [1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220404/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220404/