Consumerism
Food additive makers face intensified attack "Scare" stories have shaken public confidence in safety of additives; FDA requires more testing, restricts use of some This is the second of a series of special reports in which C&EN examines the effects of consumerism on various segments of the chemical industry. The first report, which discussed consumer-oriented activities within the Federal Government, appeared June 28 (page 14). Future stories in the series will deal with the effects of the new consumer activism on drugs, pesticides, and household chemicals. This story was written by C&EN senior associate editor Howard J. Sanders. Never before have food additives been under such sharp, incessant attack. In recent months, scarcely a week has gone by without some new warning being sounded about the possible health hazards of chemical additives in foods. Public confidence in the safety of foods has been shaken by consumer groups, university scientists, government agencies, legislative committees, and newspaper and magazine writers alarmed about food additives. Many developments reflect the growing public and governmental concern about food additives: • Last year, a Ralph Nader study group issued a report called "The Chemical Feast/' written by James S. Turner. The report contains a scathing preface by Mr. Nader. He writes, "The failure of [governmental] regulation to ensure safe, pure, and nutritious food in the world's largest breadbasket has been in step with each new, ingenious technique for manipulating the content of food products as dictated by corporate greed and irresponsibility. Making food appear [to be] what it is not is an integral part of the $125 billion food industry." Because of "the cosmetic treatment of food" with 16 C&EN JULY 12, 1971
chemical additives, he says, the purity, wholesomeness, safety, and nutritional value of foods are being seriously degraded. • On April 6, the Senate's Executive Reorganization and Government Research Subcommittee, headed by Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (D.-Conn.), began a series of hearings about the effects on man of chemicals present in foods, drugs, and the environment. The opening hearings dealt with the possible link between food additives and such threats as birth defects, genetic damage, and cancer. A month earlier, the House Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations, Jieaded by Rep. Lawrence H. Fountain (D.N.C.), held similar hearings. • According to a recent issue of Time, the selling of so-called "health foods" or "organic foods" (foods grown without the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and containing no emulsifiers, mold inhibitors, antioxidants, maturing agents, thickeners, stabilizers, preservatives, artificial flavorings and sweeteners, synthetic coloring agents, synthetic nutritional supplements, and other additives) is "one of the nation's fastest rising businesses." Reportedly, the U.S. now has some 2500 health food stores, with estimated annual sales of $200 million. To put this last figure in perspective, it should be pointed out that if the U.S. food industry has annual sales of $125 billion, as Mr. Nader says, health foods have captured only 0.16% of the market. • The May 2, 1971, issue of The New York Times Book Review contains a full-page advertisement that, in bold letters, carries the title "Food Pollution." The ad promotes a new book, "Consumer Beware! Your Food and What's Been Done to It," by Beatrice Trum Hunter, author of "The Natural Foods Cookbook." Her latest volume, the ad declares, "charges that the food industry—protected by timid, vague laws and the lax enforcement of even these—is free to serve up virtually anything it chooses to an unsuspecting public . . . . What it chooses is cause for national alarm and immediate action." The book's "carefully documented analy-
sis" covers such topics as the "unholy alliance [between] science and the food industry." • Since January 1968, the magazine Prevention, published by Rodale Press, has doubled its circulation to more than 1 million. Although the magazine is strenuously opposed to many things, such as DDT, chemical fertilizers, phosphate detergents, water fluoridation, high-cholesterol diets, and aluminum kitchen utensils, one of its main targets is food additives. The public, argued the magazine's founder Jerome I. Rodale (described in a recent article in The New York Times as the "guru of the organic food cult"), should eat only "pure foods"—that is, foods in their natural state, without additives. Mr. Rodale, who died last month at the age of 72, let it be known that he regularly ate sunflower seeds and assiduously avoided refined white sugar. He had once announced that he expected to live to 100—"unless I'm run over by a sugar-crazed taxi driver." • Some food companies are now getting more mail than ever from consumers either complaining about the use of chemical additives or (in fewer cases) asking for information about these additives. General Foods Corp. reports that the number of such letters it received in its fiscal year ending March 31, 1971, for example, was three times the number it received in the similar period two years earlier. The company also reports that there has been a small b u t noticeable increase in the number of such letters that contain four-letter obscenities, or what one General Foods spokesman refers to more delicately as the "new-wave vocabulary." • In their advertising, some food companies are now making a major point of the fact that their products contain no chemical additives. In some of its recent television commercials, Dannon Milk Products, for example, has been strongly emphasizing that there are no chemical additives in its yogurt. Sealtest Foods has run major ads to promote its Breyers "all-natural ice cream." Breyers is superior, the ads assert,
because it has "all-natural ingredients for all-natural flavor." Because of the mounting public clamor about food additives, stimu lated by the growing publicity about the alleged hazards of these chemi cals, the food additives industry to day is described by some industry people as edgy and apprehensive. One additives producer says, "No body knows where the ax will fall next, or when one of your products may be ruthlessly maligned by some alarmist report in the press." A Mon santo spokesman declares, "We have a very deep and growing concern over the emotional impact that a few preliminary, unconfirmed but widely publicized experiments in laboratory animals can have on the public's con fidence in the safety of food addi tives." In contrast, a spokesman for Atlas Chemical Industries says, "You never really know whether all the scare headlines reflect the genuine appre hension of a large segment of the gen eral population or of only a relatively few people, most of whom are not well informed and are readily in flamed by sensational reports of 'poi sons in our foods/ I am inclined to believe that the vast majority of people are not being carried away by the hysteria in some quarters, and thus continue to have great confi dence in the safety of the foods they eat."
Quite plainly, the food additive companies are fully convinced that their products are safe. The Food and Drug Administration, moreover, would not allow these chemicals to be added to food if FDA did not also consider them safe by present stand ards. Some months ago, Dr. Fredrick J. Stare, head of Harvard's department of nutrition, wrote in Life: "As a physician and a student of nutrition for the past 30 years, I am convinced that food additives are far safer in actual use than the basic natural foods themselves . . . ." The many beneficial effects of food chemicals, he believes, far outweigh "the very, very few instances of harm [result ing] from excessive or careless use of additives." If the majority of experts in the field are convinced—as they are— that, with few exceptions, food addi tives are safe at their present per mitted levels of use, why are some food additive manufacturers so edgy? One reason is that many peo ple can be readily swayed by shock headlines, by provocative articles in newspapers and magazines, by muck raking books, and by preliminary re ports of unconfirmed experiments. MSG. A case in point is that of the flavor enhancer monosodium gluta mate (MSG). In May 1969, Dr. John W. Olney of Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., reported that brain
damage resulted when high doses of MSG were injected under the skin of two- to 10-day-old mice. He specu lated that similar damage might be produced in human infants receiving MSG in their food. When this report hit the news papers, many mothers became deeply disturbed about the use of baby foods containing MSG. Fur thermore, the value of MSG in these foods was questioned by some scien tists on the grounds that babies may be far less sensitive to taste than are adults. Thus, MSG does not make the food taste significantly better to babies, these scientists believe, al though it does make the food more appealing to mothers who sample it. Because of the public alarm about MSG in baby foods and the great un certainty about its taste-enhancing value for infants, the producers of these foods (chiefly to allay public fears, and not because they felt that MSG was unsafe) voluntarily stopped using the additive. Contrary to some published reports, the baby food companies were not forced to do so by FDA. In fact, FDA has never banned the use of MSG, in reason able concentrations, in any food. FDA did, however, ask the National Academy of Sciences-National Re search Council to investigate the safety and usefulness of MSG in .foods. The NAS-NRC committee concluded in its July 1970 report that
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to be offered for use in foods since not been demonstrated in man, The 1938) was about $500,000—about half conversion of a variable but significant of which represents the cost of safety percentage of cyclamate to cyclohexyltesting. According to some other amine, however, has been found to oc companies, the cost of safety test cur in both laboratory animals and ing a new food additive may, in some man. In 1968, FDA scientists showed that cyclohexylamine can cause chro cases, run as high as $1 million. One industry observer gives an mosome breaks in vivo in the germi other reason why he expects fewer nal cells of male rats. new food additives to be introduced Another significant development is in the future. "Companies," he says, FDA's growing belief that some chem "are too much at the mercy of any icals now on the GRAS list should be scandalmonger . . . . For the would-be removed from the list and placed un manufacturer of a new food additive, der more rigid control. This removal, the risks of capricious public opinion FDA says, will be necessary in the are just too great." light of new scientific knowledge, the Question. A major question con development of new methods of toxifronting food additives producers is: cological testing, and the expanded What will FDA do next? One thing consumption of some GRAS sub seems certain. FDA will be asking stances in recent years. for more and more tests to determine Questionnaire. As part of a pilot the safety of food additives. study last year, NAS-NRC's Food Pro This testing is hindered, however, tection Committee sent a question by the lack of agreement about which naire to 47 food and food additive laboratory tests are the most mean producers, requesting information ingful to determine, for example, the about their use of additives now on potential mutagenicity of a food addi the GRAS list. Because of the good tive. Says one food additives scien response to the pilot project, the NAStist, "No one knows for sure which of NRC committee will this year perform the proposed mutagenicity tests are a vastly enlarged survey. most relevant to human safety or how The results of this study, in addi the results of such testing should be tion to other information, will be used translated into regulatory action . . . . in a program to re-evaluate the safety The situation is further complicated of food chemicals now on the GRAS by the difficulty of judging the impli list and to determine which of these cations to human safety of chemicals should be more closely regulated. To used at normal levels, when the actual assist in this re-evaluation, FDA last animal testing is done with chemicals month established specific criteria for fed in very high, if not near-lethal, classifying food substances as either doses." GRAS compounds or regulated food In addition to requiring greater additives. testing of new additives, FDA plans Which additives will be removed to review in detail the safety studies from the GRAS list is not yet known. of some food additives that have been Some manufacturers predict that in widespread use for many years. those removed will include such Among these compounds are saccha amino acid nutritional supplements as rin, nitrite, nitrate, sulfur dioxide (a lysine and histidine. These amino preservative used in dried fruits, corn acids are expected to be more closely sirup, wines, and other foods), butyl- regulated because, even though they ated hydroxyanisole and butylated hy are natural components of proteins, droxy toluene (antioxidants used to re they can be toxic when eaten in ex tard the formation of rancid fats), cessive quantities. Moreover, they and all synthetic food colors. can upset the nutritionally balanced Furthermore, FDA may require test pattern of amino acids in the diet. ing of metabolic products of food ad Some companies also predict that ditives. There is growing awareness the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, and that an additive may itself be safe, E) will be taken off the GRAS list. but that it may be converted to an These vitamins, unlike the readily unsafe product in an animal or hu excreted water-soluble vitamins, can man body. Such testing is compli build up to toxic levels in the body cated, however, by the fact that these if they are consumed in inordinately reaction products may or may not be large amounts. the same in animals and man. Climbing. Despite the clamor about Nitrosamines. A case in point is the food additives, the sales of these reaction between nitrite and second products are climbing. Dr. Jules ary amines to form nitrosamines, Blake of Mallinckrodt predicts that which may produce cancer in labora in the next five years, U.S. sales of tory animals. This reaction has been food additives will grow about 6% shown to occur under certain condi per year, not counting inflation. (In tions in experimental animals, but has the recent past, these sales have risen
ι about 5% per year.) Total 1970 sales of food additives made and used in the U.S., he estimates, were $484 mil lion. This figure will climb to $756 million in 1980, according to Richard L. Hughes of Arthur D. Little, Inc. The demand for food additives, Dr. Blake says, will be accelerated by the mounting demand for highly proc essed convenience foods, which typ ically use relatively large amounts of additives. These convenience foods will be used more and more by housewives and by restaurants, ho tels, and institutions. Demand will also be spurred by the growing use of nutritional food supplements. In years past, FDA was highly skeptical about the use of nutritional supplements, which it regarded as largely unnecessary. But now, Dr. Blake says, FDA is actively encour aging the use of these additives. Deficiencies. Part of this change in FDA's attitude stems from studies by the Public Health Service and others. These studies show that many Americans (especially teenagers and elderly people, even in above-aver age income groups) do not eat "nor mal, balanced diets" and, therefore, suffer nutritional deficiencies. A sig nificant number of teen-age girls, for example, don't !get enough iron, cal cium, and vitamin C—partly because their diets consist largely of such things as hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries, and soft drinks. Says one company spokesman, "In the past, it was axiomatic in the food industry that you sold foods pri marily on the basis of their taste, color, texture, and convenience. Al though food companies sometimes fortified their products with special nutrients, this generally had little ef fect on the public's acceptance of these products. "Now that consumers are becoming more and more concerned about nu trition, however, food companies are placing greater stress on the nutri tional content of their products. This should lead to increased sales of vita min and mineral additives and other nutritional supplements in foods." Producers of these supplements and of virtually all other types of food additives can thus look forward to expanding markets. Although these producers can expect intensified safety evaluation, growing consumer concern about potential hazards (real or imagined), and greater governmen tal control, they can also expect a sig nificant rise in the demand for these valuable food components. JULY 12, 1971 C&EN 23
