Checking the Additives

Besides having one of the richest diets and the most varied menus on earth, Americans daily consume a haphazard assortment of an estimated 400 chemicals added to foods as preservatives, coloring agents, antioxidants, mold inhibitors, bleaches, thickeners, thinners, emulsifiers and moisteners. This week, to take both the hap and the hazard out of the addilives, a new law (signed by President Eisenhower six months ago; becomes effective. Its burden: before processors may add any chemical to food, its safety must be proved to the satisfaction of the Food & Drug Administration.

Long Way to Market. While this seems simple common sense, it took eight years to persuade Congress to enact a direct reversal of the old law--under which the burden of proof was on the FDA to 1) show that ar additive in food already marketed was dangerous, and 2) get it banned by court order. Need for the new law has been intensified by speeding changes in U.S. food growing, marketing and eating habits: less and less food is grown at home or near the point of consumption; more and more is shipped great distances, takes longer to reach the table, goes through increasingly complex processing to make prefabricated dishes or whole dinners for supermarket dispensers. Simultaneously, chemical manufacturers have been synthesizing new substances whose long-range effects on the human body are not yet known.

Since most food processors have neither the facilities nor the know-how, it will usually be up to the chemical manufacturers themselves to prove the safety of additives. The law covers those already in use, with a time allowance for testers to tackle the backlog, as well as any proposed for future use. The test technique : put the additive in an appropriate food and give it to laboratory animals (150 rats, 21 dogs, at three-dose levels) for their natural lifetime or a minimum of two years. Even if the critters die natural deaths, their bodies will still be dissected to see whether any damage can be traced to the additive. If there is any suspicion of cancer, studies may be prolonged to seven years. Testing will cost industry millions. And the FDA needs an additional $1,000,000 a year to check the test methods and data.

When Is a Poison? Nobody knows how many of the additives now in use have been fully tested. Best guess: about 150 are tried and true, will cause no problem, e.g., old familiars such as sodium benzoate (preservative in foods and many soft drinks), and other items less recognizable but long widely used--calcium or sodium propionate (mold inhibitor in bread) and butylated hydroxy anisole (antioxidant to keep fats from going rancid). Another 150 are expected to pass the tests, but 100 or more are in a medical no-man's land.

Biggest complicating factor is a basic fact of pharmacology: there is no sharp line between poisonous and nonpoisonous substances--common salt can be a poison in excess, and arsenic can be a lifesaver. Dr. Arnold J. Lehman, the FDA's pharmacology director, quotes the Swiss Alchemist-Physician Paracelsus (1493-1541): "Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy." Some chemicals are poisonous over the years even in minute doses, and these the FDA will ban outright. But in the main, under its new legislative charter to protect the public health, the FDA will be applying old Paracelsus' law.

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