Kyle Diamantas explains how the 1958 GRAS exemption, meant for simple ingredients like salt, now lets manufacturers skip FDA review for over 90% of new food additives. The loophole has turned into regulatory capture, with the FDA often unaware of what's being added to food.
If you go back to 1958, we were at a time where there were concerns among the American people about a number of incidents that had happened where people have gotten sick or died because of additives that were found in food. Congress said, "We need to address this, so we're going to pass this new law which is going to require any new food additive that's going to enter the food supply to file a formal petition." The problem is that that same law had an exception in there that said if you're generally recognized as safe, you don't have to go through that food additive petition process. And at the time, we did not have the complex supply of ingredients that we now have. Chris was thinking about things like salt, vinegar, pepper, flour. Those were the GRAS ingredients that had been in the food supply, generally recognized as safe among qualified experts. Unfortunately, that exception became the tail that wags the dog.
When we think about these issues, this is not a new regulation. I would characterize this as fixing the perversion and corporate capture of an existing regulation. It is not right that over 90% of new ingredients in the food supply which we can't pronounce are designated by industry as generally recognized as safe, which then means that the FDA does not record of that ingredient being added in the food supply and has no record of safety studies whatsoever.
And there's been different iterations that FDA has taken to try to regulate these substances. We are in an interagency process to try to change how FDA regulates. We're hopeful that one way or another we'll see meaningful change when it comes to grass standards.
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